Campaign Overview

Beginning in April 2021, the gaming studio began working with InMobi to drive new installs of one of their top games. They were particularly interested in acquiring loyal users, as they didn’t want to pay for people to just download the app and then delete it soon after. As such, the team was particularly interested in a high Day 7 ROAS (return on ad spend) – essentially, did people who downloaded the app thanks to InMobi still have the game on their mobile devices seven days after the initial download?

The campaign started in late April and lasted through the end of September 2021. The campaign targeted both iOS and Android users and utilized a differentiated approach on each operating system. The campaign also used data and insights from Adjust to measure performance.

How ATT Impacted The Campaign

One day after the campaign went live, Apple launched iOS 14.5. As Apple began to enforce its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, the campaign slowly but surely had fewer IDFAs (Apple’s device-level identifier) to use to individually target potential new users. As a result, the InMobi team began using SKAdNetwork (SKAN), Apple’s privacy-focused measurement solution, to track the success of their efforts.

Creative Overview

The campaign leveraged a wide variety of creative formats to drive installs, including banner ads, display ads, video ads and fullscreen interstitials. While some of the ad units were previously built, others were custom developed by InMobi Creative Studio.

Results

Overall, the campaign was a huge success. In less than six months, InMobi was able to drive tens of thousands of installs, with a significant portion of new users on iOS coming from SKAN-measured campaigns. And on iOS, the average D7 ROAS was over 87% for the bulk of the campaign.

Over the course of the campaign, over one in five iOS installs were through SKAN. The gaming studio also saw especially strong results in August and September, highlighting how InMobi was able to continually optimize results throughout the campaign. In September alone, they saw 56% growth in installs on iOS and 18% growth in installs on Android devices.

They also saw strong results on Android throughout the campaign, especially during the busy summer months. In June, InMobi drove a 241% increase in Android installs. And in July, the game saw a 483% increase in new users on Android devices.

The campaign also highlighted the value of using high-impact and custom ads for user acquisition. For one, the average IPM (number of installs per 1,000 ad impressions) of fullscreen video as was 100x greater than for smaller display ads. And the custom creatives developed by the InMobi Creative Studio had IPMs 50% greater than did the pre-built ads. In addition, the game saw a 242% increase in installs from fullscreen video ads in June.