MobilityWare Plays to Win in a Privacy-First World on iOS

Headquartered in Orange County, CA, MobilityWare has been a pioneer in mobile gaming since the birth of iOS and Android, having released multiple titles on day one of each app store’s debut. With 100s of millions of downloads now under their belt and the #1 solitaire app globally across mobile operating systems in addition to dozens of other titles, they remain a dominant player to this day in the card and puzzle casual gaming categories.

After previously establishing the UA practice at JamCity, Chris Kim joined MobilityWare in 2021 as Director of User Acquisition. Charged with continuing to build on the studio’s prolific growth trajectory in a post-ATT world, Kim quickly recognized the need to rethink the legacy UA playbook from a number of fronts, including channel mix and creative, saying, “With the advent of privacy, the days of putting an outsized share of budget in self-attributing networks have passed, making a healthy channel mix key. This climate has also shined a spotlight on creative as the last great lever at our disposal for driving incremental app performance.

Led by Director of User Acquisition Chris Kim, the MobilityWare UA team sought to accelerate the transformation of their predominantly in-app ad monetized growth strategies to better align with a privacy-first future. The first step in this journey was to align in-house teams around nurturing the right level of focus on emerging priorities by making user acquisition and creative distinct practice areas. "UA and creative are ultimately two separate tracks for the brain," says Kim. "By splitting these two functions, UA teams are able to stay focused on optimization, privacy, bid calculations, and overall campaign efficiency while their counterparts' energy is squarely spent on creative performance, testing roadmaps, and ongoing iterations."

With this new operating model in place, their main objective was to dial in the right streamlined mix of partners for maximizing incremental lift in retention and ROAS at scale across their full portfolio of apps, starting in the USA.

The next step was re-evaluating and fine-tuning MobilityWare's widely dispersed channel mix to prioritize media partners capable of successfully pivoting away from relying on user-level IDs. As Kim puts it, "In the wake of ongoing privacy shakeups, we are looking to swiftly shift spends towards partners who can deftly navigate SKAN and make it work for advertisers."

InMobi DSP was chosen to participate in this evaluation due to their recognized expertise in SKAN and first-of-its-kind dedicated bidder designed to optimize iOS app performance campaigns solely based on conversions reported by Apple's privacy-preserving attribution framework. MobilityWare’s flagship solitaire app as well as a newly launched Monopoly-branded title were chosen as the first apps to trial in this US-based test.

InMobi aimed to rapidly scale installs - as well as drive D1/D7 retention and ROAS - by leveraging a mix of SKAN and MMP probabilistic attribution signals to power optimization across all available iOS inventory and ad sizes. In order to achieve this goal, InMobi recommended MobilityWare implement AppsFlyer's unique Single Source of Truth (SSOT) solution, which unifies and deduplicates iOS attribution data across these disparate sources to deliver the clearest picture of campaign results in a "best of both worlds" approach.

In addition, InMobi's automated tools for creative optimization were trained on MobilityWare's official App Store listings to produce additional messaging variants for testing that aligned seamlessly with their app store experience, rendering all creative treatments at double the standard pixel density in order to deliver the richest ad experience.