Netmarble optimizes programmatic campaigns and achieves higher ROAS after taking control through Moloco Ads

After a string of chart-topping releases and milestone acquisitions, the user acquisition team at Netmarble was eager to capitalize on an increasingly powerful position in the global games market.

Challenge

Armed with a portfolio of profitable mobile hits like BTS World and Marvel Future Fight, their goal became to diversify user acquisition in order to maximize reach and avoid reliance on any individual mobile channel while ensuring a strong, scalable return on ad spend. Netmarble elected to avoid the affiliate and ad networks most commonly known for fraud and, in the end, partnered with the experts at Moloco to explore and experiment within the growing programmatic ecosystem. It wasn’t long before the power of programmatic became apparent.

“After a successful partnership with Moloco, our knowledge of the programmatic ecosystem grew substantially,” explained Tae Heon Kim, UA Team Lead at Netmarble. “Once our team understood the demand-side fundamentals like bidding and creative optimization, we felt there was an even greater opportunity for us to take a more hands-on approach. We started using Moloco's self-serve features to identify and implement unique campaign strategies that targeted different performance metrics at different stages of a game’s lifecycle.”

Solution

Thanks to Moloco's full-funnel ad serving transparency, Netmarble was able to conduct detailed analysis and determine that by prioritizing installs over revenue during the first few months after a game’s launch, it could acquire a critical mass of users at a fraction of what it would have cost to prioritize ROAS during the same time period. Those same user data could then be efficiently used to help machine learning study for other campaigns that used ROAS as its performance metric. They became an effective in-put to filter out those not likely to spend but target users with the potential to generate high returns.

Results

With Moloco's robust performance algorithms powering Moloco Ads, Netmarble was able to automatically optimize performance for both CPI and ROAS at the campaign level. After Netmarble set the target metrics for each campaign in their dashboard, the machine learning algorithms powering each individual campaign went to work self-optimizing for their respective target metrics: one for CPI and one for ROAS. Moloco's model was able to achieve its peak efficiency in a matter of days, the install target campaign maximizing user acquisition by lowering the CPI, the ROAS target campaign achieving over 2.5 times the ROAS over the install target campaign.

As Tae Heon Kim explains, none of this would have been possible without the transparency provided by Moloco Ads:

“Through Moloco, we can access each impression’s granular log data, allowing us to understand every step of the funnel from exposure to conversion. MOLOCO is the only partner that provides this kind of precise feedback. It speaks to their confidence in providing clean traffic, and it’s a huge part of why we trust them implicitly.”

Since then, Tae Heon and the rest of the Netmarble UA marketing team have made Moloco a cornerstone of their user acquisition efforts. “All the programmatic campaigns by the UA marketing team now run directly through Moloco Cloud,” explains Tae Heon. “For titles like the Seven Deadly Sins, our efforts have been so successful that we’ve allocated  more than 30% of our total UA Ad spend to Moloco for its launching campaigns, making it the third largest share of our budget after Facebook and Google.”

The full story on Netmarble's collaboration with Moloco can be found by clicking on the link here.

To learn more about Moloco Ads and how you can start leveraging your own strategic insights to fuel growth across the programmatic ecosystem, contact the machine learning and ad performance experts today.

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