Nanobit x Adikteev: What’s the secret to positive ROAS on iOS campaigns?

Written by Margot Miller | Jun 19, 2024 8:39:38 AM

iOS: 11% above ROAS target
Android: Met ROAS target

Working with Adikteev has significantly enhanced our engagement with lapsed payers, surpassing our goals on iOS by 11 percentage points. This partnership has driven substantial value and provided deeper insights into user behaviors across both platforms. Their targeted approach has refined our campaigns, making them more effective than ever.

Dora Stojaković, Senior Growth Marketing Manager

@ Nanobit

Strategic Insights

Higher Spending Tendencies on iOS: iOS users, despite being a smaller demographic, tend to spend more. By targeting iOS users more aggressively, you can extract higher value per user and achieve higher ROAS.

Experimentation is Key: It’s important to have a platform-specific strategy for iOS and Android campaigns. Test out the possibility for success on iOS through smaller budgets and experimenting with your opt-in rate. Experimentation can lead to surpassing performance benchmarks and uncovering valuable insights about user behavior.
Balancing Audience and Budget: While targeting larger audiences on Android delivers consistent results, the high performance on iOS with a smaller audience suggests that quality can sometimes outweigh quantity in targeting strategies.

Winked is an engaging romance simulation game developed by Nanobit, a renowned mobile game studio known for creating rich, narrative-driven experiences. In Winked, players navigate complex relationships and intriguing storylines where their choices directly influence the game's outcome. This immersive approach to storytelling allows players to live vicariously through their characters, making critical decisions that affect romantic outcomes and plot twists. Nanobit has established itself in the gaming industry by focusing on high-quality graphics and deep, engaging content that resonates with a diverse audience, thereby securing a loyal fanbase and solidifying its reputation as a leader in the simulation game genre.

Background

In the competitive landscape of mobile gaming, staying ahead requires not just innovation in game development but also in marketing tactics. Winked took a targeted approach, focusing on retargeting campaigns on both iOS and Android.

Campaign Setup

Nanobit embarked on a dual-platform retargeting campaign aimed at re-engaging lapsed payers and maximizing ROAS. They started out with a budget split of 15% on iOS and 85% on Android with a differentiated approach between the Android and iOS:

Android:

Users who made at most 2 purchases in the last 180 days, but lapsed for 7 days
User who made at least 3 purchases in the last 180 days, but lapsed for 7 days

Nanobit focused on users who had made a maximum of 2 purchases, and users who’d made a minimum of 3 purchases with an inactivity window of 7 days. This strategy helped capitalize on the larger audience size available on Android, ensuring the campaigns were kept within a manageable scope and budget.

iOS:

Users who made a purchase between 8 to 180 days but not in the last 7 days

In contrast, Nanobit broadened their targeting for iOS to include all payers who made a purchase in anywhere from 8-180 days, but who’d lapsed the last 7 days. This was a calculated risk to explore the spending behavior of iOS users, who typically exhibit higher disposable income.

Results & Analysis

The results highlighted distinct outcomes across both platforms:

iOS Performance: Winked on iOS outperformed expectations, overachieving the ROAS target by 11%. This underscores the potential for high returns when targeting iOS users, even with smaller audience sizes. The ARPU for iOS users on Winked is higher than those on Android, making iOS campaigns worth running. Even with a budget split of 15%, Nanobit was still able to achieve good performance because of the high value users on iOS.
Android Performance: Android campaigns met the set target ROAS target. This consistency aligns with the expected outcomes from the larger but more selectively targeted audience base

Conclusion

The success of the iOS retargeting campaigns for Winked not only highlights the effectiveness of tailored, platform-specific marketing strategies but also reinforces the need for continuous experimentation.

High LTV users on iOS can still offer good ROAS despite smaller audience sizes
Test out audiences to find the right strategy and segments for your iOS campaigns
Find the baseline for your current opt-in rate as they have been increasing year over year.

As the mobile gaming market evolves, such data-driven approaches will be critical in staying competitive and maximizing returns.

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