Animoca Brands’ “Crazy Defense Heroes” Case Study

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Animoca Brands Intro 

Animoca Brands is a global mobile and blockchain game developer and publisher with offices in Hong Kong, United States, South Korea, Finland, Argentina, and the Czech Republic. Animoca Brands is a leader in the field of digital entertainment, specializing in blockchain, gamification, and artificial intelligence technologies to develop and publish a broad portfolio of mobile products. 

Their leading original titles include The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes. Animoca Brands also develops mobile games based on popular intellectual properties such as Formula 1®, Marvel, Garfield, Snoopy, Thomas & Friends™, Power Rangers, MotoGP, and Doraemon.

Persona.ly Intro

Persona.ly is a tech product company driving mobile user acquisition for brands and app developers, operating world-wide and focusing on the US, KR, JP, RU, SEA, and IN markets. Using our proprietary bidder and machine-learning algorithms, we offer transparent, performance-based, highly-targeted UA, and retargeting solutions.

Persona.ly strives to be more than just a vendor for its partners, but a partner that helps generate actual value, growth, and broad marketing insights that can be used across channels.

Campaign Goals

Persona.ly worked together with Animoca Brands on one of their leading titles, “Crazy Defense Heroes,” aiming to reach app growth and acquire highly engaged users who would make in-app purchases in order to reach their ROAS KPIs.

Process

Our proprietary programmatic DSP is integrated with all major SSPs and can process more than 500,000 QPS of in-app inventory. We apply user-level targeting using our machine-learning algorithms, based on real-time request data and aggregated data from our DMP, to run effective UA campaigns. This infrastructure, designed to allow us to focus on user behavior, rather than just ad placements, enables us to help mobile app developers, such as Animoca Brands, to acquire the most relevant users for their games. 

When we started running UA campaigns in Japan for Animoca Brands’ “Crazy Defense Heroes” on iOS in April, our initial approach was intent-based targeting. We targeted users that showed direct interest in multiple relevant genres – Tower Defense, Strategy, and Card Games. This approach allowed us to acquire users with a significantly higher than usual D1 retention rate for the genre.

Then, our machine learning models gradually learned the patterns of the users that were most engaged or made purchases on the day of their install, which allowed us to target similar users and eventually resulted in beating the defined ROAS KPIs. We were also able to reach a recoup period of 45 days. 

Results

“It was a pleasure working with the Persona.ly team. They would share and discuss the plan of achieving our goals and ensure that we were crystal clear about every step. During the campaign, they reviewed the performance consistently and made optimizations in order to exceed our target ROAS.“

Cindy Kong, Senior Product Associate @ Animoca Brands 

“The Animoca Brands team was cooperative and communicative. They provided us with all of the initial data we needed in order to reach and exceed their ROAS KPIs in the particular genre of Tower Defense in the competitive Japanese market”. 

Maor Kreichman, VP, Strategic Partnerships @ Persona.ly