Case Study – GOAT Games’ King’s Throne

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GOAT Games Intro 

GOAT Games, founded in 2019, is a mobile game development and publishing company located in Guangzhou, China. The GOAT team’s core members are from well-known international game companies such as Tap4fun, FunPlus, Elex, Storm8, Pocket Gems, NetEase, Tencent, and more. 

GOAT Games were formerly a global publishing division of Efun, under which they’d released one of their leading titles “War and Magic”. As an independent company, they have an in-house development team as well as a diverse localization team composed of European, American, and domestic members. Their leading title “War and Magic” ranks #1 as top-grossing in more than 7 countries, with over 10 million players around the globe.

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 GOAT Games on one of their leading titles, “King’s Throne: Game of Lust” aiming to reach app growth and acquire highly engaged users through the use of playable ads. 

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 GOAT Games, to acquire the most relevant users for their games. 

When we started running UA campaigns for GOAT Games’ “King’s Throne: Game of Lust”, on both iOS and Android in the USA, our approach was to combine our intent-based targeting with interstitial videos and interactive playable ads. 

We targeted users that showed direct interest in multiple relevant genres – MMORPG, strategy (including 4x), and RPG, as well as games revolving around ‘choice’ and interactive storytelling mechanics and used both video ads and playable ads to boost in-app performance. This approach allowed us to acquire users that showed past intent in at least one of the sub-genres that compile the game’s core theme and mechanics, leading to a much shorter exploration period.

Then, our machine learning models gradually learned the patterns of the users that were most engaged or made purchases on the same day they installed, which allowed us to target similar users and eventually resulted in beating the organic conversion to FTD.

Our playable ad for “King’s Throne – Game of Lust “

Results

Working with Persona.ly is a pleasure. Their dedicated, and efficient team is always ready to outreach our goals. In our campaign, we saw an incredibly fast growth both in volume, and ROAS, which makes Persona.ly one of the best DSP platforms on the market

Alexander Cherpak, Senior UA & Marketing Lead @ Goat games

The team at Goat Games is a pleasure to work with – their cooperation and attentiveness to detail allowed us to create an effective playable ad quickly and scale our bidding and prediction faster than usual, leading to quicker, more promising results

Yan Reizin, Regional Manager @ Persona.ly