How We Reached 45% D7 ROAS for 33RD: Random Defense

Download the PDF version of the case study.

Wondersquad Intro

Founded in 2016, Wondersquad is a brilliant collective of creators that create engaging mobile game experiences for hundreds of thousands of users around the world. As a small and tightly knit team based in Korea, they dream of creating games that “transcend age, culture and language”, as quoted by their founder, Kwanhee Seo.

Persona.ly Intro

Persona.ly is a tech product company driving mobile user acquisition for brands and app developers, operating worldwide. Using our proprietary bidder and machine-learning algorithms, we offer transparent, performance-based, highly-targeted UA and retargeting solutions at scale with access to over 1 Million ad auctions per second.

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 Wondersquad to promote their RPG Tower Defence Game 33RD: Random Defense on Android in Korea, with the emphasis being on acquiring users with high rates of retention.

Process

When we started running our UA campaigns for 33RD, our initial approach was to target look-a-like audiences generated around the different gameplay aspects and features that comprise the core gameplay loop of 33RD – tower-defense, RPG & RTS (real-time strategy) elements, as well as the ‘cute animals’ theme.

Being such a unique combination of all these aspects, our look-a-like audiences were able to capture users that showed a lot of interest in 33RD and drew significant install traction since day 1, setting up the next stages of optimization and scaling to be straightforward. 

Over the course of just several weeks, our team was able to scale UA for 33RD significantly, while beating the D7 Retention KPI by ~40%, and showing rates 2x higher than other paid sources at the same time.

Results

As soon as campaigns started our D7 retention rate was already over 10% than the KPI, and on week 2, we were able to beat it by close to 40%, in parallel, the high retention users paid dividends allowing us to reach 45% D7 KPI.

Throughout the first month of running campaigns for 33RD, our D7 retention rate exceeded both other paid sources by nearly 100% and organic by 65%, proving that our approach resulted in significantly more engaged users.

“Through the easy and fast onboarding process, the campaign launched in a short period of time outperformed my expectations, so I knew that Person.ly is a great DSP. I wish you all the best in the future.”

Seo Kwanhee, CEO @ Wondersquad

“While running this campaign with Wonder Squad, the active support of CEO Kwanhee Seo and the marketing team was an important opportunity to bring about this result, and I am delighted to make another case study in Persona.ly through the successful campaigns for the tower defense game, 33RD: Random Defense.”

Myong Ryu, Head of APAC @ Persona.ly