How We Helped Launch and Scale KYOTOMA Inc.’s Yurufuwa While Boosting Organic Install Volume x40

Joseph Iris

February 08, 2022

5 min

Download the PDF version of the case study.

KYOTOMA Inc. Intro

KYOTOMA Inc. produces a wide range of entertainment works, from game planning and development to animation production. Especially in the casual game genre, KYOTOMA released a large portfolio of games that can be enjoyed by a wide range of players with a variety of unique and original cute and quirky art and play styles.

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 KYOTOMA to launch their new title “Soft & Fluffy Dolls Yurufuwa” on both Android and iOS, in the US, GB, and CA. The new dress-up game incorporates the unique ‘moving-paper’ style of viral artist WASU, who reached over 500,000 subscribers and over 80M views on his Youtube channel in a little over a year.

The main goal of the campaigns was to help Yurufuwa drive install traction and gradually get a foothold in the dress-up niche in western markets, in a cost-effective manner.

Process

When we started running our UA campaigns for Yurufuwa, our initial approach towards each platform was naturally different:

On Android: given the fact that dress-up games with a Japanese art style are a niche, our initial approach was to target look-a-like audiences generated around user interest in the dress-up and mini-game mechanics of the game combined with an affinity to various Japanese art styles.

On iOS: for SKAN and post-iOS 14.5 campaigns, we used the approach described in our ‘Context Distance Calculator’ demo – using machine learning-driven natural language processing (NLP), we are able to determine the contextual relationship between our partnered advertiser apps and the apps where we show the ads, allowing us to model and bid according to the contextual ‘distance’ each app couple by understanding this relationship in a very granular way.

Results

Performance vs. CPI KPI

Two different CPI KPIs were provided – one more lenient for the initial exploration period of campaigns, and another, more aggressive, for when enough data was accumulated to run campaigns normally.

Within the first week of running the campaigns, we were able to exceed the exploration KPI, generating installs 25% cheaper than the target.

Within the second week of running the campaigns, we were able to exceed the aggressive KPI, generating installs over 10% cheaper than the target, all the while increasing the daily volume of installs by x3.

Organic Volume Boost

Given the fact that Persona.ly was the only paid channel promoting Yurufuwa for the duration of the case study allows us to isolate the impact of our campaigns on organic growth.

Just two short days after starting our campaigns, the volume of organic installs increased x11 and kept increasing dramatically to x28 a week after starting, and x41 two weeks after, showing a direct and substantial boost to organic volume.

Category Rank

Being the only paid channel also allows us to measure the impact of our acquisition on the store category rank for Yurufuwa in the countries where we promoted it.

Within just a couple of days from starting the campaigns, Yurufuwa started appearing in the lower ranks of the Games-Simulation category on the Google Play store. Within two weeks, the title climbed up the ranks significantly to being around 250 for all three active countries.

For comparison, the title still hadn’t been listed on the category ranks for countries like South Korea and Japan for the duration of the case study.

“In collaboration with Persona.ly, the players who can enjoy our games have expanded to the world. With their generous support, we also receive useful data-driven advice from improving the quality of the game to achieving better monetization.”
Yasu Mitani, CEO @ KYOTOMA Inc.

“Working with Yasu-san is a pleasure, being able to work together closely as the first and only paid channel allows us to be very flexible and agile with our decisions while informing the team at KYOTOMA about our optimizations and how to continue the UA efforts in general.”
Gal Koragi, Head of Operations @ Persona.ly

Joseph Iris

Joseph of the House Iris, the Second of His Name, The Easily Burnt, Manager of Product Marketing, Pwner of Noobs, Owner of Just Enough Pets (4), Curator of Content, Member of the Blog's Guard, Breaker of Chairs and Cousin of Dragons.