How We Increased Purchase CVR by 186% for Nexon’s Dungeon&Fighter Mobile

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Campaign Goals

Results at a Glance:

Campaign Goals

• Re-engage churned payers at the most opportune time to motivate them to make additional purchases.

• Bring the churned users who haven’t made purchases back to the app and convert, exposing them to newer content in the game and eventually converting them into paying customers, generating FTD event (First-Time Deposit).

Process

When we started running the re-engagement campaigns for Dungeon&Fighter Mobile, our initial approach was to target all churned users that haven’t been active for at least 7 days.

Using Dynamic Audiences we quickly generated a segment of newly churned users to re-engage. The continuous data sharing and Persona.ly’s capabilities to update the Dynamic Audience in real-time, allowed us to keep the audience segment constantly up-to-date by adding freshly churned users and suppressing the targeting of users that re-engaged organically while avoiding manual operations on both Nexon and Persona.ly’s sides.

The initial campaign setup generally targeting churned users already put the campaigns well above the KPI as our targeting algorithms quickly found the best time and placements for re-engaging with users, driving the engagement costs down rapidly and leading to positive ROAS.

Over time, as we gathered enough samples, the target for our algorithms shifted towards increasing the ROAS, which shifted our targeting algorithm to also factor the probability of users making additional purchases, which lead to a significant increase in our payer conversion, as shown in the graphs below.

Scaling

As soon as the model focusing on ROAS was established and robust, our extensive reach, processing over 1.8M in-app ad auctions per second allowed us to maintain strong performance at a high scale.

Ad-hoc analysis of the targeting algorithm generated specifically for Dungeon&Fighter Mobile informed us that a key feature that increases the likelihood of a user making purchases is the usage of high-end devices (expressed by having more RAM capacity and a higher Pixel-Per-Inch ratio), which aligned well with the context of the title.

Campaign Results

FTD CVR and Campaign Scaling

Once enough sample data was collected for our ML models to classify the users who are likely to convert by making a first purchase and non-converting users, the payer conversion began to steadily increase as campaigns scaled up.

As can be seen in the graph, over the course of fewer than two months scale increased by 250% while payer conversion doubled.

Scale & Payer Conversion Over Time

While re-engaging churned payers is the easier part of the task, the main problem was sifting through the churned users that had not purchased before and re-engaging with those who have a higher probability of turning into paying customers.

Ad-hoc analysis showed that the most important factor increasing the likelihood of a purchase being made was the time passed since the user’s last engagement – how ‘freshly churned’ he was, the shorter the time passed, the higher the conversion rate. As soon as our targeting algorithms realized this relationship, we started to bid more efficiently and our performance improved dramatically.

“Despite the time difference, the Persona.ly team offered responsive support and made sure to meet our goals & KPIs, and worked professionally, providing us great results. Our team considers Persona.ly as one of our main DSP retargeting platforms as it outperformed in KR titles in general. We’d love to cooperate further and see how the campaign would perform globally too.”

Amy Chung, Global User Acquisition Team at Nexon

About Nexon

Founded in 1994, NEXON Co., Ltd. (Nexon) (3659.TO) is a company engaged in the production, development and operation of online games and Virtual Worlds. First listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2011, Nexon was placed on JPX400 in 2015 and added to the Nikkei Stock Index 300 in 2017. In 2020, Nexon was added to the Nikkei 225. Nexon currently has more than 45 live games on multiple platforms including mobile and available in more than 190 countries. Major game franchises include MapleStory, KartRider and Dungeon&Fighter. In 2021, Nexon completed the acquisition of Embark Studios AB, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden, developing multiple projects for global release.

“Ever since the start of our cooperation with Nexon, it was clear that the team consists of extremely savvy professionals, and it’s always been a pleasure to work with them. Early on in the relationship we managed to establish mutual trust which yields a fruitful partnership and great campaign performance to this day.”

Gal Koragi, Head of Operations at Persona.ly

About Persona.ly

Persona.ly is a mobile-first DSP operating worldwide. Using our proprietary bidder and machine-learning algorithms, we offer transparent, performance-driven, highly-targeted UA and retargeting solutions at scale with access to over 1.5 Million ad auctions per second. We are trusted by CoinDCX, Games24x7, Ubisoft, Tilting point and many others.

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.