How Persona.ly Increased D7 FTD CVR for Non-payers by 1.6x in 2 months for Nexon’s MapleStory M

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Results at a Glance

Campaign Goal

The goal of the campaign was to re-engage churned users to bring them back to the game and encourage them to make additional in-app purchases. We were presented with ROAS-based KPI to measure the success of the campaign.

“Despite working from a different country, I’m consistently impressed by Persona.ly’s rapid response times – it feels like we’re working right next to each other. Thanks to their low CPIR and superior ROAS compared to other advertising platforms, Persona.ly has become an essential DSP partner for our Maple M Korea retargeting campaign.

I look forward to experimenting with various targeting strategies and achieving even better results with Persona.ly in the future.”

Seonju Jang 장선주 – User Acquisition Manager at Nexon

Programmatic Re-engagement Process for MapleStory M

When we started running the campaign for MapleStory M, using our programmatic DSP’s feature – Dynamic Audiences – our proprietary audience segmentation engine available to our clients at no extra cost, we quickly generated two audience segments:

• Payers: Users who made an in-app purchase at some point and then stopped being active in the game
• Non-payers: Users who never made any purchase and churned

The campaign’s key challenge was identifying users within each segment who had the highest probability of making additional purchases. For Payers, this meant identifying those likely to make in-app purchases again, and for Non-payers, those most likely to make their first purchase. Within a week of running the campaign, our programmatic bidder gathered sufficient data to identify audience features that indicated purchase probability, allowing us to refine our targeting to focus on high-potential sub-segments.

As we gathered more data for our ML algorithm to improve predictions, we consistently outperformed our ROAS KPI.

Campaign Results

Campaign Scaling

Within the first few weeks we were already outperforming the ROAS KPI.
As our platform gathered more signals for our ML algorithm to identify and target high-value audiences in the bid stream, we were able to scale the campaign by 8.5x while maintaining high performance.

Non-payers Segment

While re-engaging Payers is a more straightforward task, the main challenge was to re-activate users who didn’t make any in-app purchases prior to the campaign and convert them into paying users. 
After the initial learning period, our programmatic platform’s ML algorithm was able to classify users into three groups:

Following this classification, we were able to improve the D7 FTD CVR (Conversion Rate from Re-attribution to First Purchase) by 1.6x for the Non-payers segment in 2 months.

About Nexon

Nexon was founded in 1994 and introduced some of the biggest innovations in our industry including the world’s first graphic MMORPG and the first free-to-play game.

By focusing on quality we have developed long-standing IP franchise hits, including MapleStory, Dungeon&Fighter, Sudden Attack, and KartRider. Each of our games is tailored to the unique geography in which they are played, which is why our titles continue to be played by millions of people around the globe.

“Over the years of working with Nexon, their team has shown true dedication to campaign success. They are open to new ideas and are constantly keeping us updated. This open communication allows us to keep improving the performance. 

Our success in running the campaign allowed us to establish trust, which led to expanding the collaboration to other Nexon titles, including FC™ Mobile, Dungeon and Fighter Mobile, and others.

The success of the MapleStory M campaign is yet another evidence of our programmatic DSPs advantage. We’re committed to growing our presence in the Korean market and bringing even better solutions for app developers and publishers.”

Rachel SEO – Business Development Director, Korea 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 4 million ad auctions per second. We are trusted by Tenscent, NextNinja, Papaya Gaming, Rapido, 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.