Photo Roulette is a unique, fun social game with a history of organic virality and over 20m lifetime downloads.
Photo Roulette delivers a very premium experience for its userbase, and the Photo Roulette team were keen to not to risk devaluing that by increasing ad saturation.
The brief for Rise Mobile was to increase revenue yield from the current ad strategy, without introducing any new ad placements or increasing the frequency of the pre-existing ad placements. Photo Roulette shows Video Interstitials intermittently between every few games.
The partnership between Photo Roulette & Rise Mobile began almost immediately after the introduction of iOS14.5 and ATT (App Tracking Transparency Framework).
Alongside the aforementioned increase in revenue yield, the second challenge for Rise Mobile was to ‘future proof’ Photo Roulette from the impact of the introduction of ATT.
“Rise Mobile had a significant impact in a very short space of time. The strategy was communicated clearly upfront and it’s execution led to a large increase in our advertising revenue.” Thorvald Thorsnes, Photo Roulette
Our full focus was on making changes that would increase eCPM without generating any additional ad requests.
The pre-existing system contained one global waterfall, which was changed to a tiered system which grouped countries together based on their monetisation rates.
This allowed for a more tailored waterfall for each country. Implementation resulted in greater fill rates in lower-tier countries, while also taking full advantage of the highest monetising countries such as the United States.
Additional demand was introduced to increase competition in the waterfall. Three new networks were added to the existing stack of five and each contributed value.
A conscious shift was made towards running more networks through bidding. The primary goal was to attain increased performance from each of these networks, but also to create enough space in the waterfall to accommodate our new networks and ensure enough request priority for each.
These actions resulted in significant performance improvements; ARPDAU increased by 49% without any change in the number of impressions shown per session.
Operating in an environment where ATT’s final impact is unknown was tricky, but there were some actions that we were able to execute that guaranteed Photo Roulette was in a great position to come out of the other side stronger.
Both IDFA and non-IDFA variants of the waterfall were created for each country tier. This allowed us to monitor the discrepancy in eCPM between both groups of users globally, increasing our visibility of the effect of ATT. It also meant independent optimisation of the waterfalls for each group was possible, reflecting the gap in monetisation rates between the two groups.
Ramping up to eight ad networks from the initial five was also designed to spread inventory across a greater number of partners. We felt that in times of uncertainty and change like the one ATT brought about, over-reliance on a single network is particularly unwise, and working with as many partners as possible (within reason) can allow any impact to be hedged as much as possible.
“Rise Mobile had a significant impact in a very short space of time. The strategy was communicated clearly upfront and it’s execution led to a large increase in our advertising revenue.” Thorvald Thorsnes, Photo Roulette
