Playrix runs non-personalized UA campaign with Liftoff, CPAs decrease
CPIs, CPA and D7 ROAS on par or better than personalized traffic
Playrix is a mobile game development company founded in 2004. Starting out as a casual game developer for PCs and creating several award-winning titles since 2011, Playrix has focused on building free-to-play games for smartphones and tablets. Their games, Manor Matters, Wildscapes, Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Township, and Fishdom have consistently ranked among the Top 50 Grossing Apps for iOS and Google Play since their release.
Preparing for IDFA Changes
With Apple announcing upcoming changes to IDFA, Playrix turned to Liftoff to run campaigns promoting all their casual games, targeting iOS users with Limited Ad Tracking (LAT) enabled on their device. The purpose of the on-going campaigns is two-fold:
- Understand the performance impact of bidding on “non-personalized” zero IDFA traffic including CPI, CPA (in-app purchase) and Day 7 ROAS
- Understand the spend potential on iOS of non-personalized LAT traffic compared to “personalized” traffic
Changing the Setup
To evaluate the performance of non-personalized traffic, Liftoff added a segment of LAT users to existing Playrix campaigns to enable bidding against this audience. All other aspects of the campaign remained the same including the setup, KPIs, ad creatives, regions, and ML models.
Liftoff systems were built not solely to rely on device IDs, so adapting our bidding strategy to accommodate traffic without device IDs was straight-forward. For attribution purposes, we relied on Playrix’s mobile measurement partner to accurately track installs and post-install events.
Performance Proved Strong From the Start
Non-personalized traffic performed well from the get-go. CPIs were lower across every major region. CPA (cost per in-app purchase), though initially higher compared to IDFA traffic, eventually decreased to less than personalized traffic over the first few weeks, suggesting that non-personalized traffic has the potential to outperform personalized traffic.
In fact, Day 7 ROAS is on par or better than personalized traffic in most cases.
Meanwhile, scale wasn’t an issue as non-personalized traffic quickly ramped up to become a very significant percentage of Playrix’s overall iOS spend with Liftoff.