MagicLab on in-App Bidding and Leveraging Monetize to Increase Revenue From Banner Ads on Android using SDK 7

Headquartered in Ankara, Turkey, MagicLab has an ambitious and rapidly growing team of 70 people. They originally had great success with creating amazing hyper-casual games such as Run Race 3D, Fun Race 3D, and Destiny Run. Combined, they’ve generated more than 1.5 billion downloads. MagicLab also started self-publishing games, releasing successful titles like Dream Wedding!, Fidget Trading 3D, Meme Challenge, and more. 

While maintaining the performance of their self-published games with more than 500K daily active users (DAU), MagicLab’s team is mainly focused on pivoting toward games with higher retention and IAP potential. They have a large team dedicated to creating a hit casual puzzle title and other teams focused on hybrid-casual game development.

The Challenge – No man ever steps in the same river twice

Because we are growing fast, we needed a monetization partner that is both reliable and profitable. We have been working with Liftoff Monetize for four years, and they have always been part of our waterfalls and will continue to be after switching to in-app bidding, which has been a reliable and consistent performer for us.

For us, optimizing a waterfall means finding ways to increase ARPDAU. There are many ways to achieve this, including decreasing latency, creating placements with the right eCPM, arranging networks to increase competition, and more. The problem with optimizing a waterfall is that there is never a perfect one. Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” You can think of the “man” as users and the “river” as a waterfall (they are both made up of water). 

Even though you optimize a waterfall to be perfect, it won’t be tomorrow. Factors such as player count, seasonality, available demand, UA budgets, and player locales, are constantly changing, so the waterfall needs constant attention and care. When you switch to in-app bidding there are no such concerns. Networks compete against each other for the placement, which should optimize your eCPM. In an in-app bidding setup, there is only a single instance for a single network which optimizes latency, and there is no need for constant optimizations as the bidding algorithms take into account outcomes of all those factors automatically. In-app bidding is like a self-cleaning oven. Recently we were experiencing problems with our SDK and some banner crashes, without being able to catch the source.

The Solution – A proactive investigation to find positive outcomes

We were experiencing a problem about banner ads causing crashes on some devices. When informed of our issues, Liftoff’s team took the initiative to investigate the issue and suggested alternative solutions. We tried the latest Android SDK 7.0 beta and were in constant communication with their internal tech team, sharing bugs and log data. We solved the crashing banners problem and discovered that the Liftoff Monetize SDK wasn’t the source of the issue. It was great having another helping hand when dealing with problems. Liftoff’s SDK 7.0 did not solve our issue directly but it greatly improved our banner performance. 

The Liftoff team is communicating a lot and informing us about their placements, best practices, and availability of in-app bidding as early as possible. In general, we are using interstitials, rewarded videos, and banners and saw improvements quickly after switching from waterfall to in-app bidding.

The Results – Only the start of a promising future

We are currently live with Liftoff SDK 7.0 on one of our Android apps and did see an increase in share of voice (SOV) of around 5% revenue. Currently, Liftoff is close to 20% revenue SOV on banners across all of our geos and waterfalls for that game. After running more tests, we are looking forward to adding Liftoff’s SDK 7.0 to other games.

“Being a monetization manager is easy. It’s like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire. You are on fire. Everything is on fire. And you are in hell. For that, it is great to work with a company that can support different aspects of our company’s growth and has a spaceship logo.”

Arda Seviniş, Growth Manager at MagicLab Game Technologies

Interested in seeing similar success with your app? Contact your account manager or email [email protected]