How Liftoff Uses Creative Intelligence to Drive ROAS for Match-3 Game Marketers

How a combination of artificial intelligence and more than a decade of experience help us deliver the highest value for your ad dollars.

The explosive growth of match-3 games has led many mobile game marketers to treat it as a genre unto itself. Games like Candy Crush Saga, Royal Match, and Fishdom grossed nearly a combined $1 billion in Q3 2021, and the earning potential of the genre continues to grow.

This growth potential is a blessing and a curse. There’s a massive audience of players willing to spend on IAP, and those who don’t provide supplemental revenue through in-app ads. However, there are also a lot of high-profile, deeply-entrenched games that take up much of the market share within this genre, making it a difficult segment to crack.

It’s not enough to properly monetize and maximize retention within your match-3 game, especially as the cost of converting paying users continues to grow year over year. You need effective marketing that will help you stand out from the crowd, preferably by focusing on your game’s key differentiators and targeting your potential player base’s main motivators.

At Liftoff, we’ve developed Creative Intelligence to do just that. Through algorithmic analysis, human ingenuity, and contextual ad targeting, we hone in the aspects that draw players into your game and design ad creative that gets them playing — all without relying on third-party tracking data. Discover how Creative Intelligence can maximize user acquisition and drive ROAS for your match-3 title.

Jump to a section…

What is Creative Intelligence?
VisualMind discovers what drives your players
Liftoff Creative Studio handles the rest
Match-3 requires a human touch

What is Creative Intelligence?

Creative Intelligence is our unique approach to mobile game marketing. It’s a hybrid of data-driven computer vision technology combined with more than a decade of experience in designing winning ad creative.

VisualMind discovers what drives your players

It all begins with VisualMind, our proprietary computer vision tool. VisualMind uses artificial intelligence to scan your match-3 game for what we call Motivational Drivers, which represent the emotional reasons why players download and play specific mobile games. These motivations provide a quantifiable way for us to design the most effective ads. When scanning your game, we’ll look at Motivational Drivers like the following:

• Thinking & Solving: The core driver for players who seek out match-3 puzzle games.
• Improving Skills: Some players take Thinking & Solving a step further, playing match-3 titles to improve their cognitive skills.
• Completing Milestones: Your game may rank highly here if it features a level-based progression layer.
• Customization & Decoration: Many match-3 games feature unlockable items that players can use to customize character profiles or home spaces.
• Competing Against Others: Some match-3 games also feature competitive elements, allowing players from all over the world to participate in one-on-one or score attack modes with high score tables.

A scan of your game will produce a score for each of our Motivational Drivers. For example, your game may end up with a nine for Thinking & Solving, a seven for Customization & Decoration, and a four for Competing Against Others. These scores give our creative teams insight into your game’s unique features and strengths so we can market directly to the audience most likely to download, play, and convert into paying customers.

The best part? VisualMind’s algorithm doesn’t rely on any third-party data, ensuring your advertising strategies are effective for the long haul.

Liftoff Creative Studio handles the rest

VisualMind doesn’t just work on mobile games. If you’re already running ads for your game, we can scan those ads and derive Motivational Driver scores for comparison purposes. If your game scores highly in Customization & Decoration but your video ads rank lower, the Liftoff Creative Studio team can design more appropriately aligned creative.

Our team of creative professionals will consult with your mobile game marketers and designers to develop video and interactive mobile ads that speak directly to your players’ specific motivations.

Liftoff Creative Studio has over a decade of experience designing mobile ads for match-3 publishers like King and Playrix. Our work has given us insight into the special demands of the match-3 gaming landscape. Match-3 is more than just another puzzle genre — its massive audience, unique play mechanics, and value for publishers make it worthy of special attention.

Liftoff’s suite of tools also includes Motivational Targeting, which allows you to harness the power of VisualMind to promote your new ads inside apps that match the same Motivational Drivers. That way, you can ensure your ad dollars are going directly toward engaged players who are most likely to install.

Match-3 requires a human touch

The longevity and earnings potential of the match-3 genre is unlike any other. Breaking into a market where 81% of the top 200 games are over two years old requires a deep understanding of your audience and what will motivate them to play your game, along with killer creative to leverage that information. Creative Intelligence makes that happen. Contact us today to learn more about how Liftoff can help your match-3 game stand out and maximize your ROAS.