Gaming

Case Study: Melsoft Games

Using Automation to scale campaigns efficiently

Increased efficiency of campaign management by 40%

Scaled their ad spend by 2x, without adding additional headcount

Reduced manual tasks to optimize campaigns daily

About Melsoft Games

Melsoft games develop fun, challenging games for users all over the world. Their most famous title, MyCafe, found global popularity, reaching over 100 million downloads since its release in 2016. Family Island, the newest release by Melsoft Games in the farming/simulation genre, generated 11 million installs in under 6 months and continues to grow.

The Challenge

Scaling marketing campaigns to outpace the competition

Competition for users is increasing, forcing gaming app developers to optimize their products and their campaigns. Increased competition in the app stores spreads organic traffic around, reducing the number of users an app doesn’t have to pay for. In 2019, the number of paid installs increased 25% from the previous year. This effect forces app developers to invest more time and money in user acquisition to drive growth.

Like many game developers, Melsoft is focused on achieving positive return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), all while increasing their user acquisition spend (and campaigns) every month. High cost-per-install (CPI) rates are the norm in gaming, meaning that marketers have to optimize their spend more often, and in more detail. If they don’t do this, there’s a real risk in overspending budgets on channels that deliver low-quality users. And as spend increases, so does the number of channels a marketer will use to find users.

Increasing budgets, increasing channels and increasing costs all add up to an increase in operational work to scale effectively. In Melsoft’s case, the team was running over 10-12 networks, each with a high number of campaigns at any given time. As such, they were looking for a single solution where they could compare performance across all channels without having to work between 10+ separate dashboards.

The Solution

Creating efficiency through data aggregation and automated workflows

Adjust’s automation tool, Automate Enterprise, has been imperative to Melsoft for scaling user acquisition efforts. Automate Enterprise aggregates all marketing data into one single dashboard so marketers can compare ad spend for each channel, side-by-side.

“We use Automate Enterprise as the single source of truth for all our marketing campaigns. It’s proven to be extremely convenient for visualizing and analyzing the data.”

Alexander Shilyaev

COO/CMO, Melsoft Games

Melsoft also introduced automated workflows to automate parts of the optimization process. With roughly 20% of their ad spend running through these workflows, the team could rely on the Automate Enterprise Rule Engine to pause, scale and optimize campaigns without lifting a finger. Now, they never have to worry about going over budget. Additionally, with the help of the Rule Engine , Melsoft has been able to test hundreds of new creatives per month with the underperforming creatives being paused or stopped before they end up draining budgets.

The Result

Mastering mobile marketing automation

Working with Automate Enterprise has driven significant improvement to Melsoft’s operations. Automate Enterprise enabled them to allocate budgets more efficiently and scale their operations with increased advertising spend.

Their efforts resulted in:

Increased efficiency of campaign management by 40% on average
Scaled their ad spend by 2x, without adding headcount
Reduced manual daily tasks to optimize campaigns

“Automating workflows has been critical in us being able to scale campaigns the way we have. Since integrating with Automate Enterprise we’ve been able to test hundreds more creatives than we could in the past, without having to spend additional time or money.”

Alexander Shilyaev

COO/CMO, Melsoft Games