Gaming
Case Study: FleroGames
About Flero Games
Flero Games is a mobile game development and publishing company based in Korea who make social simulation genre games, like EveryTown, My Secret Bistro, and TapTapFish Abyssrium. Being the number 1 simulation gaming company is our main objective. Their flagship title is "Every Town", the number 1 SNG game in Korea.
Savvy spending at the core
Flero Games is a mid-sized gaming developer that specializes in creating mid-core games that attract and engage global players. In 2013 it launched the flagship game “Every Town” and rose to the top of the charts within a couple of weeks. Since then the company has launched 9 titles and managed to amass millions of users from around the world.
The company operates under a lean business model, spending marketing budgets meticulously. The focus is on driving high value installs, monitoring return on ad spend, and investing in marketing channels that deliver the highest value users who engage for longer periods of time. The lean business model also includes the tools Flero invests in to optimize, manage and measure the delivery of its global campaigns.
When Flero first started out it was using a free tool to measure campaigns, however it soon became apparent that this tool wouldn’t give them the data needed to make smart decisions and uplift marketing spend.
Flero Games is not a big player in the gaming industry, this means we do not have the money to invest in unclear marketing methods or channels. This makes our marketing strategy quite conservative, which is why our team is reliant on an attribution provider such as Adjust. We use it to scale within our limits, and we have bumpers on everything we do with the Fraud Prevention Suite.
Dongbin Chi
UA Lead, Flero Games
Growing responsibly within a multi-channel marketing approach
Flero acquires users from a multitude of sources. The focus is on efficiency, rather than on the volume of installs. Efficiency for Flero is all about acquiring users who will stay engaged for long periods of time, will move to other game titles through cross promotional campaigns, and who will spend money in-app. For the marketing team, retention metrics are valued higher than any other KPI as an indicator of increased revenue potential and also K factor (or the virality factor)— the concept that people will install the app based on a friend’s experience.
Scaling user acquisition across several networks is the best way to gain exposure to the largest number of potentially engaged app users and see higher conversion rates,all while driving higher ROIs. However, scaling marketing in this way can potentially lead to being exposed to performance ad fraud.
Choosing the right solution
Flero Games set stringent criteria when choosing a new solution that would require investing time and money integrating across all of its app titles. The team had three main requirements:
- More in-depth reporting and analysis that integrates with every marketing channel
- Protection when scaling marketing budgets globally
- Easy access to raw data to perform in-depth offline cross-departmental analysis and create accurate benchmarks
They needed a platform to manage campaigns, measure success, and provide assurance the apps were protected from performance ad fraud. In 2017 Flero Games integrated with Adjust.
Solution
Adjust’s Cohort Report has been a huge boon for Flero Games, giving the team a quick and easy way to drill into campaigns, share KPIs across departments and optimize spend for the best results.
The cohort menu is one of the key features of any attribution provider. Adjust’s Cohort has given us a solid basis for making strategic decisions. We always refer to the essential KPIs from the Cohort Reports in order to figure out which source is driving us the most retained users. Additionally, the LTV for each time period is very helpful when you need to make quick decisions.
Dongbin Chi
UA Lead, Flero Games
Flero runs marketing campaigns on more than 10 different marketing channels at any given time, across eight different app titles. When a campaign is delivering high-value users, the budget is scaled quickly. The marketers need to make these decisions on the most accurate data possible — data that isn’t muddled with fraudulent engagements and installs. With fraud rising 21% in 2019, maintaining data integrity has become even more vitally important.
Flero enabled the Fraud Prevention Suite from the moment it started working with Adjust, ensuring data stayed clean and the team could make the smartest decisions possible.
Data transparency is very important to us. UA managers always try to understand the structure of the campaign, and they often need to read the raw data and use it to formulate insights that impact bigger budgetary decisions. If the data is not transparent or if it is full of mistakes then, of course, your insights and decisions will be wrong.
Flero is also leveraging Adjust’s callbacks, webhooks that transmit granular user and app data in real time. This callback data is piped into Flero’s BI warehouse where Flero stores and secures all user-level data used to improve gameplay, marketing strategy, and overall company decisions.
To extract more value from data, we are focusing more on performing deeper analysis outside of the Adjust Dashboard. We are looking at things like how much we're spending and how paid campaigns affect organic installs [K factor].
Results
Integrating with Adjust’s Fraud Prevention Solution (FPS) has allowed Flero Games to scale its marketing with confidence.
FPS is definitely one of the most helpful features. Especially when we are launching a new title or launching multiple campaigns in tandem. Last year when we launched a new RPG with the largest budget we’ve had to date, FPS was integral in making sure this money was spent on acquiring legit users. On that launch alone, 40% of all paid installs were fraudulent engagements and successfully blocked, meaning we could reinvest the money to acquire legitimate users.
Dongbin Chi
UA Lead, Flero Games
Preventing fraud is not the only success Flero Games has seen working with Adjust. The reporting and measurement tools have enabled the team to revisit older titles with a clearer picture of deliverables and the ability to keep the pulse of KPIs. They’ve seen a dramatic increase to marketing efficiency — within just 6 months of reinvesting in old titles, DAUs increased by 500% and revenue by 250% — a huge win for Flero Games.
The outlook is bright for Flero Games, with a tight grip on campaign performance, and increased revenue across the board, the company will continue to experiment and optimize its secret sauce.
We want to continue to build better infrastructures and benchmarks for UA, ad monetization and creatives. We are really excited about automation and we plan on investing in new technologies that will help us continue to grow and penetrate our markets further.
- DAU increase: 500%
- Revenue: 250%
- Fraud blocked and marketing budget reinvested: 40%
