Case Study: IsCool Entertainment

IsCool Entertainment is a passionate, creative, and innovative mobile gaming studio focusing on high quality, free-to-play, highly social games for friends to play together and share a fun experience.

Successful games such as Garden of Words, Bouquet of Words, Wordox, Belote, and Crazy 8 have received numerous accolades and are enjoyed by millions of fans every month across the world.

Based in the heart of Paris in the vibrant Montorgueil area, the mix of young emerging talents and experienced industry players makes IsCool Entertainment a very special and fun place to work.

IsCool Entertainment has been part of Hachette Group since July 2017.

IsCool Entertainment is a Paris, France based gaming publisher that develops casual games with a focus on the word game segment. Their current most popular title, Garden of Words, has amassed more than 25 million installs.

Like most gaming publishers, IsCool’s main objective is maximizing ROI from their user acquisition campaigns. When it comes to deciding which marketing channels to invest in, ROI is their North Star. Their business model is two-fold: they generate revenue by showing ads in their apps and from users making in-app purchases. Around 70% of their revenue comes from the former - showing ads.

In recent years, in-app advertising has proven itself as an effective monetization strategy for many mobile gaming publishers. Gaming publishers know exactly how much money they made last month from showing ads in their app; however, they often don’t know which users generated the revenue or where those users came from. This is because the industry’s status quo is to aggregate ad revenue data across an entire ad network.

For IsCool, attributing in-app purchases is a relatively simple task. They get user-revenue data for in-app purchases directly from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store at a user level, which they can attribute back to the campaign that drove that user. When it comes to attributing ad revenue to users, however, it’s a bit more challenging. Given the status quo, IsCool was only getting insight into which marketing channels were driving quality users on network, campaign, ad format, and operating system (OS) level. But the reality is, individual users acquired from various marketing channels deliver different revenue. Some users might have a CPM of $5, while others could be as high as $100. Without this granularity of data, IsCool lacked the insight to optimize their user acquisition strategies based on user-level information.

Adjust user-level ad revenue powered by MoPub’s impression-level revenue data was a game-changer for IsCool. The two solutions combined work seamlessly to provide them with the granular insight they need to calculate ROI on a user level. With MoPub’s impression-level revenue data and Adjust’s reporting capabilities, IsCool is able to tie ad revenue directly to the source that delivered the user and compare it with the cost to acquire that user for the most precise ROAS calculation. By combining user-level ad revenue data with in-app purchase revenue data, IsCool has visibility into each user’s true LTV. This enables them to calculate accurate ROAS and make informed user acquisition decisions.

As a result of analyzing impression-level ad revenue data, IsCool has been able to spend their budgets more efficiently on campaigns that are driving quality sources. Additionally, due to their ability to pause low-ROI campaigns, they saw a global increase in profit margins.