Survival Games

The objective

Overcoming creative fatigue for sustainable user acquisition and higher ROAS

Survival Games, an international mobile game developer and studio founded in 2019, is known for its flagship title, Raft® Survival - Ocean Nomad, an open world survivor simulator game.

In Raft® Survival - Ocean Nomad, players are thrust into a vast ocean world with minimal resources and are challenged to survive for as long as possible.

To achieve its primary objective of continuously acquiring new paying users, Survival Games initiated marketing campaigns on TikTok in 2020, specifically targeting US iOS users with a focus on achieving positive performance metrics.

While the brand's efforts on the platform were initially successful, it encountered creative fatigue. This issue necessitated a constant allocation of resources towards creating new ad creatives to maintain user engagement.

The Survival Games team soon recognized that their relentless pursuit of creative development was preventing them from fully capitalizing on TikTok's potential, thereby limiting their ability to scale user acquisition volumes and resulting in inconsistent performance.

In response to this challenge, the gaming publisher sought a solution to address creative fatigue while simultaneously increasing the number of new users to increase return on advertising spend (ROAS).

The Solution

Crafting a holistic user acquisition strategy: Bundling TTCC with VBO and App Profile Page

Raft® Survival - Ocean Nomad employs a hybrid monetization strategy, comprising both in-app advertising and in-app purchases and subscriptions. Consequently, ongoing campaigns must deliver positive outcomes at every stage of the user journey, spanning from impressions (measured by CPM and CTR) to installs (CPI), and ultimately, to purchases (CVR, CPA) while maintaining strong ROAS.

The gaming publisher conducted extensive tests, experimenting with various combinations of content, adjusting the level of focus on gameplay elements, and trying out different creative hooks to find the most effective creative approach.

Analyzing the results allowed Survival Games to pinpoint the most effective strategies for its specific objectives and allocate resources accordingly, with the potential to enhance ROAS and lower expenses. To further expand and achieve stable performance in its primary markets, including the USA and other English-speaking countries, Survival Games made the decision to try out TikTok Creative Challenge.

The publisher initiated its first brief for Raft® Survival - Ocean Nomad, and upon observing positive outcomes, allocated budgets to the TTCC creatives based on their performance results.

Survival Games meticulously worked on the brief. After testing multiple iterations of the brief, the team determined that placing a strong emphasis on encouraging creators to showcase enjoyable gameplay footage was the critical factor for achieving success.

Additionally, prompting creators to incorporate a captivating hook at the beginning of the video and concluding with a compelling call to action played a significant role in stabilising performance metricsAfter implementing TTCC, Survival Games combined it with Value Based Optimization (VBO) and App Profile Page. VBO allowed Survival Games to stabilise ROAS and target more valuable users, while App Profile Page provided real-time events to help optimize the auction algorithm.

Survival Games also diversified geo targeting. The team separated countries into tiers according to user acquisition costs and conversion rates, placing together US and higher-ROAS countries like AU, CA, GB. This allowed them to achieve stable delivery with actual bids and costs for each country.

The Results

Finding the winning formula to improve performance metrics and achieve high ROAS

The combination of TTCC creatives, VBO, and the App Profile Page proved to be a highly effective strategy, increasing ROAS by 177%. This strategy also allowed Survival Games to increase volume by 59% while improving overall performance metrics, including a 24% reduction in cost per install, a 28% increase in click-through rate, and an impressive 38% boost in installs per mille (IPM) - a key metric for tracking the number of app installs per thousand ad impressions.

These results were in comparison to the previous month's marketing activities, showcasing the significant impact of this winning formula.

Survival Games devised an effective approach for collaborating with TTCC, consisting of four stages: initiating a launch brief, obtaining results, evaluating those outcomes, and making necessary adjustments to the brief.

This method has been successfully applied to various other projects, enabling the publisher to launch several new IPs on TikTok.