How Neon Play Established Consistent Positive ROAS Across All Ad Channels

🏆 Award-Winning Mobile Game Developer

📆 Founded in 2010

📲 Apple's 10,000,000,000th downloaded App

Neon Play celebrated its 10th-anniversary last year. Their 10 year DNA is creating byte-sized gameplay that fits the pocket-sized gaps in the day which absolutely suits a mobile gamer.

With Paper Glider becoming Apple's Ten Billionth download app, Neon Play leveraged the media attention to rapidly grow in the number of players and staff, leading the company to winning multiple awards (including one that got them a meeting with the Queen of England).

Over a year ago, the studio transitioned to Idle games and found this style of play matching perfectly with their way of rewarding small play sessions many times a day.

Challenge: Executing Optimization Decisions At Scale

Neon Play is running paid UA campaigns across multiple advertising channels, including Facebook, Google UAC, Snapchat, ironSource, AppLovin, Unity Ads, Vungle, and AdColony. So the number of active campaigns running at any given time can easily go above 250.

Neon Play’s User Acquisition Managers Josh Vinten and Antony Willis would go through a long process of manual optimization, starting with exporting the Sub-Source IDs, measuring the ROAS, applying formulas to adjust the bids, and then importing sheets into each of the ad networks.

Solution: Cross-Channel Automation

After having success with the ironSource ROAS optimizer, Neon Play decided to explore a cross-channel automation solution and chose to partner with BidShake.

The team at Neon Play ran several tests on optimizations to understand which formulas achieve the best results. After an insightful journey of testing different combinations of ROAS targets for mature Day 1, 3, 7 with different goals, Neon Play started seeing a consistent ROAS without scaling or killing off sub-sources when they wouldn’t necessarily need to.

It is then that Neon Play was ready to fully rely on Bidshake’s Automated Rules.

Impact: Consistent ROAS Across All Ad Channels

Free from manually optimizing campaigns, Josh Vinten and Antony Willis were able to explore each ad network further, set up and scale campaigns faster, look at data more granularly, and expand Automation Rules even further.

Looking Forward: More Games, More Users

Neon Play will continue building Idle games and aim to innovate the genre. According to Mark Allen, Neon Play’s Director of Games, mobile players want more than the standard Idle games currently on the market. “We will be releasing games with new mechanics; more management; active gameplay; and deeper content,” says Mark Allen.

In terms of their UA strategy, the team plans to increase the number of ad networks throughout the year and will utilize BidShake to achieve this.