Since its founding in 2015, Korea-based publisher PLAYLINKS has come to be a major player in casual gaming, particularly mobile casino slot games. PLAYLINKS currently has more than 15 game titles to its name, including its flagship title High Roller Vegas Casino Slots. As the app’s user growth exploded across audiences, the need to get the most out of their marketing budget, improve efficiency, and optimize keyword bids became more critical than ever.
PLAYLINKS approached Luna looking to scale their Apple Search Ads activity with a focus on decreasing CPIs, boosting ROAS, and creating a centralized hub for data visualizations for their campaign and keyword performance. Hear from Hany Jang, UA Manager at PLAYLINKS, about how Luna helped solve these challenges for the publisher.
Looking for an Apple Search Ads solution
“We approached Luna with several challenges to address: first and foremost was improving efficiency across our Apple Search Ads campaigns, next was cutting our CPI, and third was boosting ROAS.
"Apple Search Ads is a crucial channel to master for iOS marketing, and working with a platform like Luna was a major key to success."
- Hany Jang, UA Manager at PLAYLINKS
The flywheel of efficiency
We wanted to find a solution to display our Apple Search Ads channel data and MMP data in a single user interface to help us increase efficiency in our analysis and optimization. This was precisely the solution offered by Luna, which centralized our MMP and Apple Search Ads data, as well as supplying us with user-friendly dashboards to visualize all our core metrics in one place.
Beyond that, the platform allowed us to efficiently dive deeper into our keywords and our competitors’ - giving us significant insights into negative keywords, and giving us back that valuable research time.
We also sought to improve efficiency around optimizing our keyword bids manually through these two platforms. Luna helped us tackle this with their auto-bids and smart recommendations, which uses an algorithm to automatically determine the best bid for each keyword.
"Beyond that, the platform allowed us to efficiently dive deeper into our keywords and our competitors’"
- Hany Jang, UA Manager at PLAYLINKS
This had multiple positive knock-on effects for us. The first effect was the optimization center's improvement on our efficiency. The next was the significant lowering of our CPI and raising of ROAS.
Cutting CPI by 70% with Luna’s optimization center
To maximize our marketing output, we needed to reach our highest quality users at the lowest cost per install, and save manual time in the process. Now, with Luna’s optimization center, we have been able to cut our CPI by almost 70%. Their smart bidding solutions allowed us to bid both time and cost efficiently, ensuring we hit our mark more of the time with less of the cost. This allowed us to address the challenge of boosting ROAS too. These smart bidding campaigns brought in very high value users. This translated to a major boost, more than doubling ROAS from 1.5% to 3.3%.
A stellar future with Luna
When we initially approached Luna we had three specific challenges that we wanted to solve for: to improve efficiency through a unified view of our MMP and Apple Search Ads native data, a way to efficiently lower CPI, and to optimize our Apple Search Ads campaigns towards ROAS.
Luna delivered on all three goals. Their auto-optimizations allowed us to reach the benchmarks we were aiming for, with little to no intervention on our part, while their platform gave us the comprehensive view we needed to visualize all of our performance across data sources.
Apple Search Ads is a crucial channel to master for iOS marketing, and working with a platform, like Luna, that could provide these kinds of tools and expertise was a major key to success. This is our first time working with Luna and we’re deeply impressed with their expertise and their high-quality output - we look forward to continuing our work with the Luna team.
