Gaming
Installs are easy to buy. Day-30 retention shows whether they were worth it.
User acquisition for free-to-play games, judged on retention curves and payback periods.
+48%
Uplift in day-seven cohort return on ad spend
Mobile user acquisition
The challenge
Nearly everyone who installs your game will never pay a thing. Revenue follows a power law, the typical player is worth nothing, and you are really buying the chance of finding a high-value player rather than buying purchases. That would be manageable if you could see the result, but on iOS you mostly cannot: data arrives aggregated, delayed, limited to six bits of conversion value, and removed entirely when cohorts fall below Apple’s privacy thresholds.
Then the payback period turns it into a finance issue. A mid-core game that recovers its costs over ninety to one hundred and eighty days is not managing a marketing budget line — it is managing a working-capital cycle. A wrong ROAS curve is not just a weak quarter; it is a cash-flow problem.
Key factors
What we plan for
Treat creative as the media buy
Ad networks bid for you. The real levers are creative, event mapping and target ROAS — and of those, creative makes the biggest difference. We work to a production schedule with installs-per-mille tracked by concept and variant, refresh triggers set in advance, and a clear line between brand-new concepts and variations on a proven winner. Playable ads are handled as builds with their own production track, not as video edits.
Design your conversion value schema deliberately
Six bits of fine conversion value is a design limitation, and most schemas are inherited rather than planned. We map what you really need to tell apart — early monetisation, retention milestones or predicted value bands — against postback windows and crowd anonymity tiers, knowing you cannot have all three. Mistakes here cannot be fixed later by optimisation.
Model to the real payback period of the game
Hypercasual, casual and mid-core games recover costs on entirely different curves, and applying one game’s target ROAS to another is a frequent and costly mistake. We set cohort ROAS checkpoints suited to the genre and monetisation model, then track real cohorts against the curve rather than a blended average that hides its shape.
Reconcile the three figures that will never match
Network-reported results, SKAdNetwork postbacks and your MMP will disagree — by design, not by error. We maintain an ongoing reconciliation and, where the budget in question justifies it, resolve disputes with geo holdouts or matched-market tests rather than choosing whichever dashboard is most convenient.
Services
Services we deliver here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping managed for margin, not platform-reported ROAS.
Performance Marketing
Budget allocated across channels by measured contribution, not by what each platform claims.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to a payback period, with media purchased to match.
Campaign Management
Profit-focused campaign planning, pacing and reviews run as a steady routine.
Common questions
How do you measure iOS performance today?
Through SKAdNetwork postbacks with a purpose-built conversion value schema, moving to AdAttributionKit as coverage grows, plus incrementality testing where the aggregated data is too broad to answer the question. What we never do is present modelled figures as if they were observed. When a number is an estimate, our reports say so.
How much creative is needed to do this well?
More than most studios anticipate, and the amount grows with spend. The key point is that creative supply has replaced bid management as the main operational bottleneck. We agree a monthly target for concepts and variants with you at the outset, because a media plan that outpaces the creative pipeline stalls within weeks.
Can you support a soft launch?
Yes — and it is the ideal moment to bring us in. Soft launch is when measurement infrastructure and the conversion value schema should be finalised, and when kill criteria should be agreed before anyone is emotionally invested in the result. Defining what a failing retention curve looks like before you see one is far easier than afterwards.
Do you also handle ASO?
We coordinate with it and include store conversion rate in UA planning, as it directly affects effective cost per install. Dedicated ASO — keyword research, store listing tests and large-scale localisation — we would either scope separately or refer to a specialist. It sits next to what we do rather than being the same discipline.
Begin with an audit.
The audit has a clear scope and a clear output, and it stands on its own — no obligation to continue. If it shows your current setup is working well, that is a perfectly valid result and we will tell you so.