The developer needed to improve LTV among Russian-speaking users
The company develops word puzzle games that have already been downloaded more than 40 million times. For instance, one of Marul Games’ most popular apps is Word Surf — a game where users have to find hidden words to earn game coins.
Marul Games has Russia in the top 3 countries with the highest DAU, with an average of 70K users actively playing Word Surf daily. That’s why the game developer needed to increase LTV among Russian-speaking players and improve the effective price per thousand impressions. So they arranged to promote themselves in the Yandex Advertising Network to reach these goals.
The game developer integrated the Yandex Advertising Network SDK in 2020 and started active promotion in 2021
Marul Games used three formats — banners, rewarded ads, and full-screen ads. For effective promotion, the company constantly conducted A/B tests, worked with waterfalls, and updated the SDK and ads.txt files.
To illustrate, in one of the experiments, the developer analyzed the effectiveness of advertising networks. A test lasted for a week on a sample of nearly 50% of the total number of Russian users. Based on the outcomes, Marul chose the Yandex Advertising Network.
There are some samples of banners seen by word puzzle players:
As a result, Marul Games enhanced the essential metrics
Stefan Marinov, Monetization Manager at Marul Games, said that a high retention rate could only be obtained through ads that do not annoy the user. Promotion with Yandex enabled the improvement of LTV and CPM while increasing retention.
During 2021-2022, the Yandex Advertising Network started to bring 50% of the income from monetization in Russia. And the effective eCPM impressions has improved significantly:
We conducted an A/B-test to check if it’s worth promoting with Yandex. In fact, this was unnecessary — even without testing, we saw performance growth.
Yandex managers are always in touch — they advise on ads settings and notify about Yandex Advertising Network tools updates.
Marul Games boosted their performance because they were open to experimentation and highly involved in the process.
We will continue to help Marul Games. Besides Russia, there are plans to promote games with the Yandex Advertising Network in the USA, Turkey, India, and Indonesia.