With Non-Personalized Traffic, Murka’s ROAS Increased by 3%
Costs decreased across the board—with 6% lower CPAs
Murka is an established and rapidly growing European game developer of social casino titles. The EGR recognized Murka as the best social casino operator, and E&K Gaming has given it the title of ‘Most Innovative Company’. It has been ranked among top European app companies by App Annie for several years in a row.
Based in Ukraine, Murka has grown to a well-established company with more than 500 employees alongside successful global titles, which led to its acquisition by Blackstone in 2019.
Executive Summary
With Apple’s decision to put privacy in consumers’ hands, Murka, a leading developer of social casino gaming apps, wanted to ensure that its user acquisition (UA) campaigns with Liftoff wouldn’t be disrupted. If users are going to opt-out of sharing IDFA, Murka needs a strong alternative to continue to scale. Fortunately, Liftoff has a solution: non-personalized traffic. By testing this new traffic source, Murka was able to boost UA performance across its app portfolio. For their marquee title Scatter Slots, Murka achieved 3% higher ROAS and 6% lower CPAs than personalized traffic.
Murka’s Challenge
Apple’s announcement of upcoming changes to device tracking created uncertainty across the app marketing spectrum. By giving consumers a choice to share their IDFA, many industry analysts and veterans predicted that most users would decide to switch tracking off. This issue poses a fundamental problem for advertisers who want to maintain their spend while finding and converting the users who are most receptive to their apps.
Murka, a Ukrainian-based developer of social casino titles, sees iOS users as highly valuable. The gaming company would not view dropping the platform as a ready alternative. “iOS is a leading channel,” says Maria Kalinik, Senior Programmatic Manager at Murka, “and highly lucrative. With or without IDFA, we need the channel to perform.”
As iOS users are a significant portion of Murka’s user acquisition, it needed a long-term solution that allowed it to acquire users at scale without the IDFA. Together, Murka and Liftoff began testing non-personalized traffic as a new source of inventory.
What is Non-Personalized Traffic?
When Apple announced privacy changes that would be released as part of iOS 14 (later rolled back to 2021), Liftoff began buying non-personalized traffic (known as Limited Ad Tracking, or LAT) that does not share the IDFA on bid requests. Murka was one of Liftoff’s first customers to test this traffic source and discover significant UA performance upsides.
How did Non-Personalized Traffic Perform?
When testing on Scatter Slots, a narrative-focused slots title with an audience of over 20m players, Liftoff’s non-personalized traffic drove significant results over a two-week period:
- 3% higher ROAS and 6% lower CPAs in comparison to personalized traffic
- CPIs decreased by 9%
- Purchases increased 53%, resulting in 20% higher revenue
These early results show the potential of non-personalized traffic. As Liftoff continues to scale non-personalized traffic, our machine learning improves, resulting in increased spending and better campaign performance.