Gismart is a leading developer and publisher of mobile games and entertainment-focused apps, with over 800 million downloads to date and offices in London, Kyiv, Beijing, and Minsk.
Gismart expanded its portfolio into the hypercasual space in 2019. Their top titles include Cool Goal!, Pencil Rush 3D, Foil Turning 3D, Domino Smash, VIP Guard, Defuse the Bomb 3D, Beat Maker Go, Piano Crush, DJ it!, and WeDrum. In 2020, Gismart was ranked the 6th fastest-growing company in Europe according to the Financial Times (FT 1000). In February 2021 they launched three new games, two of them, Pencil Rush 3D and Warp Slider, managed to crack the US top free games chart just a few days after its global release.
5%
increase in LTV
5-7%
increase in ARPDAU
Challenge
With their previous focus on creating entertainment apps, Gismart has historically monetized using a combination of in-app purchases and ads, however their main source of revenue came from subscriptions.
When they expanded into hypercasual games, they needed a new strategy in order to optimize monetization for this genre. As hypercasual players are typically familiar with seeing ads in the game play and less likely to pay for an in-app purchase or subscription, IAA became the key focus for their monetization model.
The challenge was to find a balance between LTV and the user acquisition funnel with their main aim to increase revenue without harming retention metrics.
Solution
Gismart worked closely with multiple Meta teams. They partnered with Meta Audience Network on their ad strategy, working together to resolve issues, make add-ons where needed and optimize monetization.
Due to the player-friendly format, rewarded video ads have been crucial to successfully monetizing Gismart’s hypercasual titles as players feel more positively after watching the ad and receiving their reward. The team carefully a/b tested and analysed the game flow to choose the best ad frequency and entry points for rewarded videos. They found that the most popular entry points are shown on the finish screen where they can get double coins and when a user fails a level, as a way to encourage them to continue to play.
Gismart collaborated closely with the Meta Audience Network team to make sure that the ad implementation both enhanced the user experience and were compliant with policy requirements. They have continuously sought to innovate and test new features in order to make the most positive impact to their monetization.
They also adopted bidding at the end of 2019 through IronSource mediation before migrating to MoPub at the end of 2020, with a view to using this new solution to streamline operations and increase revenue.
One of the key success factors that heightened our partnership with [Meta] were the powerful tools of [Meta] Audience Network. The tools enable more transparency in the processes and let the team have a clear focus on improving performance to achieve maximum results.”
Irina Krivets, Head of Monetization at Gismart
Results
Since focusing on IAA on their hypercasual titles, Gismart have seen an increase in LTV, and as a result have been able to acquire more users.
Bidding has also helped to increase ARPDAU and importantly, reduce time spent on the many waterfalls that needed to be managed across the portfolio for all country tiers.
All results are self-reported and not identically repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.
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