Value Add Research: Applovin + Ironsource

An interview with the user acquisition head of Voodoo, a top hyper-casual and mobile games creator, gave insight into how Applovin + Ironsource are the new favorites among game studios’ user acquisition teams.

What’s changed?

Historically, Facebook and Google used to take 60–70% share of marketing spend. Facebook and Google lost their footing, and two new companies have come out on top: Applovin and Ironsource.

How do these new top two players differentiate from each other?

Whether you go with Applovin or Ironsource comes down to the type of game, and the type of mediation partner you’re seeking.

• AppLovin best used for… attribution accuracy
• Ironsource best used for… value optimization

If you have an ad revenue based game, it is likely your “biggest spend is going to LevelPlay” (aka Ironsource, owned by Unity). But, Ironsource doesn’t allow studios who don’t use their remediation platform to run value-optimized campaigns.

What exactly is a value-optimized campaign?

• Value-optimized campaigns are ones that have a target or minimum ROAS
• This is the superior type of campaign to run on Applovin or Levelplay’s channels
• ROAS campaigns depend on probabilistic attribution since the absence of Apple‘s SKAdNetwork

And what does Applovin offer?

Applovin’s success is due to their pluralistic attribution. They have seen success with their monetization tool with the addition of MoPub.

“AppLovin’s mediation and app discovery tools really work well together. They really complement each other really well… delivering performance, significant performance. And I really don’t see Unity or IronSource, being able to do the same thing immediately like within the next six months. This level of scale for AppLovin took them two or three years. And even after the MoPub’s acquisition, it still took them roughly, I think, roughly a year until we see this level of performance.
With Unity’s attempts to steal market share and promotions, 1% of your overall revenue might boost by being on LevelPlay, but you might be losing more on what you could potentially get with marketing if you stay on AppLovin. So for that reason, at the moment, I wouldn’t really make that switch. But perhaps this could change in two years. But realistically, I would be really surprised to see that change actually materializing before two years.”

What’s the preference between the two that you’ve seen among your UA peers?

Among his UA network across companies in casual gaming, AppLovin is either they’re number one or number two for this year already.

Where does Unity fit in?

70–80% of the industry uses Unity for production.

Unity tried to change their pricing model and turn it into an installation base model. A boycott happened to resist the change, and “this did quite a bit of damage to Unity’s revenues. What we are hearing is the Unity was getting roughly 30% to 35% less bid requests, which means for them to earn a commission basically with each bid request. This is where they make most of their money. Ultimately, I do see them turning back.”

What’s the future look like for personalization?

AppLovin, Unity and Ironsource — when you go onto these platforms for their reporting, you have one SKAdNetwork view and a separate new for probabilistic results. By collecting data, you can push LTV up with these insights. This works by collecting a bunch of data points, running them through some machine learning engine, not actually trying to identify devices one to one, but rather like saying, this device looks like another device that had success was this high LTV. This clustering can direct marketing to the right spots.