Results
Bidding has proved to be successful for Rovio, helping to create a significant shift across their business.
Through testing, Rovio compared the impact of bidding versus waterfall set up. The results proved their hypothesis: bidding helped them earn more ad revenue resulting in a positive impact on ARPDAU.
As a result, Rovio moved the majority of their game inventory from waterfall to bidding. Now 92%1 of their ad revenue runs on bidding. Further, all new games bypass waterfall set up all together and use bidding as their monetization set up from launch. Angry Birds Dream Blast and Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs AR were the latest two games to follow this direct-to-bidding approach.
Bidding has driven an increase in efficiency as well for Rovio. Previously, they had to devote significant ad operation resources to the manual work of maintaining complex waterfalls.
With bidding, they have been able to reallocate these resources to more impactful areas for the business. One such area is working directly with the game development teams to ensure that ad placements provide the best experience for the players, which is vitally important for building sustainable ad monetization that helps further grow their business.
Source: 1Data provided by client, May 2019