Facebook's optimisation tools are at the top of its game

Founded in 2002, Nekki is the leading publisher of high-quality action and strategy games. In August 2019, one of their most popular games, Shadow Fight 3, was involved in a 12-day video advertisement campaign. Nekki’s and Facebook Marketing Partner ROASUP efforts secured them a whole new generation of players in a cost-effective way. 

Nekki develop and publish games for PC, consoles, and mobile devices, with the total amount of registered users of their games exceeding 500 million globally. Nekki are probably most well known for their martial art fighting gaming series, Shadow Fight. Each game in the Shadow Fight series is set in the Far East, with Shadow Fight 1 originating as a Facebook game. The sequels - Shadow Fight 2 and 3 are respectively both available as free-to-play mobile games. Unlike its forerunners, Shadow Fight 3 is much more advanced, including 3D graphics and more life-like characters.

Let the ‘Campaign’ begin:

Not only did the game developer want to market Shadow Fight 3 to a new set of players but they also wanted to explore new ways to improve return on ad spend in its ad campaigns in the future. 

Working with Facebook Marketing Partner and gaming app user acquisition specialists ROASUP for over a year, the 12-day video advertising campaign was created to showcase Shadow Fight 3’s impressive gameplay across a collection of Facebook ad placements. Their mission was to encourage people to download the app and enjoy all that Shadow Fight was to offer. 

ROASUP and Nekki were keen to target adverts to a broad worldwide audience while using Facebook’s minimum return on ad spend (ROAS) control function. This tool allows advertisers to ensure a return on ad spend over a certain level per optimisation event. ROASUP also recommended using the campaign budget optimisation tool. A tool that allows Facebook to automatically find the best results across ad sets for the span of the campaign. 

Level up:

Nekki and ROASUP have successfully levelled up since their campaign promoting Shadow Fight 3. They achieved an 80% increase in return on ad spend, a 30% decrease in cost per unique purchase, and a huge 50% more installs converted to paying players.

Their success was a result of using Facebook’s optimisation tools in their campaign. Alexander Lubchenko, CMO at Nekki said the campaign budget optimisation delivered “more stable results while scaling advertising budgets” and overall Nekki “successfully” achieved their goal.

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