Lessmore exceeds ROAS goal by 80% within 2 weeks

The Lessmore story

Lessmore is a Germany-based independent studio with a team spread throughout Europe. Founded in 2021, the company has two successful games - Eatventure and Pocket Chess - with Eatventure trending towards the top of the US charts in free games.

Lessmore's business strategy is rooted in hypercasual game development. Their approach is to create games within weeks, quickly test them in the market, and adjust or drop them as needed. As a result, there is greater pressure to monetize quickly. The Lessmore team doesn’t settle for small profits per game; each game must show considerable performance and have the potential to become a chart-topper.

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Challenge

Lessmore's Eatventure generates most of its revenue through in-app ads, with a low percentage coming from in-app purchases. In September 2022, Lessmore aimed to boost the revenue from in-app purchases and set an ambitious D7 ROAS goal. However, Lessmore faced a challenge as they relied on a single revenue data set that represented less than a third of their IAP data. This limited their ability to optimize effectively for both ad revenue and in-app purchases, with the studio struggling to achieve their KPI.

Finding a Solution

Moloco provided a solution by leveraging its Dual ROAS optimization model, which considers the holistic spending patterns of users and targets optimal users based on both ad revenue and in-app purchases. Using this approach, Lessmore optimized their ad spend towards users who are not only likely to click on ads but also make in-app purchases, resulting in a more balanced revenue stream.

Moloco's Dual ROAS optimization approach was made possible by the simple setup of data connectors between Moloco and Singular, sharing both in-app ads and in-app ads data from Eatventure’s campaign efficiently.  As Gus Viegas, Head of Growth at Lessmore explains “Because it’s so simple to set up data connectors between different networks and Singular, it was very easy for us to develop new ways to pass data from our app to different networks, like Moloco. This helped us to optimize our user acquisition campaigns in a way that managed to scale us to double digits, tens of thousands of spend per day per network across a variety of networks. Crucially - it helped us scale our user base with high-value users”

Because it’s so simple to set up data connectors between different networks and Singular, it was very easy for us to develop new ways to pass data from our app to different networks, like Moloco.

Success for Lessmore

Summary of scale:

• D7 ROAS at +80% within 2 weeks of campaign launch
• 600% daily budget scale within a month

Moloco's Dual ROAS model quickly boosted the ROAS performance by optimizing for both ad revenue and in-app purchases. This immediate improvement helped Lessmore to overachieve its KPI just in 2 weeks and enabled the studio to scale its budget on a daily basis.

As Gus notes, “When we were testing a normal campaign either optimized for in-app purchase or ad revenue, it didn’t cut it. But it was so easy to pipeline both together using Singular to Moloco, that within 2 weeks, we were already seeing positive growth. In a DSP at the time, at least for me, it was unheard of to have performance campaigns before 6 weeks, and here it took us only 2 weeks to be profitable and spending tens of thousands a day with ease, and still growing within Moloco. I think it’s all due to that seamless data pipelining from Singular.”

“Spend first and expect to optimize later is a common misconception created by many DSPs/Ad Networks that apply the same optimization strategy per vertical. Not every app has the same monetization model, and this is why it’s crucial for mobile marketers to choose a DSP that can quickly power a customizable bidding machine adapted to different monetization models with rigorous sets of 1st-party data.

Marrying Singular’s ad monetization data and Moloco’s robust machine learning engine, Lessmore was able to overachieve its goal expeditiously, and continue scaling while exceeding the KPI goal every day,” said Jihyo Kim, Director of Partnerships at Moloco.

In a DSP at the time, at least for me, it was unheard of to have performance campaigns before 6 weeks, and here it took us only 2 weeks to be profitable and spend tens of thousands a day with ease, and still growing within Moloco.

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