MyTona Achieved 17% Increase in Day 14 ROAS with Non-Personalized traffic

By James Haslam | January 28, 2021

MyTona’s Budgets Steadily Shift to Non-Personalized Bids

MyTona is a free-to-play mobile game developer and publisher. Established in 2006, MyTona is the creator of hit games, such as ‘Seeker’s Notes: Hidden Mystery’ and ‘Cooking Diary’. According to app store top charts, Seeker’s Notes is the top-performing hidden object game, reaching the top 10 grossing games on the iPad in USA, Canada, UK and European countries. Seekers Notes has been downloaded more than 20 million times.


Executive Summary

Imminent changes to IDFA on iOS means that marketers must prepare for the future. MyTona, a leading publisher of mobile games, sought a solution that allowed them to continue to scale in a post-IDFA world. They found one with Liftoff, by bidding on non-personalized traffic to scale new user growth. Non-personalized traffic provided strong results, with MyTona’s campaign generating 17% higher Day 14 ROAS, while shifting an increasing amount of budget to non-personalized traffic.

Preparing for Change

MyTona, a leading game publisher of chart-toppers such as Seeker’s Notes: Hidden Mystery and Cooking Diary, wanted to react quickly when it learned of Apple’s announcement that it would limit access to the IDFA with the release of iOS14. The consequences of placing ad tracking in the hands of consumers mean that targeted campaigns may no longer be as viable as before, so other solutions are required in order to continue to bid at scale and grow.

Looking to Liftoff, MyTona trialed non-personalized (NP) traffic for their Cooking Diary app. Non-personalized traffic is made up of users who have turned ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ (or LAT) settings on their iOS devices. By limiting ad tracking, users hide their IDFA to advertisers. But such users can still be advertised to, even without being directly targeted at the user level.

Liftoff began to increase bidding on NP traffic following Apple’s initial announcement. This allowed Liftoff to test its viability and scale machine learning (ML), enabling us to offer a strong solution to customers. 

What Was the Impact of Non-Personalized Traffic?

Non-personalized traffic consistently delivered high-quality users for MyTona’s Cooking Diary game, outperforming personalized traffic on Day 14 Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS) by 17%, MyTona’s target metric. As a result, MyTona’s budgets have steadily shifted towards buying non-personalized traffic. The team is also satisfied with the progress we’ve made together.

“We were unsure what impact Apple’s announcement would have on the performance of our user acquisition efforts,” says Weihao Ang, User Acquisition Lead at MyTona, “and quite concerned to be frank.” Liftoff took their concerns off the table with a viable approach to growth.

With Liftoff’s support and the impressive results they have been able to deliver by bidding on non-personalized traffic, we are confident that programmatic on iOS will continue to be a top-performing channel for us.Weihao Ang, User Acquisition Lead, MyTona

Want to discover how non-personalized traffic performs in other key verticals? For gaming, Playrix’s case study has you covered. Social casino app marketers can catch up with Murka’s case study. And our latest case study with Yubo covers social apps too.