When the goal is to bring back players and attract new ones, it’s important not to focus on just one channel. In this battle royale PC game campaign, we used an approach that combines the best practices of performance advertising with the most effective programmatic traffic strategies. Through a precise targeting setup and effective creative work, we not only achieved conversion goals but also significantly increased reach.
Our client is a multiplayer online battle royale game. It is available for PC (Steam, Epic Games), consoles (Xbox, PlayStation), and through the official website.
The key objectives of the campaign were: to bring back old players for the update and attract new ones with fresh maps and missions. Additionally, it was important to ensure the profitability of the ad investments while maintaining business profitability.
The client worked with three specific audiences, and expanding beyond them was not allowed. Since the game is only available on PC and consoles, mobile traffic was tested selectively to determine if users launched the game on PC after seeing ads on their phones. Analytics were tracked through Gamesight.
To achieve both reach and profitability, we combined two approaches: traditional performance campaigns for conversions and programmatic campaigns for extending reach. We also monitored how the reach campaigns optimized over time, started driving players, and generated conversions. Additionally, the strength of the brand played a role on our side, positively affecting ROAS.
Although the main goal of the campaign was conversions and ROAS, we decided to include programmatic sources as well. In our experience, combining reach campaigns with performance formats delivers the best results. The more often users see an ad, the more trust is built.
Programmatic offers sources that allow precise targeting, reaching the right audience, and, even with the CPM auction, ensuring good conversions. Moreover, programmatic works well with targeting on PC. The key is to choose the right sources with good segmentation and reach for the necessary geos.
The campaign lasted a month as it was aimed at drawing attention to the game’s update. We also included mobile traffic to test the hypothesis of users switching from one device to another. Gamesight helped track this statistic if devices were on the same IP network.
Over the month, we achieved:
Despite using a CPM auction and bidding for reach, the cost per conversion stayed within the benchmark. This confirms the effectiveness of the audience clustering strategy, which, despite the expected low CTR from programmatic sources, ensured the necessary reach for a successful update and conversion.
The ROAS over 30 days was 237%.
For mobile devices, we created separate campaigns to test the hypothesis with Gamesight: can users transition from one device to another even if they saw ads not on their primary target device?
As a result, mobile campaigns showed a lower CPA since mobile traffic is cheaper and more abundant. At the same time, users were just as engaged, provided the creatives and targeting were set up correctly.
For advertising PC and console games focused on ROAS and conversions, it is not advisable to rely solely on narrow device targeting and performance optimization. As this case shows, properly set analytics, audience clustering, and creative work deliver better results than strictly adhering to technical limitations. Users can see ads on mobile devices; if they belong to the target audience, they can easily switch to a PC to play. Additionally, programmatic sources with deep audience segmentation can show good performance.