How Product Madness Can Test & Optimize New Channels Faster with Singular

Product Madness is the studio behind the most visually stunning and immersive mobile slots games in the market. The San Francisco-based developer’s flagship and most popular title, Heart of Vegas, is a top five grossing casino game in over 60 different countries.

Marketing Challenges

• Test 2–3 new mobile ad networks each month
• Run 1,000+ ad campaigns each month
• Continuously run ad campaigns in 15–18 mobile ad networks

At Product Madness, marketers are fueled daily by data retrieved through the Singular API.

We cut through everything,” says Patrick Witham, the company’s Director of User Acquisition, “as granular as it gets and as high-level as it gets.

Witham’s team hones in on a host of KPIs to evaluate their mobile advertising efforts: CPI, Day 7, Day 14 and Day 30 ROI, LTV. “We’ve created an LTV model that we measure on the platform, app, channel and campaign level.”

Ad networks will sometimes work for you for a year and then all of sudden the ends won’t justify the means, so it’s important to continuously test and keep a close eye on fluctuations.

To slice and dice the terabytes of data generated by its 1,000 campaigns per month, Product Madness relies on Singular to automate core marketing engineering processes — namely, the ingestion and aggregation of cost data spread across the 15+ mobile ad networks it is testing at any given moment.

Since we run with a lot of channels and frequently test new ones, Singular saves us a huge amount of time,” says Product Madness’s Witham. “We pull all the cost and other campaign information from the Singular API into our internal BI, where we do our dashboarding and analysis.

Prior to Singular, Witham and his Product Madness team struggled to manually aggregate cost data on a daily basis.

We would go into each individual network, download an Excel report, copy and paste the data, normalize it and marry it with the backend,” Witham recalls. Eighty percent of the time, the process took around 45 minutes per day, while 20 percent of the time something would break and it would take upwards of 2 hours per day (or 10 hours per week) to collect the data.

We were left with this giant Excel file that was around 100MB, with macros that could take 20 to 30 minutes to run if the file didn’t crash first.

As Product Madness sought to scale its marketing operations following the exponential growth of Heart of Vegas, the UA team considered building an internal cost aggregation system. However, the Product Madness engineers had their hands full with a rapidly evolving data infrastructure. Building and maintaining the pipes to stream, standardize and deliver real-time cost data from an ever-changing list of media sources was another major project.

We discovered that we just didn’t have the resources so it was a no-brainer to go with Singular.

ROI and LTV reporting at the game campaign level, once a cumbersome task for the team, is now largely automated. When Witham’s Product Madness team provides tracking links to its ad networks, they pass a specific campaign name to the network and each time an install occurs a postback containing campaign information gets sent and automatically matches to cost data in Singular.

The Product Madness team is careful to keep their campaign names consistent, says Witham.

If an install comes from the ‘Chartboost_HOV_iPad’ campaign, our system posts back info on ‘Chartboost_HOV_iPad’ and auto aggregates the cost and conversion data together.

Auto aggregation enables us to test faster because we don’t have to go in and manually update an Excel file with new data,” he adds.

UA managers can quickly look at how their game campaigns are performing and then go in and change creatives, targeting or adjust budgets. All in all, it allows the Product Madness team to become more data-savvy and take care of data consumption efficiently and autonomously.

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