Optimizing creatives for faster growth: Neon Play tells all

Who is Neon Play?

Neon Play is an award-winning mobile game developer based in the UK. Recently, the team transitioned from hyper-casual to idle games, publishing hits such as Idle Army Base and Scrapyard Tycoon Idle Game. Today we’re going to zoom in on their creative process to find out exactly how they managed to save time, get better results, and re-energize their ongoing campaigns.

Challenge: Improving engagement for ongoing campaigns

For a successful creative strategy, you need to constantly refresh your creatives and test new concepts to improve engagements and break through the noise. Keeping your CPI low when scaling can be challenging, and most of the time your installs will keep getting more and more expensive as time goes on. Why? Because seeing similar ads over and over again means that your users will inevitably become too familiar with the concepts you’re showing and reduce engagement (i.e. creative fatigue). Moreover, one creative concept can only interest so many users, so refreshing ad concepts will allow you to speak to more audiences and engage more users.

Neon Play has a strong creative team that are always brimming with new ideas and new concepts to test. However, all the labor involved in testing and uploading creatives to each different ad channel meant that they were previously only able to roll out one creative per network each week. Their challenge was therefore to accelerate creative testing and implement more winning assets into ongoing campaigns.

“We conduct regular brainstorming sessions as a team to come up with new creative concepts, and we’re always looking for new best performing creatives by AB testing specific elements of each ad: the headline, music, colors, start-mid-end, and so on. There’s so much to be done and we wanted to be able to move much faster to meet this demand and boost results”.

Antony Willis
Growth Manager at Neon Play

Solution: Finding the right tools for creative optimizations

To manage and optimize their creatives Neon Play chose to work with Singular and BidShake, a leading marketing automation platform, who recently released its new Creative Manager tool. BidShake makes it easier than ever to upload and assign new creative assets to multiple campaigns across ad networks, as well as collecting performance data and analyzing ad effectiveness. The tool is designed to help teams like Neon Play take their creative strategy to the next level.

Winning Asset Example A


Winning Asset Example B

Bidshake’s integration with Singular takes these individual capabilities and combines them for a powerful outcome. The integration generates accurate, granular, and timely performance insights from Singular that feed into BidShake’s optimization engine. With this feedback loop in place, Bidshake can pull exactly the right data at exactly the right time, allowing Neon Play to base their creative ideation and testing phases on the most reliable data.

Results: 43% more installs at 22% lower cost per install

With the great symbiosis of the Singular-Bidshake integration, the Neon Play team is saving more time on the manual side of things,  and can dedicate more effort and energy to testing different creatives, keeping ad creatives as fresh as possible!

Through Bidshake’s Creative Manager, the Neon Play team is now able to upload 3-10 new creative concepts per week, which amounts to between 100 and 200 ads WEEKLY! This means that they’re able to test more and more concepts, unearthing top-performing ads that would have stayed in the shadows otherwise.

The integration has empowered them to to roll out more best-performing creatives, and to analyze and optimize them. This has helped them to reduce the CPI and stabilize it, meaning that they could continue scaling at a strong pace, rather than slowing down if the CPI increased.
The Neon Play team reports

↑43% installs

↓22% cost per install

👉 To find out more about Neon Play, click here.
👉 To find out more about BidShake Creative Manager, click here.

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