Hero Wars

Gamers collect, battle, and win.
Hero Wars drives global growth.

In Hero Wars, players collect heroes with different skills to win in arena battles and guild wars. Nexters, the developer of the app, boosted awareness and installs with Apple Search Ads campaigns across the Today tab¹, the Search tab, product pages, and search results, improving both revenue and retention.

The Results

3x higher average revenue per user compared with similar platforms.

2x higher retention compared with similar platforms.

4x higher install-to-purchase compared with similar platforms.

56% higher tap-through rate on search results campaigns within a month of running Today tab ad.

The Challenge

Focused on maximizing downloads and boosting revenue, the Nexters team needed to increase app visibility with more gamers around the globe. To ensure high-quality acquisition and strong return on ad spend, they wanted to broaden awareness and capture the attention of potential players interested in role-playing games on the App Store. In a highly competitive category like gaming, brand protection was also a key business objective.

Apple Search Ads helps us protect our brand and boost organic results while showing impressive return on investment results and increasing our visibility, new players, and downloads.

Maxim Kotov

User Acquisition Manager at Nexters

The Solution

Boost awareness with more customers on the Today and Search tabs.

To extend reach to new audiences, the team at Nexters invested in ads on the Today tab. With this ad placement, they positioned their brand prominently on the front page of the App Store, making their app some of the first content that millions of people saw. “The Today tab campaigns helped us reach a wider audience and get discovered, driving overall growth,” says Nexters User Acquisition Producer Valentin Belenkov. “After a month of running Today tab campaigns, we started seeing a high return on ad spend generated by highly engaged users, meeting our key performance indicator goals for the campaigns.”

The team further maximized impressions by allocating additional budget to ads on the Search tab, which are featured at the top of the suggested apps list and influence potential players before they narrow in on a search. They also invested in ads on product pages, appearing at the top of the You Might Also Like list. With these ads, they reached people who had scrolled to the bottom of relevant product pages, actively researching apps and getting information to help them decide whether to download.

Scale growth to new markets efficiently.

Search results campaigns also helped the Nexters team stay competitive across markets all over the world. Brand campaigns were the focus of their investment, capturing strong intent from potential players searching for keywords related to their app or company name. “We set extremely high cost-per-tap bids on our brand campaigns to maintain a leadership position around the globe,” says Belenkov. “We also ensured that our budgeting for ads on the Today tab, the Search Tab, and product pages was always incremental with the spend on search results brand campaigns, which always perform well and show efficiency immediately. With this multi-placement strategy, Apple Search Ads delivered strong performance and good return on investment.”

Company Snapshot