Gamers enter fantasy world.
Seven Deadly Sins drives revenue.

With Apple Search Ads, the Netmarble team was able to capture strong intent from people searching on the App Store. A brand campaign helped them capture potential players searching specifically for their brand terms. “By running an evergreen campaign focused on our brand terms, we found we could protect our brand from the competition and drive high-value acquisition,” says Netmarble’s Growth Marketing Team Lead Taehun Kim. 

In fact, brand keyword campaigns attract the game’s most valuable audiences. Players acquired through Apple Search Ads brand campaigns have higher in-app purchases, driving 13 percent higher revenue per install than other ad platforms. These players are also more loyal: They have a 24 percent higher retention rate compared with other ad platforms. 

To improve performance efficiency, the Netmarble team closely monitored campaign performance at the keyword level in each country. With weekly Impression Share and Recommendations reports, they were able to see the current impression share on each keyword, which is useful in evaluating the opportunity. They also actively made bidding adjustments based on these reports to keep their brand ranking within the top three for key terms. They modified cost-per-tap (CPT) bids on brand terms whenever they saw fluctuations in impressions, maximizing reach at a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) compared with other platforms. 

“In every market, we found brand campaigns were the key to increasing overall revenue while building our brand,” says Kim. “With Apple Search Ads, we are able to consistently drive a strong volume of impressions at a very affordable cost due to high relevancy.”

Apple Search Ads also provided the Netmarble team with valuable keyword insights from not only brand but also competitive category campaigns. By combining these learnings with their own internal data, the team developed a powerful and effective strategy across their many gaming apps, driving incremental growth across brands.  

“Apple Search Ads helps us understand our core users better—specifically how they search and how they behave. That’s why we plan to continue growing our investment in Apple Search Ads,” says Kim.