ironSource Ads campaign best practices

Follow these best practices to make sure your UA campaigns on ironSource Ads are optimized for performance.

⚡ Before you start Make sure your MMP is sharing attributed and non-attribution data with ironSource Ads before your campaign goes live and implementing these best practices. If ironSource Ads does not receive the necessary data from your MMP, your campaign may underperform.
Additionally, consult with your account manager to ensure that your app’s taxonomy is under the right genre. This is crucial for the campaign’s performance since it’s related to the targeted sources the campaign will explore.

Refine your campaign targeting

Segment your campaigns to add precision to your user acquisition efforts:

Focus on the countries where your game or app already has an existing user base in the first weeks of a campaign going live. For example, if your game already has a strong user base in Korea, spend most of your UA budget in Korea for the first few weeks.
Once you see strong performance in your initial country, expand your targeting to other countries that will have a strong impact on campaign performance. Top-performing countries include the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Korea, and Japan.
Split your iOS campaigns to target different bids for iPad and iPhone. iPad users generally tend to be higher-value users than iPhone users, so it’s recommended to have higher bids for iPad users.

Fine-tune your creative strategy

Make sure you have the following:

Start with 5-8 creatives and add 4-6 more creatives weekly until you’ve got 30 creatives live for your campaign. This will enable you to maximize engagement from a diverse audience and see which creatives are performing the best.
Include both video and playable/interactive end card creatives in your campaign, as these tend to perform better than other ad formats and have higher engagement rates.
Keep rotating and adjusting your creatives to find the best-performing combinations and test new creative types by concept, duration, etc.
Include at least one English creative along with the 5-8 creative options you already have. Even if the campaign is not specifically targeting English-speaking countries, including an English creative allows devices set to English in your target countries to receive your ads, expanding your reach.

Optimize your bids

Start a campaign with your maximum bid that’s in line with your LTV and business strategy, to increase the probability of your ad appearing in apps. Starting too low can lead to a situation where the campaign spends a lot of money and doesn’t scale efficiently.
Be sure to monitor the performance of your campaign in the initial days after it launches and increase the bid for a well-performing source that hits your KPIs (ROAS and retention rate) to stay competitive. e

Leverage the ironSource Ads optimizers

After running several campaigns manually, you may have accumulated enough installs to qualify for the ROAS and the tCPA optimizers. Both optimizers will help you scale your user acquisition faster and find quality users that are in line with your goals. Reach out to your account manager to onboard as soon as possible.

Note: The ROAS optimizer for in-app purchases is available to all ironSource advertisers. However, you need to be a LevelPlay publisher in order to use the ROAS optimizer for ad revenue, or a combination of ad revenue with in-app purchases.

Advertise with Unity Ads in conjunction with ironSource Ads

Maximize your reach by using the two networks with the largest and most diverse supply sources on the market. ironSource Ads and Unity Ads networks share less than 20% of supply sources, meaning your games will get in front of millions of different users so you can scale faster.