'The Walking Dead: Survivors’ Successfully Re-engages Players with Deep Learning

Elex, founded in 2008, is one of the top gaming companies in China and is a benchmark for successful internationalization among Chinese internet companies. Their flagship title, The Walking Dead: Survivors, is based on a famous comic book and TV show. This strategy-based game has three million monthly active users worldwide and was an excellent fit for launching a re-engagement campaign to maximize monthly active users (MAU) and revenue.

The campaign aimed to increase the number of active paying players by bringing back lapsed users who had previously spent money on in-game purchases but had since stopped playing. D7 ROAS was defined as a success metric of the campaign, and RTB House had to overcome challenges such as:

• Proving the value of retargeting campaigns to Elex, working as their sole retargeting partner
• Rapidly scaling up the campaign after hitting initial KPIs
• Delivering performance on the US market and then in other locations around the world

The in-house team at RTB House built creatives in various formats and tailored them to Elex’s expectations. During the campaign, RTB House kept adding and testing new creatives to help avoid ad fatigue among users and deliver a high click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Taking advantage of full postback data flow via MMP, the RTB House Deep Learning-based engine was able to treat each impression as a unique segment. The bidder was also able to assess more than just user behavior, analyzing factors such as how users in a specific location might react to a particular creative or in-app placement. The campaign leveraged our access to a vast inventory in all global locations, allowing us to process an average of 6M queries per second, which is significantly above the market standard.

The campaign for US-based users hit all of the client’s goals within just a few weeks. The Elex team then decided to open up the campaign with the aim of replicating this success in other regions. RTB House was able to over-deliver ROAS goals at scale, running successful re-engagement activities in the US, Korea, Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, the Philippines, and numerous other countries. Even as the campaign rapidly expanded, RTB House were able to exceed ROAS goals by three or four times in most months. Following this sustained success, Elex decided to introduce new markets to their already active campaigns.