Smillage Sees 30% ARPU Growth and Increased LTV in Japan and SEA

Smillage was founded in 2019, originally developing forum and content apps. In 2020, the team decided that they would shift their focus towards making casual mobile games, and they further expanded their team to release even more games the following year.

Now, with hundreds of millions downloads worldwide and a dozen games under their name, they are poised to climb through the ranks of the hyper-casual market and succeed in their mission of making fun games that entertain every player.

Catwalk Beauty and Love Journey By Smillage

Facing Challenges with a Smile

Although already very successful, the main challenge for Smillage has often been coming up with new, innovative ideas to create fun and engaging games. Sometimes those games don t perform well enough, and optimizing app monetization and increasing LTV can prove difficult.

To fix that part of the equation, Smillage turned to Pangle Bidding, leveraging Pangle s expertise in foreign markets to maximize their app monetization revenue. With Pangle’s high eCPM and fill rate in Japan and other Southeast Asian markets, Smillage saw their performance growing. This allowed them to continue their advance in new regions, and it created a strong foundation for Smillage to build upon and achieve long-term success.

Analyze, Optimize, Monetize, Repeat

Smillage always had one main objective: to create enjoyable hyper-casual games for its users. As such, they believe that ads should not interfere with the players enjoyment, whether it be interstitial ads or rewarded video ads.

To reach an optimal balance, they analyzed again and again their game data and designed multiple sets of advertising strategies. Rounding up useful player data such as average session duration, opening frequencies, and user level duration, they developed a series of AB tests.

Ultimately, they were able to optimize the balance between advertising and user retention for the games that they were proud to create.

Thanks to this research and testing, they saw their single-day game time increase upwards of 8%. In turn, this boosted the number of times they were able to show rewarded video ads to daily active users by 10% and increased the number of interstitial ads significantly, by more than 20%. Together with Pangle, they were able to fully capitalize on these results.

Hypercharging Hyper-Casual Games with Pangle Bidding

After continued success Smillage has integrated Pangle into a number of their releases, including Catwalk Beauty and Love Journey. Through the growth platform, the gaming company reached rapid success in Japan, South Korea, and SEA markets for the first time, rushing to the top of their respective App categories.

Pangle Bidding helped Smillage achieve a higher eCPM in all the regions covered, as well as uplifting ARPU by 30% and improving LTV. Pangle contributes up to 30% of their monetization, and all in all, total revenue increased by 20%.

The in-depth understanding of ad monetization and guidance regarding advertising traffic and industry trends assisted in improving revenue across all of Smillage products.

Looking to the Future with a Smile

Now that Smillage has a strong monetization strategy coupled with their eye for game design, the future of the company is looking bright. We asked their team how they felt working with our team at Pangle.

Smillage: “Moving forward, we will continue to strengthen our cooperation with Pangle as we further expand into the markets of Japan, South Korea, and SEA. We believe that Pangle has an absolute advantage when it comes to ad monetization in the above regions.

Additionally, their industry insight and professional understanding really helps us boost the monetization of our hyper-casual games, and we really hope to see the Pangle team expand to cover even more countries.”

Ready to join us on your monetization journey and boost your product revenue? Please reach out to us at pangle_support@bytedance.com. For more Developer Chats, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook!