What is more important for the agency in working with a client? To follow the principle “the client is always right” or bending your own line? Our experience has shown that there is a golden mean.
Our cooperation with Goat Games, the Chinese game developer, is an example of how to build a collaborative scheme of working so that all those involved in the process come out on the winning side.
How did it go?
Our buying team has been working steadily in mobile for about 5 years. Goat Games approached Adsbalance with a request to promote their product Dragon Storm Fantasy. As it often happens in such cases, the advertiser already had their own ideas about how the process should be structured and how to count the results. In this case, the client offered to work by CPI, which generally seemed logical, agency get paid for installing applications. A KPI has also been set for payback on day 7-38%.
In our experience, the customer needs to show visible results first, and then offer other options and their terms. So we set to work. The result, as expected, did not disappoint Goat Games. During the whole period of promotion we steadily drove traffic in the plus for the client. Advertising spend return on investment was +30-70% when the amount was $50,000 or more in 30 days. Top creos showed ROI above 100%.
What’s wrong, you may ask? Trying to keep a balance between CPI and KPI for ROI, we worked hard to produce highly successful creos and improve buying efficiency. In the end, we provided traffic better than required, but were unable to scale.
As we tried to scale, it became less and less profitable to work on CPI. We wanted not only to meet KPIs, but also to optimise client costs. But now the agency was over-fulfilling the KPIs, but still getting the same fixed amount, i.e. losing their money in the end. The cost of the installation was fixed and the results presented to (and paid for by) the client did not show any real progress. We were paid the same for bringing in both expensive and cheap leads.
We faced a choice. Or to do KPIs as indicated, which would lead to the need to pour in cheap instals. But that way the figures would remain at a fixed level, although the traffic would no longer be of the same quality. Or over-perform KPIs, but reduce your profits.
So what did we do?
We decided it was time to talk to the advertiser. We had already shown them that it was possible to do business with us, and the company trusted us. So we offered to try something new for them, namely working on the RevShare model. We explained that it would be a pure win-win: the client would receive the highest quality traffic and over-fulfilled KPIs, and we would have an opportunity to earn more. We have agreed to make the installation fee floating and dependent on our ROAS. Now we could buy more expensive installations.
What did we get as a result?
The focus shifted from how many installations were made, to the quality of the audience we brought in. We built an open and clear system of working with traffic, which made it easy to assess the results. After switching to RevShare, we linked the metric to ROI. This allowed us to work at full capacity, without the danger of going into deficit when scaling up.
In the end, both sides got more than they had planned, and were also able to discover new things. The advertiser learned about the opportunity to work profitably on the RevShare model, and we got a satisfied client and the opportunity to earn more than we had planned initially.
