Case Study: MyTona

Two ways to stop mobile ad fraud How Games can prevent fraud for 100% effectiveness

Looking at the distribution of ad fraud among all the verti-cals Adjust measures, Games accounts for a third of all fraud blocked by the Fraud Prevention Suite. If you’re a Game publisher and have paid for mobile adver-tising to attract new users, it’s very likely that your campaign has been tainted by one of the five kinds of mobile ad fraud we know to exist. Furthermore, if your game includes in-app pur-chases, it’s probable that some users have tried to steal them.

Since working with Adjust, MyTona has acquired more than 12 million users across all plat-forms: including iOS, Android and Windows. Their principle issue was that as the number of paid installs increased, fraud grew too. This was further com-plicated as they began new user acquisition campaigns across countries which are known to have a higher rate of fraud. For instance, in South East Asia, MyTona saw a higher rejected installs rate - more than 2%, compared to tier 1 countries, where it's usually 0.7%.

When it came to in-app pur-chases, MyTona consistently re-ceived around 20% discrepancy in purchases from Google’s Play Store, and around 3% from the App Store compared with real purchase value data.

MyTona needed a way to stop mobile fraud from reaching their UA budgets, skewing their data-sets and, ultimately, affecting their ability to make decisions about the strategic direction of their app.

The challenge

The Solution

Out of all app verticals, Games are the most targeted by fraud.

MyTona combined two powerful tools to take on fraud: The Fraud Prevention Suite, and Purchase Verification. With them, MyTona was able to scale back the ef-fects of fraudulent purchases within their app, and were also able to stop ad fraud from steal-ing their user acquisition budget.

Adjust’s Fraud Prevention Suite Adjust uses a five step waterfall of tools that analyzes every in-stall engagement event, in the moment. If fraud is found to be active, the Fraud Prevention Suite blocks it from stealing ad fraud budget, and skewing valu-able datasets.

MyTona saw the opportunity early, and began a trial with the suite soon after launch two years

ago. As they began to see the rate of fraud affecting their campaign performance, they kept with the tool, and it kept producing the re-sults they were after.

Purchase Verification Fake In-app purchases can often be attributed to jailbroken phones. To MyTona, the unverifi-able transactions will skew their revenue data, affecting critical decisions related to user acquisi-tion and game design. In this case MyTona’s requirement was that all purchases made are accu-rate and authentic. With Adjust’s Purchase Verification tool, MyTo-na’s marketing team was given the ability to certify all in-app purchases and make accurate decisions.

Purchase Verification works like this: a user purchases an item in-app. At the same moment, Adjust communicates with iOS/Google Play Store server and confirms or rejects the purchase in real time. Because it works instantly, data and revenue numbers are never distorted by fake in-app pay-ments, as such purchases are im-mediately rejected.

Since integrating Adjust’s Pur-chase Verification tool. MyTona was able to effectively use the data from Adjust without having to waste resources to navigate though false data. Allowing the team to make prompt and accu-rate decisions resulting in a more efficient workflow.

MyTona has been utilizing the fraud prevention suite since its launch over two years ago.

The suite has resulted in MyTona receiving less than 1% of fraudulent activity across all devices for Seekers Notes.

MyTona began working with Purchase Verification in December 2017, and they saw results quickly after that.

After implementing Purchase Verification the company received improved accuracy, almost to 100% of purchases. They were also able to identify some severe outliers, with likely indications of gaming the system. One example was a case where a single user ‘paid’ $6000 for in-app items, a near-impossibility.

Purchase verification continues to make a difference, helping the team make correct decisions on campaign lifetime value.

“It helped us to make correct decisions based purely on correct install data.” Elena Vinokurova, Marketing Manager at MyTona said, “We make decisions and put effort into the right networks and partners. We are able to say to ourselves ‘Partner A brings us this kind of install, and we’re 100% sure that they’re not fraudulent’.”

Results

Went from a 4% fraud rate on multi-country campaigns to less than 1% with FPS

Achieved 100% accuracy with in-app purchase validation

10% increase in ROAS since activating FPS and PV

The final figures

Adjust is the Mobile Measurement Company. We provide the highest quality analytics and measurement solutions for mobile app marketers worldwide. With Adjust’s open source SDK, app marketers can measure and analyze user behavior, user acquisition campaigns, and overall marketing ROI. Adjust’s platform provides streamlined reporting for understandable, actionable and comparable metrics.

Adjust is a Facebook Marketing Partner and is integrated with over 1000 networks and analytics providers worldwide. Founded in Berlin in 2012, Adjust has offices in San Francisco, New York, São Paulo, London, Paris, Istanbul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Jakarta, and Moscow.

MyTona is a free-to-play mobile game developer and publisher. Established in 2006, MyTona is the creator of hit games, such as Seeker’s Notes: Hidden Mystery and The Secret Society. According to current charts, Seeker’s Notes is the top performing hidden object game, reaching the top 10 grossing games on the iPad in USA, Canada, UK and European countries. Seekers Notes has been downloaded more than 20 million times.

MyTona’s studio is made up of a team of 350 members, spread across five offices. The company was founded by Alexey Ushnisky and Afanasey Ushnisky and since it’s beginning, has become one of the most successful game developers in Russia.

www.adjust.com