You have probably heard all the buzz about UA automation and are trying to determine the best path forward for your business.  As Eric Seufert outlines in his MDM article, The Five Levels of Digital Marketing Automation, UA automation is the ambition of many UA teams but there is still a considerable gap between hype and real-world application.  As a partner to some of the leading mobile gaming companies and having spent the last six years in the UA automation and AI space, MetricWorks is firmly planted in the real-world application of automation.

However, if we were to apply Eric’s classification model to our UA automation platform, we find that even our technology most closely resembles Level 3: Marketing strategy automation:

In particular, we feel that our innovation over the last six years enabled us to cover the bottom two rows in the graphic above, namely, Campaign setting experimentation (except for budget optimization) and ROAS projection and reporting.  So why is that?

Well, firstly, ad creative production has proven to date impossible to automate.  As we all know, producing captivating creatives requires human creativity.  This production process resists automation.  Therefore, UA teams around the world have found it better to spend their budgets on human resources to deliver these tasks that are difficult to  automate.

Secondly, automating audience testing requires the machine (or automation platform) to know a lot of different things that may require cross-sectional industry data or domain knowledge that is not easily accessible or is simply not possible to share due to intense competition among gaming companies.  

That leaves the bottom two sections that we feel our automation platform brings to life via a powerful range of features:

1. Cost & data aggregation in a consolidated dashboard
2. Real-time source-level LTV predictions (95% accuracy with 30 days of historical data)
3. Automated Bid Management Across All Channels At Source By Country Level
4. Impact Analysis: Easily conduct detailed analysis of the impact of bid optimizations on performance (volume, ROAS or custom KPIs)
5. Automation Rules: Automate time-consuming marketing strategies on a near real-time basis and set guard-rails based on ROAS, Retention, DAU or other KPIs
6. Performance Monitoring: Live monitoring and customizable alerts for designated publisher behavior
7. Bid History: Visually graph & analyze bid history along with metrics like ROAS or installs
8. Supply Groups: Customize, manage and analyze traffic groups with shared performance traits 
9. Targeted Micro-Strategies: Execute specific actions on a defined supply group

One of the features that our clients are really excited about is Automation Rules that allow marketers to encode their own user acquisition strategy.  However, the heart of our platform and the core feature is our AI-driven mobile LTV prediction (down to the source-level) and how that flows into the automated optimization and execution.

Others have built reporting dashboards and some have even added the ability to take action within these dashboards when it comes to UA execution. While this is a productive step, it is still an incremental one in the traditional direction.  In contrast, MetricWorks rethought the entire paradigm and can proudly say that we are the only ones that built our platform from the ground up to seamlessly go from raw data aggregation and analysis across all mobile channels to model/prediction to optimization and finally execution without human intervention. 

 Of course, the proof is in the pudding and our field success bears testimony to the value of our approach. Learn more about how our clients have realized a ROAS of 145% while generating an unprecedented 22.5 million LTV models and saving 40 hours per month per UA manager.