Meta AdROAS Campaign Quickly Lose Efficiency When Scaling

Last Case Study before MAU! ✈️

Are you a gaming company monetizing through IAA?🕹️ Then this case study will definitely be of interest to you.

Four months ago, I was among the first to publicly test Meta’s new adROAS campaigns (feel free to check my earlier posts). Since then, I’ve been consistently testing them across different games.

Today, I want to share something that has happened not once, but three times—with three different games:

👉𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚 𝐚𝐝𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐒 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐬 “𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐥𝐲” 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠

Don’t get me wrong— These campaigns work really well on Android and have delivered strong results for me. But it seems there’s a ceiling: as you start to scale spend, efficiency drops and the breakeven point gets pushed further out.

Here are the three main issues I’ve observed:

1️⃣ Efficiency drops despite continuous creative rotation
In this last case, I have tested +100 creatives with different angles, types and formats and although the campaign adjusted its distribution over the time (depending on the winners you’re able to find), it starts to irremediably get higher CPIs with the higher spend (which is expected until certain point) but CPI reaches a point that makes the campaign unsustainable.

The worst part? Campaign does not recover when you scale the spend down and re-launching doesn’t work either.

2️⃣Retention declines over the time –> You can see how my placement and age distribution has been over the time. We have been continuously targeting our core audience in the placement where they are supposed to be and there has not been major changes over the time in these distributions.

Still, retention rates decreased as campaigns progressed. When you combine lower retention with rising CPIs, efficiency takes a major hit.

Again, reducing spend doesn’t restore the original retention levels.

3️⃣Ad ARPDAU tends to go down –> This is the most concerning for me. Even though we managed to target the same audience continuously, newer users started engaging less with ads over the time.

Some decline in quality is expected when scaling, but this trend significantly impacted overall performance. Worse still, the drop in AD ARPDAU wasn’t reversed by reducing spend. It feels like the most valuable users are acquired early on, and once they’re gone, the remaining pool just doesn’t convert at the same level as before.

Despite all of the above, these campaigns are really a must for all publishers with ad-monetized games. They have worked incredibly well for me during all this time, outperforming other optimization goals (CPI, AEO) in all the KPIs.

See you in Vegas!!! 😁