Be Careful with the new adROAS campaigns in Meta

🚨Be Careful with the new adROAS campaigns in Meta🚨

As I recently shared on LinkedIn (I’ll leave the link in the comments), Meta has rolled out a new Value Optimization (VO) campaign specifically for mobile games that monetize mainly through ads rather than in-app purchases. For now, this is only available on Android..

I started testing this with one of my clients, and the initial results were impressive. We were reaching profitability in a much shorter period compared to other main channels like AppLovin and Google. Naturally, we began scaling gradually, as you can see in the graph.

But then… things took a turn. Once we reached $1k/day in ad spend, we saw a drastic drop in efficiency, which is clearly reflected in the declining ROAS.

The main reason seems to be the steady decline in retention rate (see screenshot 2), which is a key metric for profitability in ad-monetized games.

For some reason, at the start the algorithm brought in high-quality users, but as we scaled, the traffic quality dropped significantly, hurting ROAS. During this time, the creatives have been rotated, the placement distribution has been stable and the target audience too.

We are now reducing spend again and, and the campaign seems to be slowly recovering but for now, this adROAS model isn’t ready for high-volume scaling yet (at least for this game).

I hope you liked this one, have a nice week ahead!