Gamers breed and feed dinosaurs.
Dino mutant : T-Rex reaches
players worldwide.

Leading up the game’s release, the team at mondayoff exclusively invested in Apple Ads, driving early brand awareness and capturing strong intent with a pre-order campaign. When a customer downloads a pre-order app, it’s automatically installed on their device once the app becomes available. To maximize the impact of their pre-order strategy in key markets, the mondayoff team also ran ads across search results, the Today tab, the Search tab, and product pages. They closely monitored install request reports to optimize bidding and increased cost-per-tap (CPT) for countries and placements with the strongest performance.

“During the preregistration phase, we only ran Apple Ads and did not invest in any other media channels. Our pre-order campaign and ad placements across the App Store drove a sharp increase in keyword search volume and significant boost in app installs,” says Kang Dunkun, CEO at mondayoff. “Following the success of this campaign, mondayoff has decided to make Apple Ads preregistration campaigns an essential part of our strategy for all future title launches.”

In fact, Today tab ads were the top driver of new player acquisition during pre-order. On the day of launch, Dino mutant : T-Rex ranked #1 in the simulation category, #4 in Games, and #8 overall in the App Store in Taiwan. Additionally, the app was ranked within the top 10 in the simulation game category for a month after the launch in Taiwan.

While running Apple Ads, the team saw an increase in organic rankings for relevant keywords in the App Store across many countries. For major markets like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the UK, the team attributed this success to running campaigns across all placements, including search results. “It was impressive to see that even in markets like Saudi Arabia and France, where we ran campaigns only on the Today tab and Search tab, the organic search rankings for keywords improved after running ads,” says Kang Dunkun. “Moving forward, we believe we can scale our success for maximum impact by creating better synergy between our Apple Ads campaigns and our App Store optimization.”

After the game’s launch, the mondayoff team sustained their acquisition momentum and captured relevant intent on the App Store by actively optimizing their keyword campaigns. “We were able to promote our game to players worldwide by aggressively targeting relevant keywords that aligned with strong search intent from gamers,” says Kang Dunkun. “When players searched for keywords related to our game, search results campaigns ensured that we had high visibility with these engaged audiences, driving meaningful traffic and ROI.”

In addition to actively optimizing keywords based on performance, the mondayoff team also boosted ad relevancy for different audiences leading up to the launch. They created and tested ad variations based on custom product pages set up in App Store Connect for their Today tab campaign weekly. The team aligned different keyword groups with different customer needs and intent. When potential customers tapped the mondayoff ad, they landed on a custom product page that matched the ad creative, delivering a seamless experience across platforms.

“During the pre-order phase, we monitored tap-through rate and conversion rate by country and by market of our custom product pages,” says Kang Dunkun. “Interestingly, the performance of custom product pages varied by country and region. Based on the results of running three different custom product pages over three weeks, we set up the best-performing creatives differently for each country at launch to achieve the best results.”