The backstory

FDG Entertainment is a mobile game publisher focused on creating fun, inventive and addictive titles. The nine-person team, headquartered in Munich, has been making games since 2002. Shortly after the release of the iPhone, the company shifted from feature phones to smartphones and hasn’t looked back. Today, they are developing games for mobile phones, consoles and more, with the core business being their rapidly-growing mobile games division.

Co-founder and Executive Producer Philipp Döschl manages many aspects of game development and has a unique outlook on game creation and monetization models. "The philosophy at FDG Entertainment has always been to create the best games possible and the monetization will follow," he explains. And while most of FDG Entertainment’s published games have an upfront cost, they also recently began integrating advertising into free games. Since popular games like Banana Kong and Cover Orange: Journey started monetizing through ads, revenue has increased significantly, but so has the amount of data the company needs to monitor.

App organization and optimization

FDG Entertainment currently has five ad platforms integrated across several of their apps. Each has their own dashboard with individual reports for every app, country, category and store. In the early days of tracking things were manageable, but as time passed and ad revenues grew, complexity increased. The team at FDG Entertainment built an internal system to track its advertising spend for financial reporting, but it was less than ideal for keeping a daily pulse on ad monetization. The features were geared toward accounts payable, and the only way to regularly measure ad revenue and app revenue together was to manually input the data into one big, unwieldy spreadsheet.

Each day, Philipp would pull a long list of reports to determine total revenues across apps. Depending on the depth of the report, he would often have to do manual pulls from multiple ad platforms and app stores. Ad platforms could be used for some reporting, but he struggled to find a solution that tracked ad and app revenue together. "Ad platform dashboards are beneficial for real-time data, but when it came to viewing cumulative app revenue, there just weren’t any tools out there to do that," explained Philipp. Then, data.ai released Advertising Analytics, allowing users to track revenue for all of their apps across ad platforms in one dashboard. For Philipp, it meant he could finally get back to making games instead of being stuck editing spreadsheets.

How FDG leverages Analytics

With data.ai Advertising Analytics, FDG is now able to track ad platforms, downloads and revenue metrics onto one platform, without needing to add a SDK to any apps. "I already checked my app store data every day with data.ai, so when they added support for ad platforms, it became the go-to place to get my data." Instead of bouncing between different windows for every app store and ad platform, Phil could now when he just wanted to quickly check cross-platform ad sales and revenue. The entire data.ai Analytics platform provided a seamless solution for FDG and allowed them to focus on in-session expansion plans fueled by informed decision making.

Tracking total revenue and growth in one place

data.ai Analytics helps FDG Entertainment focus on making games instead of aggregating data. Having all of their app store and ad platform data in a single dashboard saves FDG Entertainment at least 250 working hours each year, and frees up analyst resources. They can easily monitor and optimize their entire monetization strategy in a single dashboard. As a result, advertising revenue has grown their overall bottom line by 50 percent over the past year.

The core philosophy of data.ai Analytics is to provide developers and non-developers with the tools and data they need to efficiently run their business, so they can focus on making great apps. As the mobile industry evolves its business models, data.ai is keeping pace by developing analytics tools to track the systems that make companies thrive.

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