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User Acquisition

Introduction to Event optimization campaigns

Learn about Level Complete, Payer, and Retention Event optimization campaigns with Unity User Acquisition.
Read time 3 minutesLast updated 11 hours ago
Event campaigns optimize for users predicted to engage with your app after installation. The following sections detail the diffferent types of Event Optimizaiton campaigns and how they work.

Level Complete

Level Complete campaigns are advertising campaigns used to optimize for users who are more likely to reach a specific level-completion milestone within your app. Use this campaign goal to optimize for acquiring high-engagement users, increase user retention, and help you benchmark the growth of your app over time.

When to use Level Complete campaigns

Use Level Complete campaigns when you want to acquire high-quality users by targeting in-app milestone completions. For example, advertisers can use Level Complete campaigns to target users who are more likely to reach a deep stage in their app. Users who reach significant level-completion milestones are more likely to watch ads or generate in-app purchase revenue.

How Level Complete campaigns work

With Level Complete campaigns, you select a specific Level Complete event to target when setting up your campaign (Event Name Targeting). Your campaign will optimize for the first occurrence of the selected event. Level Complete events work in conjunction with a supported Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP). Refer to our post-install event documentation for information on how to pass post install events with an MMP.
Note
Although the Include values and revenue setting isn't required, the recommended best practice is to select this setting when mapping events because additional data helps Unity's models to more accurately acquire high-value users.
For detailed instructions on how to set up events in your MMP dashboard, refer to the Integration best practices documentation.

Event Name Targeting

Note
Performance will improve as Unity collects more data from newly mapped events.
After you map a Level Complete event with your MMP, use the Event Name Targeting section of the campaign setup to select which event your campaign targets. Your events become available in the User Acquisition dashboard within 72 hours after successful mapping. Expect a 14-day learning period when you successfully map a new event to Unity from your MMP for Event Name Targeting. The learning period starts when your MMP passes the new event to Unity and isn't dependent on whether you use the new event in a Level Complete campaign.
Note
Level Complete campaigns are a type of optimized campaign and can run concurrently with other optimized campaign goals that optimize for user retention and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Payer

Note
The current version of Payer campaigns is a closed beta release, and not available to everyone. The features and documentation might change between now and the next release.
Payer campaigns are an advertising campaign used to optimize for users who are more likely to make an in-app purchase. This type of campaign only focuses on acquiring users who will pay within your app. Payer campaigns don't optimize for the value of a purchase a user might make in your app, as is the goal for In-app Purchase (IAP) ROAS campaigns.

When to use Payer campaigns

Advertisers can use Payer campaigns advantageously by implementing them in various scenarios. Some notable benefits include:
  • Capability to serve multiple KPI per app by balancing user acquisitions between scale and quality acquisitions
  • Usefulness for eCommerce where the goal of your app is to acquire users who will make purchases in your app
  • Maintaining your users' data privacy by having the option to not track the values of purchase events

Retention

A retention campaign goal targets users likely to remain in your app at least seven days after installation. With this type of campaign strategy, the dashboard uses dynamic pricing based on your base bid price and a user's expected retention rate, allowing you to pay the best price across an entire user base. To optimize for retention, set a base bid (otherwise known as a CPI, or cost-per-install bid) and a max bid that the system can adjust based on the individual user's expected day-seven retention (also known as D7 retention) in your app. You can think of D7 retention as the share of users playing your app on day seven after app installation. Unity determines this percentage after receiving at least one session event from the user within a 24-hour window starting 192 hours after the install event was recorded.

How retention optimization campaigns work

A baseline D7 retention in your app for the target audience you have selected might be 10%, which means 10% of users are playing your app on day seven after installing the app.
  • Potential User 1 predicted D7 retention for your app might be 20%, or twice the average. Therefore, the bid for User 1 is your base bid x2.
  • Potential User 2 predicted D7 retention for your app might be 5%, or half the average. Therefore, the bid for User 2 is base bid x0.5.
A retention campaign goal enables you to pay the best price for users based on the predicted retention behavior. Our machine learning models ensure that you don't overbid for users who are less likely to play your app after installation, and that you bid the best price for users who are likely to continue using your app at least seven days after installation.