Everyone loves the "we made a profit in a week" case. But the reality of In-App is a bit harsher: many teams come to Moloco with the expectation that their working strategy or successful combinations of their other sources will immediately yield results. In practice, this often ends with a budget drain at the very start.

Let's analyze a real case of an experienced team that came from Facebook with a ~\$500k spend and went into the red in the first 3 weeks of work at Moloco. The case is short, but it is highly illustrative, especially for those who are just planning to enter the source.

Starting conditions

The team came from Facebook with a strong background: a stable spend of more than $500k and a constant ROI of about 30%. They are not newcomers; they have well-established processes, an understanding of creatives, scaling, and working связки.
Like many others, they decided to diversify their traffic and enter In-App through the most popular source, Moloco DSP. They allocated a comfortable budget of $10-15k for testing.

Important: at the start, the team decided to launch on their own. They rented an office, but they didn't come for recommendations, even though we offered to connect and help with the launch several times.
The team had high confidence in their experience on Facebook and believed that they could handle In-App on the fly, taking offers and approaches from Facebook and transferring them to the new source. However, the reality turned out to be a bit more complex.

For 3 weeks we received:

expense: $10421.7
ROI: -14%
there are no stable deposits

We will discuss mistakes and strategies later.

Week 1: A confident start and the first setbacks

The team entered In-App with full confidence in their ad set. They were experienced buyers, so the logic was simple: take what already works on Facebook and scale it in a new source.
They chose two Tier-1 geos, took their offer and working creatives from FB that were delivering results.
The expectation was to replicate Facebook's performance, but the reality turned out to be quite different.

In the first week, it became clear that the link was not working:
inst2reg was less than 15%
reg2dep remained at ~1%

Despite this, the team did not change either the creatives or the approach. They continued to believe in the combination and expected the algorithm to "warm up" and level out the CPA, expecting that some of the deposits would come later and pull the economy out. However, as is typical in In-App, the deposits yielded no more than 10% and did not affect the situation.

Week 2: First adjustments and root cause analysis

When it became clear that there was no point in expecting big results, and the combination was not profitable, the team began to look for the reason.
At this stage, we were already actively involved in the process. Instead of just providing a few tips, we thoroughly analyzed the launch of the offers, creatives, campaign structure, and testing logic.

What we did together:
they recommended replacing the offers in the same geographies
They provided specific edits for the creatives: what to remove, what to add, and how to adapt them for In-App
they explained how to set up tests correctly so as not to burn through your budget

After that, the command:
added new offers to the same geos
I started gradually updating my creatives
tested new approaches based on recommendations

An interesting point: even with old creatives on new offers, positive ROIs started to appear in some places. This was the first signal that the problem was not only in the creatives, but also in the fact that offers do not always work the same way in all sources.

At the same time, the team connected with designers and started updating the creatives. It took several days: new approaches, adaptation to In-App, testing of new links. By the end of the second week, the first signs of life appeared, but there was still no stability.

Team's Moloco DSP account spend

Week 3: A systematic approach and an ROI of 22%

By the third week, the team was already working systematically:

we have added new creatives adapted for In-App
they started filtering the bundles and leaving only those that give deps
we strengthened our creative approach (added playables, game mechanics, and patterns familiar to the audience)

In the middle of the week, some of the new creatives “clicked,” and this led to growth. By the end of the week, the total ROI had reached ~22%.
The team continued to test offers and refine their combinations, gradually recouping the losses of the previous weeks.

Finally, they removed the weak creatives, focused on working approaches under In-App, fixed the result, and went into the black. Due to the negative first two weeks, the total ROI was -14%.

Team's Keitaro account report

Team mistakes that cost a minus at the beginning

Mistake #1: Ignoring the specifics of Moloco at the start
The team entered Moloco based on their previous experience and confidence in the link from another source, expecting the same performance as in Facebook.
Any link in a new source is a new hypothesis. First, they used small budgets to test creatives and, most importantly, the offer, and then moved on to larger budgets.

Mistake #2: Believing in "optimizing for later"
The logic was simple: the CPA is high now, but later the system will be optimized and the price will fall. This did not happen. In Moloco, the system relies mainly on technical signals: device, app usage context, and display environment.
Therefore, the optimization logic is different from FB: if the link is initially weak, it is not worth expecting the algorithm to reduce the CPA by 2-3 times simply due to learning and flights.

Error #3: Insufficient control over Facebook creatives
The team used Facebook creatives that they were confident in, but the key mistake was not in the transfer itself, but in the approach. These creatives were not tested carefully, but with confidence, without the willingness to quickly disable them if the results were poor.
UGC formats work well on social media, but this approach may not always work in In-app. This is a gaming traffic where users respond not to "content" but to mechanics and visual triggers. Clear gameplay, recognizable slots, and strong visual effects work best.
Facebook creatives need to be tested, deposits and registrations need to be monitored, and if there is no result, they need to be quickly adapted to the In-App format.

Error #4: Moving an offer from Facebook
Teams often rely on past successful experience and enter with the same offer, expecting a similar result. However, In-App differs in both the type of traffic and user behavior, so even a strong offer from Facebook may not provide the necessary conversion to a deposit in Moloco and vice versa.
The team did not take offers for In-App and entered with a single option, hoping that it would "pull through." It is necessary to take multiple offers for one geo at once, run them in parallel, set splits and look at deposits. This is the only way to quickly figure out what works and what doesn't.

Conclusion

This case is a classic example of how in Moloco you can go into the red not because of the source, but because of the wrong approach to it. Here the result can become better, but not in large volumes, there is no situation where dolots will save the economy and there is no point in scaling what did not give a profit at the start. Such as cases we spotlight in our Telegram channel, tip to subscribe if you want to be up to date.

And the main conclusion is that the problem is almost always not in the source, but in the way it is accessed. All the errors in this case could have been reduced or completely avoided if the team had initially developed a test strategy and sought help in a timely manner. At the start of the strategy main thing is to rent an agency account at Profit Rental.

If you've already tried and failed, that's okay. The question isn't whether you made a mistake, but what to do next.
Contact us, and we'll analyze your launch, identify where money is being lost, and help you build a system that generates profits rather than just experience.

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