Monkey
OthersIntroduction
Monkey is a leading EdTech company in Vietnam that provides educational apps for children aged 0–10. With innovative learning methods and internationally standardized content, Monkey empowers kids to develop language, math, and cognitive skills through products like Monkey Junior, Monkey Stories, Monkey Math, and VMonkey.
Since its launch in 2014, Monkey has attracted more than 15 million users across 108 countries. The company has earned multiple prestigious awards, including the First Prize at the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST Tech-I 2016) competition in Silicon Valley, the Vietnam Talent Award 2016, the ASEAN ICT Gold Award 2016, and the Asia Entrepreneurship Award (AEA) in Japan. These achievements highlight Monkey’s position as a pioneer in early education and its commitment to improving learning outcomes for children worldwide.
Overview
As a children’s education app, Monkey faced three major challenges: complying with strict data privacy regulations, limited visibility into campaign performance, and difficulty measuring complex user journeys.
With Airbridge’s support, Monkey not only overcame regulatory barriers and ensured smooth app approval on app stores, a critical milestone for any app, but also enhanced its data analytics capabilities. The team could now track user behavior and campaign performance at a granular level. As a result, Monkey reduced its marketing spend by 18%, boosted conversion rates by 21%, and optimized CPI by another 18%, laying the groundwork for sustainable long-term growth.
Challenges
Platforms’ Data Compliance and Regulatory Restrictions
As a children’s educational app, Monkey had to comply with strict privacy and data transmission regulations under Google Play’s Families Policy and Apple’s Guidelines for Kids Category and Parental Control Requirements.
Any non-compliance could result in app rejection or removal, a severe disruption to operations. Monkey needed a privacy-safe measurement solution that maintained data integrity, ensured compliance, and still enabled deep campaign analysis for decision-making.
Limited Granularity in Campaign and Creative-Level Performance
Without user-level insights, Monkey struggled to identify which channels, campaigns, and ad creatives were acquiring high-value users. The lack of granular event-level data forced the team to rely on guesswork, often leading to inefficient budget allocation and underperforming user acquisition.
Difficulty Measuring Trial-to-Paid User Journeys
With a trial-to-paid subscription model, Monkey couldn’t precisely track user behavior after trial conversion or connect actual revenue (monthly and yearly) to in-app events. This made it challenging to analyze retention, churn, and conversion across the subscription lifecycle.
Solutions
Privacy-Compliant Measurement with Airbridge Restricted SDK
To meet regulatory requirements while maintaining measurement capabilities, Monkey adopted Airbridge’s Restricted SDK, a privacy-preserving version of the SDK that enables campaign and event tracking without collecting any personal data.
This approach ensured full compliance with both Apple and Google policies while streamlining the app submission process, thus enabling Monkey to minimize the risk of store rejection or approval delays, protecting business continuity and operational efficiency.
“We used to face serious issues with app rejections due to data policy violations, causing major operational disruptions. With Airbridge’s Restricted SDK, the submission process became much smoother, safer, and more transparent. Thanks to Airbridge’s dedicated support team, we can now focus on improving the product instead of worrying about compliance.” – Duong Vu, App Growth Lead at Monkey
Event-Level Accuracy with Airbridge Actuals and Revenue Reports
By integrating Airbridge’s Actuals Report, Monkey gained access to granular in-app event data at the campaign, ad group, and ad creative levels. Instead of relying solely on Cost Per Install (CPI), the team could now measure performance based on Cost Per Action (CPA) and user engagement quality.
At the same time, Airbridge’s Revenue Report empowered Monkey to monitor actual subscription revenue via both SDK and Event API integration, capturing both in-app transactions and external sources called Activation Code from website and telesales channels. With these consolidated insights, Monkey built a single source of truth across marketing and product teams, enabling more accurate LTV analysis, revenue attribution, and budget optimization across acquisition channels.
Full-Funnel Journey Measurement with Funnel Report
Understanding user flow was essential for Monkey’s trial-to-paid model. Using Airbridge’s Funnel Report, the team tracked user journeys across three key stages: Onboarding, Trial Learning, and Payment, to identify friction points and optimize conversion paths.
The example below illustrates how Monkey applied the Funnel Report to understand user behavior and optimize product performance. These examples are purely for demonstrating analytical approaches and do not reflect actual data.
Onboarding – Localized User Experience Optimization
By grouping Funnel Report by Country, Monkey identified higher drop-offs in certain regions, such as the U.S. and Thailand, where parents abandoned the process, potentially due to lengthy forms or unclear translations.
With this knowledge, adjustments in UI and localized onboarding content were made and significantly improved completion rates.
Trial Learning – Performance Comparison by App Version
By analyzing Funnel Report by App version, Monkey found that older builds had higher trial drop-offs. Insights from this analysis guided UX refinements, performance, and lag time improvements that helped sustain children’s engagement throughout the trial phase.
Payment – Conversion Optimization by Channel
When grouped by Channel, data revealed that organic users converted faster, while paid users required additional incentives. This insight enabled Monkey to personalize offers, pop-up paywalls, and payment prompts, improving checkout flow and reducing friction.
Results
Operating under the strict data governance framework of children’s apps, Monkey faced significant challenges in compliance, visibility, and campaign efficiency. Limited access to granular data made it difficult to attribute performance accurately or scale high-performing strategies.
However, with Airbridge’s comprehensive measurement suite, Monkey successfully overcame these constraints. From privacy-safe SDK integration to advanced event and funnel reporting, Airbridge empowered Monkey to make data-driven decisions at every stage of the user journey. The result: a 40% increase in subscription revenue, 21% uplift in conversion rate, and 18% reduction in marketing costs, reaffirming Monkey’s leadership in the EdTech space and setting a new benchmark for compliant, performance-driven app growth.
