Challenge
PLAYSTUDIOS, developer of award-winning casual casino games for mobile and social platforms, realized the importance of retargeting as part of its in-house marketing strategy. In early 2020, PLAYSTUDIOS approached Kayzen to help the company increase and diversify in-house re-engagement activity for its popular slots game, Pop! Slots. PLAYSTUDIOS’ primary objective for the mutual activity was to bring back paying players who had churned out of the game and increase in-app revenue from purchases.
Approach
Before launching the re-engagement activity, it was necessary to understand the user flow through the app and, more importantly, where the players drop off. For that, PLAYSTUDIOS integrated its data with Kayzen through their mobile measurement platform (MMP), which supports forwarding granular real-time in-app event data. The postback data included down-the-funnel in-app events like sessions, level progress, purchases, and more. These are essential data points to segment users and important metrics for measuring the re-engagement activity’s effectiveness.Revenue and cost data were passed to PLAYSTUDIOS’s cost aggregation platform via an existing default plug and play API integration. This gave the PLAYSTUDIOS re-engagement team an overview of campaign ROI and the ability to deep dive into the analysis whenever required.
With the help of Kayzen’s team and thanks to PLAYSTUDIOS’ data-driven approach, PLAYSTUDIOS succeeded to target and segment the right audience. Thanks to PLAYSTUDIOS robust pLTV model, the audience was segmented based on their in-app behavior and each segment received the right creative message. Various ad set designs were tested with a match to the POP! Slots title seasonal promotions and special bonuses. Kayzen campaigns included banners, interstitials, native and video ad sets, and were continually optimized for Cost Per Returning User and ROAS.
Through Kayzen, PLAYSTUDIOS’ team started bidding on all major RTB exchanges, intending to encourage users to return to the game and increase IAP. The Kayzen optimization model began optimizing bids based on user interactions with the ads and in-app behavior, which serve as an input to the machine learning models in the path to optimize for the best impact.
Impact
One of the largest gains PLAYSTUDIOS saw in performance was the increase in the number of returning users month-over-month while reaching return on ad spend within an average of only 120 days.
An additional impact was seen in the impression-to-purchase rate, a valuable metric for campaigns targeting paying users. Within one month, this rate increased by 180% and kept increasing by an average of 48% in the following months.
Other successful results for the PLAYSTUDIOS POP! Slots re-engagement campaign also include:
- CPAs decreased by an average of 65% MoM across nine months.
- In-app purchases increased by an average of 42% MoM over a period of nine months.
- Furthermore, within nine months, the average monthly spending increased by 32% MoM and 12X comparing the first and latest reviewed month.
- The campaign scaled to over six figures monthly spend while decreasing CPAs and easily met the original goal of increasing in-app purchases.
Outlook
- Applying the learnings and methods gained through POP! slots’ re-engagement activity to PLAYSTUDIOS’s additional apps will likely create a similar impact.
- Using the learnings and takeaways from POP! slots’ re-engagement campaigns in UA targeting strategies to improve purchase rates and ROAS from the early stages of the campaigns and reduce the time and budget spent on explorations.
״Partnering with Kayzen helped us to grow our retargeting activity, to engage with our past and existing players and increase the retention of our game, especially among our most valuable player segments. With Kayzen’s advanced targeting abilities and in collaboration with Kayzen‘s Customer Success team, we have managed to build an accurate and meticulous segmentation of our audience and reach out to each segment with the right messages.״ – Maria Perov, User Acquisition Manager, PLAYSTUDIOS ISRAEL
