Source: Digital Turbine

Success Story: Papaya Gaming – Solitaire Cash & Bubble Cash

Papaya Gaming is a rapidly-growing mobile gaming company that develops innovative versions of the most exciting and popular games and turns them into skill-based, real money tournaments. The company has reached a growth of over 2,000% active users in 2020 alone. Its games, Solitaire Cash & Bubble Cash, have been downloaded over 4 million times worldwide, and are rated 4.7 on the App store. The cornerstone of Papaya Gaming’s marketing strategy was to set objectives for its campaigns that were reaching accurate scaling while keeping the CPI bids at the lowest, hence improving ROAS results.

They were also considering post-install events; although it might be challenging to achieve the volume goals with low CPI bids. But, by precisely and effectively applying a categorical whitelist and granular pricing strategies, Digital Turbine’s skilled executive teams achieved high scale with targeted sources. Papaya Gaming partnered with Digital Turbine and utilized impeccable technology to expand the reach and to scale the install rates of their games.

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How did the campaign work?

In collaboration with Digital Turbine, Papaya Gaming aimed to increase its reach with an app install campaign in more than 40 regions of the U.S. In the Solitaire Cash creative strategy, Papaya Gaming wanted to test the effects of different creatives on the campaign results by allowing Digital Turbine’s dedicated growth team to optimize both game-play execution and the custom-made, interactive ‘Spin to Win’ End Card. Digital Turbine designed this custom End Card with different creative forms and matched them with relevant supply types they were compatible with.

The Bubble Cash creative strategy was already based on the gamification structure, so after seeing the high install rates of Bubble Cash, there was no need to create a gamified End Card for Solitaire Cash either. The aspect of analyzing best practices proved again how Digital Turbine’s execution is dedicated to reaching clients’ goals. The well-planned strategy set for Papaya Gaming increased the volume of Solitaire Cash in the mobile gaming industry.

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Why did the campaign work?

To uplift Papaya Gaming’s skill-based tournament games during the campaign, Digital Turbine aimed to introduce users to how the game is played within advertising videos in a short time. Different custom Guided-Install units or End Cards that highlight elements of the games and allow players to interact with them several times were very efficient for these campaigns. In addition to the creatives, Papaya Gaming used Guided-Install End Cards to create an interactive journey with users. Users click on the guided install End Card and can directly go to the store. As such, the install rates increased, and the overall performance improved.

On the other hand, in order to improve the ROAS of the campaign and to keep the CPI bids as low as possible, Digital Turbine analyzed both the supply and demand sources based on their categories, such as slots, cards, bingo, etc. and gathered all sources in a categorical whitelist to test each category and to see with which one they were getting the best results in terms of the volume and ROAS. Besides the whitelist strategy, Papaya Gaming also let Digital Turbine conduct competitor analysis so that the team could apply optimizations, benchmarking the competitors’ strategies.

Using a granular pricing optimization strategy and by reviewing each supply source one-by-one and day-by-day, Digital Turbine evaluated the install and ROAS performance of each supply source and optimized the campaigns accordingly.

Finally, Digital Turbine knows how data privacy must be transparent for mobile gaming advertising.  By keeping in touch with Papaya Gaming during the campaign period with regular catch-ups, they followed up with daily and monthly active users, install rates, and ROAS and made the necessary optimizations accordingly. Mutual communication and brainstorming definitely contributed to the campaigns’ success and grew the partnership between Papaya Gaming and Digital Turbine.

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