Crazy Maple Studio is a US-based mobile game developer known for their casual hits, including Chapters: Interactive Stories. When the studio wanted to find new ways to scale their interactive novel game Chapters, the Unity team recommended expanding their UA strategy with Tapjoy’s Daily Reward CPE campaigns.
Yana Kong, UA lead at Crazy Maple Studio, explains how implementing a Daily Reward CPE campaign drove incremental scale, with a 50% growth in installs, a 150% increase over their D7 ROAS goal, and a 120% lift in user LTV compared to users acquired from video UA channels, all without cannibalizing existing Multi Reward CPE campaigns.
Diversifying UA strategy with Daily Reward CPE
“We’ve been working with Tapjoy from Unity for quite some time, focusing on several successful Multi Reward CPE (MR-CPE) campaigns that give more advanced users the chance to earn multiple rewards as they complete deeper in-game events, like reaching high levels.
When we initially tried to acquire new US-based users for Chapters, we weren’t seeing as much scale as we wanted. We found that our bids weren't competitive enough to attract a significant amount of installs and conversions, especially when compared to higher bids in hardcore games. That’s when the Unity team recommended Daily Reward CPE (DR-CPE) as an additional way to help us achieve our desired scale.
By adding DR-CPE campaigns to our UA mix, we aimed to attract a new customer segment of casual users who are looking for lower-friction and quicker rewards, while we continue to reach more experienced users with our existing MR-CPE campaigns.
The shorter and more frequent rewards from our DR-CPE campaign immediately encouraged users to keep coming back to our app to earn more rewards as they progressed further in the game. Soon after implementing Daily Reward CPE, the new traffic we saw generated a growing number of high-LTV users returning to our app each day to earn even more rewards as they advanced in our game.
Maximizing event-based optimization
To make the most of our DR-CPE campaign, we worked with the Unity team to set up in-game events that users would need to complete each day in order to earn rewards in the publisher app. Our events were based on a designated number of chapters that users would need to read per day to earn rewards.
Next, we created a daily cap on our rewards, which served as a way to inspire players to keep coming back to the game day after day to get the available daily rewards, until they reached the total rewards in the offer. Initially, we set up a daily cap of 12 chapters that a user would need to read to earn a reward and measured our event performance. Based on conversions, we decided to lower the capping number of chapters to 8 in order to optimize our spending.
Driving incremental growth with a 50% increase in installs
DR-CPE has revitalized our offerwall UA strategy, significantly increasing our scale and by extension, our revenue. By rewarding users for completing chapters, we’ve unlocked scale to reach more users and grow our impressions by 200%. Additionally, we drove incremental growth with a 50% increase in installs and exceeded our D7 ROAS goal by 150%.
What’s more, our DR-CPE campaigns did not cannibalize our existing MR-CPE campaigns, which continue to perform well within the same geo.
“By rewarding users for chapters that they complete with Tapjoy’s Daily Reward CPE campaign, we increased our installs by 50%, exceeded our D7 ROAS goal by 150%, all without cannibalizing our existing MR-CPE campaigns.”
Achieving 120% higher LTV than video UA channels
Beyond the boost in installs, the users we acquired through offerwall are engaging with our app more and have significantly higher retention rates than users that came from video UA channels. In fact, the users we acquired through offerwall have a 120% higher LTV than users acquired through video UA channels.
“Tapjoy allowed us to reach more high-intent users who were already familiar with offerwall and actively seeking offers. As a result, we were able to acquire users with 120% higher LTV versus video UA channels and monetize them natively.”
Due to the significant impact DR-CPE has had on our app’s growth, we aim to implement additional campaigns in more geos as we continue to scale. We’re thrilled with the support and partnership of the Unity team, which has positively contributed to shaping our growth trajectory, and we look forward to continuing to increase our scale with the offerwall.”
