Case Study
Huuuge,
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In 2014, Poland-based game studio Gamelion was reborn as Huuuge Games. The new company came with a vision: transforming mobile games into massively social experiences. In other words, Huuuge makes games that are easy to jump into, fun to play, and great for experiencing with friends. This vision led to the studio’s first breakout hit in 2015: Huuuge Casino. Billionaire Casino launched the following year, and since then, the company just keeps on growing.

Fast forward to today and Huuuge Games has offices worldwide, making it one of the industry’s biggest success stories. The studio’s focus on free-to-play gaming with deep social elements has made Huuuge a veritable mobile powerhouse, boasting over a million daily active users in 195 countries. However, as the mobile market matured, the studio was on the lookout for new and innovative ad formats that would engage users and deliver strong return on ad spend (ROAS).

81%

Increase in offer initializations

8.6%

D7 ROI

17.7%

D30 ROAS

Retaining High-Quality Users While Scaling UA

While Huuuge Games’ popular casino games were racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads every month, retaining those users was an entirely different challenge. On top of that, the company’s steady growth accelerated the need to scale user acquisition in key markets. The user experience team needed a creative solution that would boost install volume and retention, and by extension, improve ROAS. That meant targeting high-quality users and engaging them at a deeper level.

In 2018, Huuuge began testing Cost Per Engagement (CPE) campaigns and found that they “outperformed video, display, and other rewarded formats in terms of ROAS,” according to Huuuge Games Networks Media Buyer Dominika Pawlasiuk. The company began running multiple CPE ads concurrently. However, as Huuuge Games’ marketing efforts increased, so did its operational overhead. Going into 2020, the company was looking for cost-effective ways to scale growth and meet its ROAS goals.

To address these challenges, Huuuge Games decided to build on the success it had seen with CPE advertising. At the same time, Tapjoy was getting ready to introduce a new product to its line-up of advertising and monetization tools: Multi-Reward CPE advertising.

“CPE ads consistently outperformed other ad formats in terms of ROAS, but we decided to test Multi-Reward to scale our efforts even further. The format is flexible by design, allowing us to target multiple events in a single offer and minimize administrative oversight.”

- Dominika Pawlasiuk, Networks Media Buyer, Huuuge Games

Multi-reward CPE Helps Huuuge Grow Bigger

In the testing phase, Huuuge ran several A/B tests to gauge the new format’s efficacy. First, the team compared the performance of Multi-Reward to single-event CPE. A surprising insight emerged: Users were more likely to start a Multi-Reward offer than a single-event CPE offer. Multi-Reward saw 81% more offer initializations throughout the testing period, partially because Multi-Reward offers provide a range of earning options, some of which are low friction. Users who participated in these events were consistently rewarded at certain levels — for example, levels 50, 70, 100, and so forth in Billionaire Casino. The more they engaged, the more further earning opportunities became available.

Next, Huuuge A/B tested offer instruction formats, taking advantage of the flexibility these new ad units supported. After trying out gallery and video variations, Huuuge found that the video format performed best. These tests proved effective: Multi-Reward beat the D30 ROAS target by 2X.

Confident in these early results, Huuuge Games was ready to go bigger. “Multi-Reward CPE allows us to scale our UA campaigns while reducing the number of live offers we have to manage day-to-day,” Dominika Pawlasiuk said. The streamlined backend experience would allow the team to set  — and achieve — more ambitious growth goals.

Rewarded Engagement Becomes UA Cornerstone

Thanks to a collaborative effort between the Huuuge Games and Tapjoy teams, the A/B testing was a marked success. Huuuge stakeholders were pleased with the results and the hands-on support they received throughout the process. Overall, the publisher felt confident in investing product innovation on the Tapjoy platform.

After a year of these campaigns an average of 8.6% D7 ROAD and 17.7% D30 ROAS across five different apps. On top of that, three key titles saw surges in installs from July 2020 to December 2020:

  • Billionaire Casino: 67,019 US installs 219,572 worldwide installs
  • Huuuge Casino: 72,456 US installs; 332,552 worldwide installs
  • Huuuge Stars: 23,439 US installs; 54,628 worldwide installs

“Players love the experience of Cost Per Engagement offers — we were simply looking for a way to go even bigger, Dominika Pawlasiuk explained. “Multi-Reward was the perfect solution.”

According to Huuuge, campaign management is now a much more streamlined process, resulting in a better user experience. As Huuuge Games becomes even more of a mobile casino powerhouse, Tapjoy remains one of the publisher’s top advertising partners. Meanwhile, Huuuge continues to explore the full potential of multi-reward CPE campaigns

“Because of the success we’ve seen, we moved 100% of our Tapjoy campaigns to the Multi-Reward model. We find immense value in this partnership and hope to rely on it for years to come.”

- Dominika Pawlasiuk, Networks Media Buyer, Huuuge Games

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