Background
What if you could play mobile games and earn rewards at the same time? In 2017, publisher Mistplay made this hypothetical question a reality. With a self-titled app billed as a loyalty program for mobile gamers, Mistplay works directly with game studios to create content and uses personalization algorithms to recommend new games to users. As these users discover, download, and play games through the Mistplay app, they earn real-world rewards like Amazon gift cards.
Since launch, Mistplay has expanded its social aspects, adding chat, profiles, and other personalized features. In just three years, the app accrued over five million downloads on the Google Play Store alone.
Mistplay first teamed up with Tapjoy about a year ago, and since then has been able to radically scale its UA efforts through Cost Per Install offers. As a lifestyle app with a gaming edge, Mistplay found in-app ads were a natural fit. Recently, Mistplay shifted its focus to Multi-Reward Cost Per Engagement and Video to Install offers to attract more quality users and drive ROAS.
Strategy
Tapjoy’s approach to helping Mistplay meet its goals was multi-tiered. First, the teams opted to scale existing Cost Per Engagement (CPE) campaigns in all regions using new Multi-Reward functionality. multi-reward CPE offers give users progressive rewards at in-app checkpoints. Converting users show stronger engagement and retention than those acquired through traditional CPE offers.
Next, Tapjoy implemented a segmentation process in which it segmented site IDs according to their performance relative to the rest of the industry. That allowed for greater optimization according to multiple business metrics.
Mistplay also dedicated approximately 20% of its budget to Video to Install offers. This format rewards users upon video completion and solicits organic installs — a dynamic that ensures stronger retention among installing users. Leveraging Tapjoy’s creative A/B testing capabilities, the campaign achieved a higher percentage of post-view installs.
Results
In the end, this multi-pronged UA strategy proved massively successful. Tapjoy soon became Mistplay's best-performing SDK network in ROAS by a large margin. Despite initial apprehensions, the Mistplay team now understood that with the right approach, rewarded offers can yield strong retention. Multi-Reward offers, in particular, kept users coming back for more, showing a strong 20% install-to-reward event completion rate.
15%
ROAs lift from CPE campaigns in T1 & T2 GEOs outperforming video in Feb'20
20%
Install-to-reward event completion rate
“When we launched our first CPE campaigns, we immediately saw healthy profitability margins. These strong results allowed us to scale to the point where our CPE offers far outspend our CPI campaigns on the network today.”
- William Grigat, User Acquisition Manager, Mistplay
