The VK mediabuying team launched the promotion of TopTop, a social platform by SOCIALTECH SOLUTIONS - FZCO. It allows users to play games of various genres and communicate online. As a result, the client managed to significantly reduce the registration cost and increase the number of players returning to the app.
Promotion goals
The client’s goal was to get as many players as possible who register and return to the app, while maintaining a profitable cost for their acquisition.
The team aimed to reduce the cost of registration by 50%, in comparison with the results achieved by the client in previous launches. The retention rate of users in the application on the first day of the campaign streaming had to match the established KPI.
Campaign setup
The VK mediabuying team used parsing of followers from similar games’ VKontakte communities in VK Ads, as well as tools for selecting audiences from external services (TargetHunter and others).
To make promotion more effective, the audience was divided into segments based on socio‑demographic characteristics and RuStore data on paying users — this allowed them to form the most relevant offers for different audience groups. Segments were selected taking into account the cost of registration and the potential for users to return to the game.
Creatives
One of the key factors for the success of the ad campaign was high-quality work with creatives. The team used a "guess the melody" video as part of the creative; during the campaign streaming, experts noticed that creatives had a strong age difference in terms of which melody was used in the video. The ad text also significantly affected the volume of initial clicks on the ad, so the team optimized the entire bundle of visuals and text, paying special attention to the wording of the ad message.
Properly selected targeting and effective creatives helped to maintain high promotion rates without the need to constantly launch new tests. The settings supported the volume of audience engagement and reduced dependence on the continuous search for new solutions.
Campaign results
As a result of the promotion, the VK mediabuying team managed to get the cost of registration on the gaming platform 30% lower than the client's KPI and 80% lower than the client's previous campaign results. The return of users to the application the day after installation was 0.7% lower than the client's KPI.
The client continues to apply the approaches found in his own campaigns to promote the platform in RuStore and other app stores. Currently, SOCIALTECH SOLUTIONS - FZCO has multiplied its spending on advertising campaigns and has become one of the largest advertisers of VK Ads.
Egor Erokhin, senior buying manager, VK:
"It often happens that by decreasing the KPIs of one benchmark, you can achieve much more outstanding results for an entire ad campaign. We recommend evaluating the results based on the combination of all important metrics. So, despite a 0.7% decrease in Ret.R D1, we improved the results of advertising campaigns per circle, while also maintaining the Ret.R D7 within the KPI.
The success of the project is to keep Ret.R D1 practically within the KPI at a registration cost 30% lower than the planned value of the client. Compared to the established KPIs, the cost of a returning player was 28.3% lower, and the same budget provided 39.5% more such players. We must not forget to test even those tools that often do not have a strong impact on the final result — each project is unique, even within the same category of applications. As a result of the campaign, the client received approaches that he was able to use in further scaling".