Spil Games’ user acquisition team tripled ROI in one day when they started promoting Operate Now: Hospital to players outside our core markets. But they didn’t assume the same result would continue because it happened this one instance. Instead, they continued to carefully plan and test as we expanded our marketing around the globe.
“We had been focusing mobile marketing in Western Europe and the U.S. where players are familiar with the game and are known to spend more money,” says Massimo Guerrato, Spil’s Director of UA. “My gut told me we were missing an opportunity with players in other countries, but there was no data to prove it.”
The UA team tested Massimo’s assumption with a small test campaign on Facebook in our non-core countries, including the highly competitive Korean and Japanese markets. “We were able to set up the promotion in those countries immediately and economically,” says Massimo. “It was important we didn’t spend more time talking about this than actually testing it.”
Within 24 hours, earnings from the campaign had reached 3 times the set-up costs. The UA team quickly maneuvered to scale up the idea. “When you see an impact like this, either something is wrong with the data, or you’ve got a good idea and should do more of it,” Massimo says.
His team took a phased approach with the campaign, testing and analyzing results at each stage and then scaling up quickly. Each time the team scaled up the campaign, they saw a positive impact on ROI, sometimes exceeding results in our core countries.
Because of these successes, the team decided to localize the app store assets. The game was localized in Korean and Japanese in November following which its retention and monetization improved immediately.
Coupled with promotions, the game started breaking into the top 10 games rankings in a number of countries, including Brazil and Singapore.
Massimo’s bet has paid off so nicely that Operate Now: Hospital just launched in traditional and simplified Chinese for the first time.
Great article