Papaya Gaming is a fast-growing studio based in Tel Aviv, with over 5 million downloads worldwide. They’ve made hit games like Solitaire Cash, which reached #2 in the Apple App Store’s Cards and Casino genre in the US. Early on in their journey, Papaya turned to the ironSource platform to strengthen their user acquisition. Read on to hear their growth story from Dan Hayoun, Papaya’s Sr. User Acquisition manager.
Finding a rocket ship to help us on our way
As a fast-growing studio, we needed to find a partner that could not only help us manage our booming business but take it to the next level. Specifically, we wanted to reach new user segments to broaden our user base for Solitaire Cash and optimize our ad creatives.
UA scale and optimization
As we were growing fast, we were finding it very time-consuming to manually optimize our bids and make granular adjustments to get the users we wanted.
When we started talking with ironSource, we explained to the team that we wanted to continue scaling our UA activity, and needed a tool to help us do this in the most efficient way.
The ironSource team introduced us to the ROAS optimizer tool, which automatically adjusts our bids to make sure we’re acquiring quality users at the right price. Thanks to machine learning, the tool crunches real-time data to make regular adjustments to our bids and deliver us the KPIs we set out to achieve.
Although the optimizer automates a lot of the work, we worked very closely with the ironSource team to monitor its performance, and tweak KPIs for our campaigns. The combination of the tool’s strength and our close collaboration helped deliver us great results.
For example, our KPI for D7 was immediately met and consistently exceeded by the optimizer. Since activating the tool, as shown in Week 1 in the chart below, we saw increased improvement week after week. In fact, by Week 4 we had reached a 40% increase in D7 ROAS - reflecting the quality of users we were acquiring.
"In fact, by Week 4 we had reached a 40% increase in D7 ROAS - reflecting the quality of users we were acquiring."
- Dan Hayoun, Senior User Acquisition Manager at Papaya Gaming
Ad creative optimization
In addition to using algorithms and machine learning, we also tapped into ironSource’s creative management solution. When we started the partnership with ironSource our ad creatives were solely video ads.
Having researched the Solitaire category’s ad creative trends, the ironSource team learned that playables made up a significant amount of the genre’s advertising. After discovering this, they worked on creating and optimizing playable ads in addition to video ads - helping us further improve our UA performance on iOS campaigns in the US market.
One way they did this was creating an interactive end card that appears at the end of the main creative, which you can see below.
Thanks to the constant A/B testing and expertise of the ironSource team, we were able to increase our IPM 3x, our CVR 1.5x, and our CTR by 40% compared to the creatives we used before this partnership.
True partners
It’s been a pleasure working with the ironSource team - we collaborated really closely together on everything, and they proved themselves to be highly responsive and professional. The platform’s ability to scale our user acquisition has been a huge factor in Solitaire Cash’s rapid rise and the growth of our business.
With our growth on the UA side, we have also begun using ironSource’s mediation solution to monetize our content. It was super straightforward to integrate the SDK and navigate our way around - and thanks to bidding technology we have seen encouraging results for our ARPDAU. We look forward to continuing our journey with ironSource to the top!
