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About the client
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The challenge
Upjers and Mapendo started working together on the app Zoo 2: Animal Park, which is a casual game, where users take the role of zoo directors. The monetization relies mostly on in-app purchases, making it necessary to acquire new paying users who buy repeatedly over months. Thus, Upjers’ KPIs were based on long-term metrics like retention rate and ROAS D90, requiring healthy progression and user retention.
The solution
We started running user acquisition campaigns in DE on a CPI basis, and focusing on iOS users. However, because Zoo2's revenue builds over months as players return to make repeat purchases, we knew install volume alone wouldn't tell us whether the campaign was working.
Therefore, we focused on the in-game journey. Every new user was tracked along with different quality signals, from completing the tutorial to reaching levels 5, 12 and 25, and finally making a purchase. These milestones let us identify high-value users weeks before their spending fully showed up in the 90-day ROAS.
By achieving a high tutorial completion rate we focused on interested players rather than accidental downloads. Since first purchases started kicking in, before level 12, we also segmented and targeted users with high purchase intent. Finally, we tracked the late-stage retention rate, in order to reach the committed core audience for the game, those deep-progression players who are typically repeat buyers. This way, our ML algorithms automatically shifted the budget towards the users’segments that consistently produced players who progressed deep into the game.
Moreover, the team at Upjers regularly helped Mapendo with creatives, feedback, recommendations on new markets to launch and strategy updates. And they were open to listen to our suggestions as well. This made the partnership profitable and smoothless for both parties.
The results
Mapendo’s optimization strategy has delivered upon Upjers’ expectations over time, consistently meeting their D-90 ROAS target while even doubling the ad spend in the best months. 1 out of 10 new players converted into paying users, who then returned to make repeated purchases. In addition, more than 30% of players who reached level 12 went on to reach level 25, helping the local core audience to grow and driving long-term revenue growth.
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As a result, Upjers expanded the partnership to France as the next market where to replicate and further improve Mapendo's UA performance.
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