Getting the attribution game right – Improve retention by 50% with AppsFlyer

Background

Hyper Hippo is a Canadian gaming app developer founded in 2012. With over 30 million installs and popular, highly ranked titles such as AdVenture Capitalist and AdVenture Communist with over 10 million installs each — Hyper Hippo is a well-known trailblazer in the mobile idle game genre. 

Being more effective in getting the word out about their games and improving the in-app user experience for gamers is what led Hyper Hippo to partner with AppsFlyer over four years ago.

Today, their user acquisition (UA) and data analytics teams rely on AppsFlyer as the single source of truth for smarter insights into their cross-channel campaign attribution, in-app user engagement, and monetization.

Challenges

Hyper Hippo’s marketing strategy focuses on three key areas:

1. Driving UA through optimizing media channels 
   
2. Growing revenue with predictive modeling 
   
3. Remarketing to users to boost re-engagement

To optimize user growth across their three main gaming apps, Hyper Hippo’s UA team required a mobile marketing solution that provided full attribution across all channels and devices.

And in order to sustainably grow revenue, it was critical for Hyper Hippo’s data analytics team to have fresh, accurate in-app engagement data to model LTV and ROAS for their gaming apps, each with different types of revenue streams ranging from ads to in-app purchases or both.

Last but not least, Hyper Hippo needed tools to successfully re-engage users to optimize retention rates — especially within their older gaming titles.

With a constantly in flux audience, coupled with different monetization strategies for each app, Hyper Hippo faced challenges common to many gaming app marketers:

Testing, attributing, and optimizing media campaigns across multiple channels, while simultaneously optimizing monetization models for each app using the vast data they collect.

Solutions

In 2018, Hyper Hippo selected AppsFlyer to power their growth model and provide the tools they needed to successfully meet their goals.

AppsFlyer provides full cross-device attribution and in-app event measurement, which allows their UA team to optimize campaigns, efficiently test new ad networks to reach new users, and optimize customer value for retention.

In turn, the data analytics team at Hyper Hippo can easily add AppsFlyer’s real-time data to their BI analytics visualization tool, Tableau, in order to calculate LTV and ROAS for each attributed channel and app.

The following are just some examples of how AppsFlyer’s dashboard and tools are used by Hyper Hippo:

• Customer experience and deep linking: Hyper Hippo uses the customer experience and deep linking suite powered by OneLink — to create contextual journeys and accurately attribute all campaigns from their owned social media properties on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. 
  
  Without the suite, the team would not be able to accurately attribute installs across social media networks — or their own website for that matter — nor could they test new social network properties without a lot of manual work.  

• Audiences for remarketing: Remarketing campaigns targeting lapsed users are made possible with AppsFlyer’s Audiences tool. With Audiences, Hyper Hippo segments players based on their last completed in-app purchase within various timeframes, and can then remarket these users with themed campaigns to bolster retention over time. 
  
  After deploying remarketing campaigns, they use dashboard tools such as Cohort to perform analysis across user lifecycles per channel and app to optimize LTV.
  
• Xpend cost aggregation: With ROAS as their main KPI, it’s critical for Hyper Hippo to have complete, accurate, and fresh cost data ingested directly by their BI systems.

The data analytics team relies on Xpend, AppsFlyer’s cost aggregation solution, and its Cost ETL feature, to automatically stream accurate cost data tied to their attribution data — at the most granular level, directly to their BI pipelines, four times a day, at their desired time. 

This, along with complete and accurate revenue data, is used to build a customized model for predictive revenue with minimal effort and way faster than before.

Results

By using  AppsFlyer’s attribution, engagement, and cost aggregation tools, Hyper Hippo has significantly propelled growth across new and old gaming titles alike.

They’ve effectively retained users of their older gaming apps by using AppsFlyer to provide a better customer experience, delivering what gamers want, when they want it.

To illustrate this point, the remarketing campaigns for their two main gaming apps, AdVenture Communist and AdVenture Capitalist, have seen a 50% increase in Day 7 retention, compared with new users they acquired during the same time period.

With AppsFlyer’s 10K+ existing integrations, Hyper Hippo can easily ramp up testing of new ad networks every month to drive growth.

In fact, according to Macarena Caceres, User Acquisition Lead in Marketing at Hyper Hippo:

“It’s a must for us for the media partner to be integrated with AppsFlyer. Many small things which make a huge difference in launching, managing, and optimizing campaigns are easier for us thanks to the suite of tools AppsFlyer provides us, as well as the professional guidance from AppsFlyer’s Customer Success Manager.”

The UA team is not the only one that has benefited from AppsFlyer. Getting fresh daily cost data tied to attribution at the most granular level from Cost ETL — is a main source of data for Hyper Hippo’s data analytics team, enabling them to leverage reliable cost aggregation insights to drive ROAS.

The easy implementation took minimal time thanks to a flexible data scheme that serves the data four times a day at their desired schedule. 

As a result, Hyper Hippo can easily export real-time data to their homegrown BI pipeline, and can then quickly share insights and results with other teams because these actions are all done using one consolidated platform.

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