Three cents an install for our own game, and knowing which installs stayed
Ludo Arena is a multiplayer game we built. We advertise it on Facebook and Instagram, but we judge the ads on what players do after they install, not on the install itself.
- Product
- Ludo Arena
- Sector
- Our own app
- Where
- Worldwide
- Services
- Paid advertisingCustomer insight
- cost per install
- $0.03
- events recorded a day
- 1.2M
- players each day
- 30,000
The trouble with counting installs
Ludo Arena has around 30,000 players a day, and we bring in new ones with Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram. Installs are the easiest thing to buy on those platforms, and also the least useful thing to count. Plenty of people install a game, open it once and never come back. If installs are all you measure, you end up paying for a lot of those people.
What we wanted to know
Which ads bring players who stick around, rather than players who just install? And what does someone who comes back tomorrow do on their first day that someone who leaves doesn't?
What the game records
The game records around 1.2 million events a day across those 30,000 players. An event is simply something a player does: claiming the daily reward, opening a private table with friends, joining a coin table, entering a tournament, finishing a match. Every install also carries the campaign and the ad that brought it in.
The pattern we found
Players who claim the daily reward and play at least one game with a friend in their first few days behave very differently from everyone else. They come back. So rather than judging a campaign by how many installs it gets, we can judge it by how many of those players it brings.
How we run the ads now
We tell Meta to look for people likely to take the actions that predict a returning player, rather than people likely to install, and we test new ads against the same measure. An install currently costs us about three cents. On its own that number doesn't mean much. It's useful because we can also say which of those installs turned into real players.
A look at Ludo Arena
If you’re in the same spot
An install is where the question starts. Three cents an install is only good news if you know how many of those people claimed a reward, played with a friend and came back. Once you can measure that, you can put your budget behind the people who stay.
