How to Level Up your Social Casino Apps: What Works and What Doesn’t


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Social casino games continue to hold their sparkling position in the mobile app market among the highest-grossing mobile app categories. Examples of these games are bingo, poker, solitaire, and slots. 

Social casino games are based on a free-to-play model where players search out both their friends and their rivals and develop strategies against each other, learning from their playing histories. It is one of the most in-demand aspects of contemporary online games, with internet users becoming more and more connected to each other. According to Statista, in-app purchase (IAP) revenue in the social casino segment is projected to reach $6.79 B in 2022.

With the massive growth of the mobile app market, it’s becoming harder to acquire high-quality users. Many users install an app only to never open it again. Hence it's of utmost importance for social casino games to acquire high lifetime value (LTV) users who will continuously visit and engage with the app and its features.

Reaching the right audience is the foundation of a successful user acquisition campaign. Since different users have different preferences, making your creative strategy specific to their taste is key to getting your message across. In this article, we discuss how you can benefit from a user acquisition campaign for your social casino game audiences.

Creative Strategies for Social Casino Games

Creative strategies are crucial when planning your next mobile ad campaign. Based on our experience with social casino games, we’ve highlighted some creative insights that have benefitted social casino apps:

Show flashy and eye-catching creative.

Social casino app users like these games because they mirror the excitement of gambling. When designing ad creatives for social casino apps, consider that the users want to see the resemblance to Las Vegas slot machines. That means creative should never be subtle, but just as flashy and eye-catching as the Vegas strip.Bingo Display UAMake use of winning effects, like falling coins jackpot sounds.

Another effective creative strategy to promote a social casino app is adding slots and falling coins to the creative. Creatives with additional audio elements like jackpot sounds are more likely to evoke positive emotions among users and make them take action.

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Display new game features.

Highlighting new game features of the app is a great way to let your audience have a sneak peek at your app and pique their interest. Make the message clear and concise when presenting new features, so they can be easily digested by your target audiences.

phone-poker-RT-newfeatureThe Role of Ad Formats

User engagement varies from one campaign to another. Just because one ad format worked for your previous campaign, does not guarantee that it will work in the next. The right format is key to grabbing the user’s attention, so choosing the right ad format for your app marketing campaign is vital. Mobile ads must be relevant, and the ad format contributes greatly to how the message is communicated and received.  

The ad format that works best for social casino apps is video. Moreover, the users of social casino apps have distinct preferences regarding call-to-action (CTA) colors and texts for different ad formats as well, so it's essential for the CTA to be single-minded and clear.

Social casino video ads, for example, work best with a “Play Now” CTA, colored in red or blue. Interstitial display ads perform best with a “Play Now” CTA in yellow, blue, or green, and banner ads work best with an “Open App” CTA, colored in blue, green, or yellow.

Case Study

We at Aarki are always running campaigns for mobile gaming apps, and one of the recent campaigns that we want like to call out is for Triwin’s Billion Cash Casino app. 

Triwin Games partnered with Aarki for a user acquisition campaign targeting iOS users with Limited Ad Tracking (LAT) enabled on their device. The objective of the campaign was to understand the return on investment (ROI) potential of the LAT traffic while acquiring new users for Triwin’s Billion Cash Casino app. 

The campaign proved to be successful right from the start. Though the non-IDFA environment limits some of the targeting and optimizations possible, we were able to train our models using the available signals for this campaign successfully and exceeded Triwin’s ROI goal by 24.80%. Furthermore, LAT traffic outperformed the IDFA traffic with over 30% higher ROI. Learn more by following the link here.

Always Test

Measuring campaign performance is essential to track your progress towards your marketing goals. There is a fine line between being effective and being irritating. Too many impressions of repetitive creative can drive away potential LTV users. Thus an important part of running a successful app marketing campaign is knowing when to refresh your ad creative. Nowadays, ads are everywhere, so for the creative to be unique and grab the user’s attention it should be customized to their specific interests to avoid ad fatigue. To learn more about how Aarki can help you do just that, send us a message here

 

Topics: Creative Insights