Mini Soccer Star

Viva Games Studios

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Mini Soccer Team

Our story:

A one-year success story

In November 2022, we started our partnership with Mini Soccer Team, a small but very talented team composed by only two people: a programmer and an artist. The game Mini Soccer Star offered casual and fun soccer matches, but its mid term retention was low and most campaigns were not profitable due to current monetization.

Challenge

Our goal was very clear: detecting the main problems in the game, improving basic KPIs (retention, monetization, visibility) and testing again until reaching profitable campaigns. After one year working together, these were the results:

A hit:

In only 12 months

How did we do it?

Firstly, we integrated our analytics system and created custom dashboards to measure every KPI. Retention, % payers, ARPU and ARPPU, game economy, game balance, drops in the FTUE and much more. After chatting with the team, we defined more than a hundred values to study. This gave us some clues to make the first changes inside the game. In the meantime, we started working ASO to improve conversion rates, which were much under the percentile 50%. We run more than fifty A/B tests until reaching a very appealing store listing for the users.

While the team was working on the first updates, we made important ASO changes in metadata to improve organic visibility. We added new tags in Google Play and changed the existing. Modified short description, subtitle and descriptions in Google Play and App Store. Created new custom store listings in Google Play for the best performing countries. Localized visual assets in different regions according to most popular clubs or players. Added events to promote exclusive and limited LiveOps inside the game. To increase IAP revenue, we defined not only new packs or offers, but also different monetization options for the users that are more willing to pay. These changes also impacted in the time players spend in the game. Some of the new features were limited events, social rankings, monthly season pass, albums with stickers and many more: We also detected that ad monetization was under performing, which could be due to a low competition between them but also to a bad ad placements strategy. After analysing all possible scenarios, we made several improvements: Included new ad networks to be more competitive in tier 2 and tier 3 countries. Changed the mediation from Admob to a top option in market. Redesigned the existing placements and created new ones. After two updates we improved fill rates, eCPM, engagement, IMPDAU and mostly all metrics related to ad monetization, also resulting in a huge increase in ad impressions (42x).

Finally, once we found out Mini Soccer Stars improved all target KPIs, we started boosting visibility with user acquisition campaigns. Firstly, small budgets on tier 2 countries; secondly, bigger investments in top performing GEOs. We created a dedicated team with video editors and animators. Weekly assets creatives tests. Campaigns in several networks at the same time: IronSource, Google Ads, TikTok, Unity Ads, Meta… Are KPIs good enough? Safe investments to grow responsibly.