Zplay is a leading Chinese hyper-casual company that’s achieved millions of downloads globally. Zplay worked with ironSource Luna on two titles, Survival Game Master and Stone Miner to find ways to boost their creative’s performance.
Here, the UA team at Zplay, shares their experience working with Luna to enhance their playable experience and get their title to hit #1 in the US.
Why Luna?
“We have a long history with ironSource, so we really trust their tools and services. In fact, in the past, we worked on interactive end cards together and saw great results. Our UA team understood that full playables were our next step, since they can really make or break a game’s launch - but because we didn’t have much experience building and optimizing playables, we needed help.
That’s where Luna’s expertise came in. Our two UA managers joined forces with Luna’s creative team to put a plan into action. Our goal focused on creating exciting playables that connected with users while simultaneously increasing scale.
Building blocks
First, Luna introduced us to two key products that were instrumental in building our creatives: Luna Elements and Luna Playable.
"Our goal focused on creating exciting playables that connected with users while simultaneously increasing scale"
Elements gave us the tools to make standout interactive end cards easily and completely by ourselves. We mostly used it to quickly test creative concepts on different networks and from there, leveraged performance data to choose which concepts to build out into full playables. However, there’s a lot of technical know-how that goes into developing and coding playables, which held us back from making them ourselves. With Luna Playable, we got the technical support we needed to develop high impact playables in-house.
Creative optimization
Now that we had our playables built, we needed to optimize them to their full potential. Luna’s team helped us maximize user engagement by bringing deep concept insights and performance-based suggestions to the table.
To improve creative performance, Luna suggested showcasing bright color palettes in our hyper-casual titles to create a more immersive experience. We also added more interactive elements with our title, Stone Miner. To give some context, in Stone Miner, users can crush, mine and sell stones. We decided to add a second interaction in the introduction where a user taps an animated button and is immediately directed to the store to sell the stones. These interactive elements got users to engage more with our creatives.
"Not only did Luna give us valuable creative advice, the team also translated the entire platform from English to Chinese which made for a seamless experience navigating the products"
Luna also suggested we test the length of our playables. With hyper-casual titles, a shorter experience performs better than a longer one, so we kept that in mind when we built our playables. Not only did Luna give us valuable creative advice, the team also translated the entire platform from English to Chinese which made for a seamless experience navigating the products.
Hitting number 1
Thanks to our collaboration with Luna, we hit our main KPIs: we significantly improved our creative performance, and saw high retention from users we acquired through the playables.
Plus, we saw impressions go way up, which helped us get Survival Game Master Android reach number 1 in the US charts - increasing global brand awareness. All in all, we leaned on Luna to help build and optimize our playables and ended up with excellent results.”
