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Founded in 2017, HyperBeard became the largest mobile game developer and publisher in Mexico by creating a portfolio of cute, casual games. The company currently has 67 employees and its most loved games include Pocket Love, Adorable Home, and Campfire Cat Cafe.
HyperBeard’s core values of exploring fresh concepts and unconventional ideas, focusing on the player experience, maintaining high standards, and embracing innovation have enabled the company to produce a successful portfolio that players have downloaded more than 220 million times. However, in the competitive industry of mobile gaming, you can never rest on your laurels.
HyperBeard realized data analytics was an opportunity for them to drive higher revenue and return on ad spend. Recognizing that they needed help to achieve their goals, the HyperBeard team partnered with Sonamine to maximize the company’s use of data analytics.
“Sonamine is great to work with. I love working with Sam. They just kind of help plug all the gaps when it comes to data analysis and the engineering side of that which is important for us. Awesome.”
According to HyperBeard CEO Alex Kozachenko, “marketing mobile games is actually quite simple.” Kozachenko goes on to say, “It comes down to LTV versus CPI. If your LTV is higher than your CPI, then you have a positive ROAS and you can scale.” He points out that the challenge comes in competing with mid-core and hardcore games that have larger profit margins, despite their higher cost per install, due to their enhanced ability to monetize.
Nick from Sonamine added, “To us, that base problem was just they couldn't get to the data and they didn't know how to use the data. They didn't trust the data.” When Sonamine performed a data audit, it found that HyperBeard wasn’t tracking some of the things the company wanted to track, which was a problem that they needed to fix before beginning a proper analysis.
Big gaming companies, such as Electronic Arts and Activision, have strong analytics teams that help them drive revenue and profits. However, many smaller publishers struggle to effectively use data.
“Most of the data is probably not great. Like we found probably 30% of the data will be erroneous and not consistent. If you look at the same thing from two places, you get two different answers. So a lot of it is just getting the data pipes and getting the data literacy up,” Nick said.
Additionally, many publishers have a limited ability to move players from one title in their portfolio to another because their games don’t all appeal to the same demographic. However, “at HyperBeard, all of our games are cute and casual. They all appeal to the same demographic, women 16 to 35. For us, the opportunity is much larger. We just need to know how to capture it,” Kozachenko stated.
HyperBeard partnered with Sonamine to find ways to better utilize data across all of its games. Sonamine performed a data audit and analysis and then cleaned up HyperBeard’s data pipelines and ran data validation so that common user IDs were used and referenced.
The Sonamine team also created standard tables for portfolio analysis, created and maintained reports, performed user flow analysis on HyperBeard’s portfolio of games, and calculated the portfolio value of each user so the company could optimize its user acquisition spend.
This solution provided both immediate results and long-term gains. Sonamine provided HyperBeard with the tools to generate its own reports and run its own analysis based on data that was now clean, organized, and reliable. In essence, the end result of the project helped HyperBeard become a data-oriented company.
“We looked at a campaign running Unity ads. Spent about $15,000 and actually plateaued at around 60% ROAS in the game that we were running it on. However, when we looked at the portfolio view, we actually found that we had broken even by 75 and around 15% profit by day 90. That just wasn't visible before Sonamine was able to jump in and help us to merge that data.”
HyperBeard brought Sonamine on board to “pull together the data to analyze portfolio LTV,” according to Kozachenko. However, the value the company received extended well beyond this specific task.
“One of the things that they're able to help us with is just really to just dive in and take a look at the data and see where the growth opportunities are. They put together an analysis that showed us kind of the most ideal flow from one game to another, whether that's the initial game or the second game, or the third game, and how we should be acquiring users and how we should be pushing users to other titles.
That's a really nice thing because a lot of times in analytics it's not that you don't have the data, although that was an issue sometimes for us. It's more that you don't necessarily know what the right questions are to ask because you haven't asked them before. Sonamine is able to, with their breadth of experience, kind of take a look at the data and then ask the right questions and give us some answers and solutions that we can then implement to drive higher portfolio LTV.”
Before working with Sonamine, HyperBeard wasn’t sure how users were moving around its apps and games. According to Nick, the partnership allowed HyperBeard to find “really good ways to advertise for users in one game and move the users around the portfolio.”
With a wealth of data now at its fingertips, HyperBeard was able to calculate the tangible value of its portfolio of games, optimize its user acquisition and ad spend, and determine the most profitable ways to direct users between games in its portfolio. Kozachenko says the company expects to grow its UA budgets by 100%-200% in 2024 thanks to Sonamine’s data analysis.
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For a limited time until June 2024, Sonamine is offering a 60 day money back guarantee to Braze customers. Come experience the ease and simplicity of the First Time Spender Nudge package and watch your conversions soar.
