Homa Games makes a splash in the Chinese market with smart strategies and next-gen attribution

This success story is produced in partnership with Mintegral, a global mobile advertising platform, providing user acquisition, monetization and creative solutions for advertisers and mobile publishers.

Background

Homa Games is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world with people all around the globe playing their games. Homa Games develops games internally and is in partnership with more than 200 handpicked studios worldwide. They have published more than 30 games with titles such as Z Escape, Sky Roller, and NERF Epic Pranks! Millions of users enjoy Homa Games’ creations on a daily basis. The company is headquartered in Paris, France, and has four more international offices around the world. In February 2021, Homa Games raised a record $15M seed round from Idinvest Partners, e.ventures & renowned business angels.

Their story

The team at Homa Games knew that the Chinese market presented a lot of opportunities.

Hyper-casual games are increasingly popular in China, which boasts a massive number of devices (200m iOS and 550m Android). The market is also growing in value ($25B for the Chinese mobile market), with user value steadily increasing, even as valuable as in the US in some cases.

Making the most of the massive opportunity in China was a key objective of Homa Games. They wanted to make China one of their main markets in terms of value, with a target of 10% revenue by the end of the year. They decided to address the iOS market first as it is easier to enter than the Android market, which is fragmented with the Google Play store not available in China.

But expanding into a new region comes with its own unique challenges. Aside from working with the typical global ad partners, there’s a lot of value in working with many home-grown ad partners like Mintegral. In-app purchases are complicated and require additional licenses, so ad revenue is a bigger deal. And not surprisingly, there are many local monetization partners like Mintegral, Tencent, and Pangle that you also want to work with. Creatives need to be personalized and localized to Chinese tastes, and there are more innovative creative types like splash ads and native ads to adopt. You need to work within local regulations and your tech needs to be up to par too with requirements, like local servers.

All this work is multiplied when dealing with several titles in your portfolio and that all equates to a lot of data to sort through. You need to collect, combine, and normalize the data to visualize your reporting across campaigns and understand what’s working and what’s not.

“Bringing Homa Games fun-packed titles into the Chinese market was an important strategic initiative for us, and we wanted to make sure our execution was flawless. Partnering with Mintegral to acquire and monetize high-value gamers in-region and Singular to attribute and analyze performance was key to our successful entry and continued growth in China“

— Xiaolong Zhang, APAC Growth Director, Homa Games

Their Solution

The Homa Games team used smart user acquisition strategies, winning ad partners like Mintegral, and powerful measurement and reporting tech from Singular to make a splash into the Chinese market.

Singular provided the Homa Games team with measurement and analytics across all their advertising and monetization partners and unified a variety of data sets like campaign data, ad monetization data, audience data, and bid data. With Singular’s Mobile Attribution, they’re able to understand their entire user journey from acquisition to re-engagement. Singular’s powerful linking and deeplinking toolset helped ensure measurement across all platforms, even SMS, influencers, and social.

Tapping into Singular’s Performance and ROI Analytics, the Homa Games team was able to analyze the impact of every ad dollar by automatically connecting and combining cost data from thousands of sources with attribution data. They were able to gain incremental performance lifts by unlocking granular ROAS at the source, campaign, creative, publisher, and keyword levels.

The design team at Homa Games leverages Singular’s Creative Analytics to visualize ad assets and their performance in a side-by-side view. It’s essential to being able to improve their storytelling and engage local audiences more effectively.

Selecting the right advertising and monetization partner was critical to their success. And Mintegral proved to be a valuable partner both in terms of user acquisition and monetization. Mintegral’s user acquisition strategies and premium in-house traffic, helped the Homa Games team to acquire high-quality players at scale while keeping the CPI at a low and steady level.

Mindworks, Mintegral’s in-house creative studio also created a set of high-quality video ads for Craft Island as well as localized the creatives to ensure they are suited for the Chinese market. And as Homa Games’ top monetization partner in the region, Mintegral delivered highly competitive eCPMs.

Both the Mintegral and Singular teams provided hands-on support and service along their journey. They were highly responsive and went above and beyond to provide personalized support to the Homa Games team.

It’s always a pleasure to help high-caliber partners like Homa Games enter the Chinese market and find sustainable growth there. Our top-tier premium traffic, creative capabilities, and industry-low CPIs, combined with Homa Games’ fantastic hyper-casual portfolio, showed the importance of working with the right partner in a competitive market. The Homa Games team has the talent to succeed in China and we look forward to working with them in the future.”

— Hector Almeida, Business Development Director at Mintegral

Their Results

With the winning combination of smart, localized user acquisition strategies and the right partners, the Homa Games successfully expanded into China and continues to see growth in the market.

Mintegral was critical for both user acquisition and monetization, providing high-quality users and world-class support to ensure campaign success.

Singular saved the Homa Games team 15+ hours weekly in manual reporting by providing a complete picture of their performance. That meant they spent less time trying to gather and transform data, and more time optimizing campaigns. But most importantly, they had the accurate, granular, and timely performance insights they needed to efficiently scale their efforts.