Compliant mobile performance measurement

Star Stable is the #1 ranked and fastest-growing horse game in the world. The game is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that fosters global player interaction, allowing users to engage, communicate, and explore the enchanting world of Jorvik from horseback.

While the game offers free access up to level 5, users can unlock the full breadth of Jorvik’s features by becoming a Star Rider through a one-time payment or by choosing from a variety of subscription options. As Star Riders, players gain access to thousands of exclusive quests, diverse horse breeds, social interactions with friends, seasonal events, and active participation in the community.

Compatible across iOS, Android, and desktop platforms, Star Stable seamlessly adapts to users’ preferences, ensuring continuity in the gaming experience regardless of the chosen device.

For Parents:
Star Stable Online is a fun and safe online adventure game tailored for children between the ages of 9 and 18. Each player has the opportunity to ride and care for their own horses, embark on quests, participate in competitions, and become a part of an epic story.
For more information about the game, please visit Star Stable’s dedicated parent portal

Star Stable started as a web-only game, moving into iOS in 2021 and most recently, Android this October (2023). All data tracking and creative and campaign management are run by an in-house team of 8 marketers and an internal BI team.

In its 12th year, Star Stable is a galloping success with more than 25 million registrations on Desktop. But mobile poses a whole new set of challenges. Added to this, being a child-directed app means legal and compliance concerns.

Being on web only, Google Analytics was all they needed to measure their performance. But as the transition to iOS began, an MMP became a necessity. “If you would like to run your ads on platforms like TikTok or Meta, you need an MMP. It’s almost impossible to implement their SDKs alone, whereas implementing Singular’s SDK solves everything and the data integration is extremely easy,” explains Fergan Kitapli, Sr. Performance Marketing & UA Manager at Star Stable Entertainment AB.

Aside from the challenge of now needing an MMP to succeed on mobile, starting on iOS meant that SKAdNetwork was another major challenge for the team at Star Stable to get ahead of. “We are not able to see user-level data owing to Apple’s rules. This means that we’ve had to build our own processes in the back end to try to map our data coherently. Fergan explains, “SKAdNetwork only allows us a very limited conversion window of 48 hours. This is extremely limiting as our game is free-to-play up to the fifth level, which takes, on average, 38 days of play.”

Fergan adds that owing to this business model, Star Stable focuses on cost per registration, necessitating sign-up to play. “This is not the best way to optimize the campaign delivery from a UA perspective. We would like to optimize the campaign delivery according to the purchase or revenue event, like we now do on Android, but on iOS it’s just impossible.”

Another challenge for the Star Stable team was needing all their data within their data warehouse (Big Query) to better measure their performance.

Singular’s strong foundation and specialization with GDPR and Coppa-Compliance topped the list for why Singular was selected by Star Stable, closely followed by Singular’s market-leading thought leadership, knowledge, and innovation with SKAdNetwork. As a company new to mobile and digging into the complexities of compliance and SKAN, Singular was the MMP they felt most able to hold their hand and guide them to optimal setup and measurement.

While Singular had already been selected for Star Stable before Fergan joined the company, he notes that the advanced settings that Singular provides, are a major advantage as they can customize their tracking specific to the intricate needs of Star Stable rather than trying to work with pre-configured and immovable options. He also really enjoys the easy network integration capabilities and believes that Singular’s easy integration with thousands of networks was a major factor in the original decision to choose Singular as a partner.

“We are extremely happy to work with Singular. We love our account managers, they are super helpful. At the beginning, we asked a ton of questions to ensure that things were set up and running smoothly and they were always patient and available and would give us detailed explanations as needed. The product is also easy enough to get a hang of that since that initial settling period, we are very self-sufficient,” says Fergan.

The team at Star Stable has also chosen to slowly adopt new features so that they can adapt to existing ones before moving to the next challenge. One of these is Singular’s creative reporting which they have recently become familiar with, “now we can see our ROI metrics alongside the creative breakdowns and share this with our internal creative studio.” Fergan explains that for optimal campaigns, the best way to keep down UA costs, specifically on TikTok, is to refresh the creatives every 10 days. “The creative report from Singular helps us to pinpoint our best-performing creatives so that we can make small adjustments rather than always coming up with new concepts. The reports also help us monitor performance across networks so we can move our budgets around accordingly.”

Talking about the day-to-day, Fergan shares, “As a team leader, Singular is super helpful for me as we are using more than 10 networks and every network has IOS and Android campaigns. Thanks to Singular, I don’t have to log into each of these platforms every day. I just track all the performance in just one single dashboard because I have created a custom report for myself. In this report, I can see how each network is performing according to the cost per install, cost per registration, and also day 30 day and day 90 ROI on the business-related stuff. So it makes my life easier…”

Lastly, the Star Stable team can easily transfer their data directly to their BigQuery data warehouse so that they can combine their data and analyze their performance on an entire business level.

Combining all performance analytics and reporting across web, iOS, and Android with Singular’s cross-device functionality.