How TapNation utilized Replai as a single source of truth for all creative video data

Jatin Mittal is Manager of User Acquisition and Monetisation at TapNation, a Hyper Casual game developer. Recently they hit their 500M+ download milestone, an incredible achievement for a company only two years old. Given this rapid growth, Replai has been key in reducing the administrative burden of tracking so many metrics; improving communication between the creative and UA teams; and in identifying and reducing creative fatigue. We spoke to Jatin about the reasons behind TapNation becoming an early Replai adopter, and what it has meant for him and his team.

In a story that many in digital marketing will recognize, a key frustration for Jatin was the lack of data available for his creative teams. Creative analysis was a painstaking process, requiring cross-referencing across multiple platforms.

“We are producing up to 20 creative concepts per week, that are deployed across all our user acquisition networks. To analyze the performance of these newly uploaded creatives every week is a repetitive task and takes a lot of resources, particularly when each platform has its own specifications and requirements. As a result, we’re analyzing data from 50 to 80 videos a week, with multiple data sources”.

Jatin Mittal – Lead UA at TapNation

The result was a creative team who found it difficult to clearly identify which creatives were working and which weren’t. UA teams, in turn, lost time searching through platforms to provide a single source of truth for their creative counterparts.

Searching for a solution

Luckily for Jatin, Replai’s arrival in the market perfectly coincided with his search for a solution. An early adopter, TapNation was immediately convinced that Replai was the MMP for creatives (Mobile Measurement Partner) that they had been searching for. Within a week, the creative team was able to start working with data from their dashboard.

The difference was apparent for Jatin himself, who at the time was UA lead for the popular title “Guess their answer”. Before Replai, Jatin was managing a localized campaign in 20 different countries, which required tracking across unique creatives tailored to the language of each country. It was bespoke work, taking painstaking hours to develop insights. Now, with the application of a filter, he has an immediate oversight into country performance.

“As the campaign manager pre- and post-Replai I could immediately tell the difference. Before I would have to open up each platform; Google Ads or Apple; and check what is happening in Colombia or Argentina and then cross reference that with analytics from Mintegral and others. I was wasting time jumping between platforms. With Replai I could simply filter by country and identify cross-platform performance in one place. There is no debating the amount of time we have saved with Replai.”

Jatin Mittal – Lead UA at TapNation

Fighting creative fatigue

One of the core challenges for any digital marketing team is keeping your creatives engaging. Without a way of tracking longer-term performance and trends, it can be impossible to proactively identify a drop in CTR for creatives spread out among a global audience. Less engaging creatives often leads to an overall dropoff in downloads and shortens the lifespan of the game itself. But this is no longer a challenge for TapNation:

“With Replai we can easily track where the CTR and CVR are going, but we can also indirectly track when we need to add new content to the creatives. It means that as well as refreshing our creatives at the right moment, we can also make data-driven changes to our storefront on platforms like Apple. We can ensure that we track and optimize every aspect of our digital marketing strategy.”

Jatin Mittal – Lead UA at TapNation

This has had a knock-on effect for communication with the creative team. Like many businesses, remote working has taken a toll on the way we keep each other up to date. These information gaps have been a barrier to creative production. However, TapNation’s creative team can now directly identify which creatives need a redesign through their dashboard. Equally, they can identify games with overall poor benchmarks to completely rethink the video strategy.

Data-driven creativity

Having worked with Replai for a longer period of time, Jatin has also identified a more strategic use for their historic data. Traditionally, the performance of past creatives does not inform new creative choices. After all, what can the performance of a video for a different game tell you about the most effective way to design a new video for an entirely new game?

The solution, according to Jatin, lies in how you identify trends. By tagging parameters like the background music, game mechanics or camera angle; benchmarks for past performance can inform the best parameters to apply to new creatives for performance. It means that Jatir and his team can identify whether a 2D, 3D, or cartoon style creative will perform best for a specific market. Because of Replai’s insights, TapNation now has a repository of successful parameters and concepts that the creative team can use to develop their next video.

The results are clear. Replai has enabled a more independent, data-driven creative team. This has reduced the burden on Jatin and his fellow UA Managers, enabling more strategic assessments of performance. By making use of historic data, TapNation is now able to avoid creative fatigue and learn from past creatives, even when they weren’t considered a success. So, would Jatin recommend Replai? “100%”

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