Magic Sort: How Creative Innovation Led to 32% Lower CPI & 78% Higher IPM

Context and Mobile Gaming Market Challenges (Early 2025)

The mobile gaming market ended 2024 with unprecedented advertising expenditure. Global ad spending exceeded one trillion dollars for the first time in history, showing 10.5% growth. Peak activity occurred in Q4, when $324 billion was spent – nearly a third of the annual budget.

This trend significantly intensified competition, and by early 2025, casual and hypercasual game developers faced a typical paradox of an overheated market: increasing marketing budgets no longer led to proportional growth in quality installs. For gaming companies, this created a chain of interconnected problems:

• Rising acquisition costs. CPI for games increased by 15-26% in Q4 2024, forcing marketers to either increase budgets or reduce acquisition volume. For many projects with low LTV, this made paid user acquisition unprofitable.
• Decreased ad impression effectiveness. IPM (installs per 1000 impressions) fell by 33% in Q4 2024. This meant significantly more ad impressions were required to attract the same number of users.
• iOS targeting limitations. After Apple's ATT implementation, the percentage of users granting double opt-in (allowing both system and in-game permission requests) remained at approximately 15-16% (AppsFlyer data, 2024). This substantially narrowed precise targeting possibilities, complicated hypothesis testing, and made campaign measurement more difficult.
• Standard creative saturation. Players stopped responding to traditional ad formats. For example, standard playable ads for liquid sorting, tower defense, and other popular genres showed decreasing effectiveness.
• Low user retention. The average Day 1 Retention for hypercasual games was around 25%, meaning 75% of acquired users were lost within the first day. Given the increased acquisition costs, this critically affected app economics.

Under these conditions, casual game developers and marketers faced the challenge of finding an approach that would simultaneously reduce CPI, increase conversion, improve retention, and ultimately enhance advertising ROI.

Magic Sort: Key Issues and Metrics (January 2025)

Magic Sort – a casual puzzle game with liquid sorting mechanics. By January 2025, analysis of the game's metrics revealed significant underperformance compared to market benchmarks:

Key issues requiring solutions:

Low ad campaign effectiveness

• Weak conversion and insufficient creative appeal
• Low audience interest in advertising materials on both platforms
• Existing creatives used without significant changes for over 3 months

Suboptimal ad budget allocation

• iOS/Android spending ratio was 60%/40%, instead of the recommended 40%/60%
• Over 80% of the budget spent on standard ad formats susceptible to creative burnout

Retention and monetization issues

• D1 Retention 17% below successful casual games, indicating insufficient engagement
• ARPU lagged behind the average for similar puzzles, reducing marketing ROI

Creative burnout

• "Color sorting" mechanics in creatives had become a visual cliché that players no longer responded to
• Lack of emotional triggers and dynamic elements in existing advertising materials

Collectively, these factors created a vicious cycle: decreased ad effectiveness → increased CPI → reduced acquisition volume → lower overall revenue → marketing budget cuts → further acquisition decline. Breaking this cycle required a radical update to the creative strategy.

Tasks Assigned to the Artik Team in January 2025

• Reduce CPI on both platforms by at least 20%
• Increase IPM by at least 50%
• Improve Retention D1 to at least 27%
• Optimize budget distribution between platforms
• Increase ARPU by at least 15%

New Game Creatives and Strategy (January-March 2025)

After analyzing the situation, we developed a creative renewal strategy for Q1 2025 – a time when users had already received new devices during the holiday season, and advertising competition began to decrease after December's peak levels.

To capture audience attention, we created three completely different creatives:

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•  Creative 1: "Kitten Asking for Milk" The player must pour milk for a cute kitten by sorting liquids between bottles. The emotional mechanics are built on sympathy and care.

•  Creative 2: "Kitten Rescue" An emotional creative where a kitten is trapped in a bottle. The player sorts liquids to free the character, intensifying feelings of empathy.

• Creative 3: "Race Against Time" A dynamic and tense scenario where bottles gradually rise upward. If the player doesn't finish in time, the game ends. This approach leverages excitement and a sense of urgency.

Why These Particular Creatives? Logic and Testing Results

We deliberately chose these three scenarios. Each approach addresses a specific hypothesis based on audience behavior analytics:

• Emotional triggers (kittens). Players respond more frequently to content with characters that evoke empathy or sympathy.
• Urgency and excitement (rising bottles). Time pressure causes players to engage more deeply.

We strategically chose the right time to experiment with new mechanics, noticing a growing trend toward higher CTRs in the gaming segment, which created favorable conditions for testing innovative creatives.

To find the optimal balance, we tested each creative with different numbers of clicks before transitioning to the app store (1, 3, 10, 20, and unlimited). This allowed us to identify the ideal engagement level for each scenario.

📊 Key Metrics Changes During Creative Implementation

During the three-month project, we sequentially implemented and optimized new creatives, tracking their impact on key performance indicators:

CPI Dynamics, $ (January-March 2025):

IPM Dynamics (January-March 2025):

Notably, each new creative not only improved metrics but also demonstrated strong synergy with the previous ones. The combination of emotional creatives featuring kittens and the dynamic creative with an urgency element produced a stronger effect than they would have in isolation.

Results of New Creative Implementation

The campaign, which ran from January to March 2025, achieved significant improvements across all key metrics:

*ARPU calculated for the first 30 days after installation — this is the timeframe UA managers use when comparing revenue to traffic costs. Lifetime-ARPU (ARPMAU) is intentionally not provided here to avoid mixing different time bases.

Particularly important is that the effect of implementing the new creatives was comprehensive:

• Reduced acquisition costs allowed for expanded audience reach
• Improved retention metrics confirmed we were attracting higher-quality users
• Increased ARPU and projected LTV provided a long-term economic effect

This result clearly demonstrates that emotionally engaged audiences are not only cheaper to acquire but also significantly more profitable in the long term.

Successful Actions Checklist:

Here's what's worth repeating on any project:

•  Test different emotional mechanics and characters to find the optimal audience response.
• Experiment with the number of clicks and engagement levels in playable creatives.
•  Use a multi-channel approach to diversify risks and maximize reach.
•  Measure not only CPI and IPM but also the impact of creatives on ARPU and LTV to see the complete picture.
•  Separately analyze and optimize metrics for different platforms.
•  Choose strategically appropriate timing for campaigns — periods of decreased competitor activity may be more economical for UA campaigns.
•  Regularly update creatives to avoid audience burnout.

Want similar results for your game? Contact us — we'll help make your project even more successful!