Spicy Horse Games approached Carrot to help them add Open Graph Stories to their game. The results speak for themselves.
Update: This post was written back when we were known as Carrot. Since then, we’ve rebranded to Teak.
“In our experience, Carrot is to player acquisition and retention what canned spinach is to Popeye. Unlike canned spinach, opening, integrating and maintaining Carrot doesn’t require special tools or herculean squeezing power. It’s a fast install, fast results super-charger for your online and mobile games.” – American McGee
Background
Spicy Horse Games is the largest independent game developer in Shanghai. Founded in 2007 by American McGee, they have developed 8 games for a range of platforms including PC, Mobile, Facebook and Xbox30/PS3.
Goals
Spicy Horse had two medium sized Facebook games that needed a boost. The goal was to increase the visibility of the games and also encourage the use of premium content. They also had limited developer time to devote to the task.
Approach
Use frictionless sharing and Open Graph Stories to allow fans to spread the word out the games.
To increase visibility, Spicy Horse found stories that represent the core actions in their app. Ideally, these stories should be shared at least once per game session.
In BigHead BASH players “play maps,” “get weapons,” and “earn action awards” in the course of a gaming session.
Since these tasks are frequently accomplished, they are ideal story candidates. Additionally, because they broadcast what players actually do in the game, they turn out to be effective marketing.
To encourage premium content use, stories highlight when players use an item that costs in-game currency.
In Crazy Fairies there are cosmetic upgrades that players can use to personalize their experience. Stories get triggered when players use these items.
Spicy Horse’s Community and Marketing Manager, Kelly, created the stories using Carrot. Using the “download code” button she was able to generate a document that contained the code her programming team needed to trigger the stories.
Developer time for integration was less than a day. Once set up, Kelly had the creative control she needed to do tests and experiments without bothering the developers for changes.
Results
Since integrating Carrot into BigHead BASH and Crazy Fairies, Spicy Horse has seen impressive results.
Crazy Fairies
In one month, a mere 446,000 posts resulted in:
- 1.5M impressions
- 5,500 clicks
- 6% conversion increase
- 18x revenue increase (that is not a typo)
In summary: For each day of the month, for every 5 players that played, 1 new player was acquired. This is a 25% increase user acquisition.
BigHead BASH
In the same month, 1.9M posts resulted in:
- 4.8M impressions
- 23,000 clicks
- 7% conversion increase
- 3.5x revenue increase
Once again, for every 5 players that played each day, 1 new player was acquired.
Conclusion
Spicy Horse was thrilled with the results of using Open Graph Stories through Carrot. They were able to increase their audience, revenue and overall app ratings with minimal investment. They were also able to reduce their marketing spend by switching from display ads to more effective social posts.
American McGee was so pleased with the the results, he instructed Kelly to come to our office and buy us lunch. We had waffles. They were delicious. Thanks, American.
– Pat