Case Study: How to Promote Mobile Game Using Telegram Ads

Learn how Telegram advertising helped Top Games Inc. achieve the best benchmarks in the mobile game industry: They gained a CPM of $5.37 and a CPI of $9.42

50% CPM relative to the industry benchmark
Fourfold CPI decrease relative to the industry benchmark

About Top Games Inc.

Top Games Inc. develops and publishes mobile games focused on the global market, especially in North America and Europe.

The product being promoted: Evony: The King’s Return

Challenges

New mobile games appear on Google Play and the App Store every day. Mobile game developers constantly need to improve their marketing metrics like CPI.

How can this be done in the face of growing competition? By trying new advertising tools where there is no competition, such as Telegram. That’s why Top Games decided to test Telegram advertising on channels and groups.

Project Goal

Promote mobile game “Evony: The King’s Return” and reduce mobile app cost per install by testing Telegram ads.

Solutions “How to market mobile game”

Telegram hit the 500 million active user milestone in the days following backlash over WhatsApp’s changing privacy policy in January 2021.

Top Games marketers came across this information at the beginning of the summer and decided to try advertising in the messenger.

“We decided to take a chance on it.” — Pandy Shaw, Marketer from Top Games Inc.

There was no official advertising platform on Telegram because it was a messenger, not a social network.

That’s why the marketing team from Top Games googled some key phrases like “advertiser/promotion on Telegram” and found Telega.io.

“Telega.io seemed very professional to us because it has more than 1,400 English verified channels. Also, there are specialists from Telega.io who speak English well and are always willing to help.” — Pandy Shaw, Marketer from Top Games Inc.

Strategy “How to advertise the mobile game on Telegram”

To succeed in the Telegram campaign, it is essential to take two steps.

The first step: Choose suitable channels. For the promotion of “Evony: The King’s Return” the Telega.io team selected a strategy to target the average person and advertised in general English-language topics such as Blogs / Books, Audiobooks & Podcasts / Computer science / Curious Facts / Education / Humor & Memes / Other.

The second step: Create an advertising post that triggers the install of the game.

For fast-launching, Top Games marketers took ad materials (including pictures and videos) that had good performance on other promotion channels and then changed them to fit the ad layout in Telegram.

They wanted to see how much a picture’s theme would affect the ad click rate.

After some data analysis, they found that the video ad was more appealing to the users on Telegram, which led to a higher rate of post clicks and app downloads.

Results

The advertising campaign lasted two weeks.

“It was our first promotion on Telegram. Well, we can say the results were not bad.” — Pandy Shaw, a marketer from Top Games Inc.

Division by device:

Android — 92%
iOS — 8%

CPM

According to the Mobile App Industry Benchmarks from Customer Acquisition, the CPM at Mobile Games in the summer of 2021 on Android, when the ad campaign was launched, was at $8. The Telegram CPM for “Evony: The King’s Return” on Android was half the price: $5.37.

Evony: The King’s Return belongs to the strategy genre. If we compare the CPM results by category, then the CPM of the promoted game corresponds to the lowest CPM in the “Word” category of games.

CTR

The CTR of Telegram advertising was 0.54%.

CPI

The CPI of Telegram advertising was $9.42. According to Customer Aquisition, the CPI from Telegrams was the lowest, compared with the CPI from other social networks.

“It’s a pleasure to work with the Telega team since they understand the Telegram users so well that they always provide useful suggestions. And they can give timely feedback whenever we have doubts and questions. Besides the professionalism in promoting on Telegram, the Telega team’s response speed is also impressive. On the whole, the team is worth working with during long-term cooperation.“ — Pandy Shaw, marketer from Top Games Inc.