How Did a Standalone Puzzle Game Top the Global Download Charts? Decoding the Winning Formula of the Hit Game

The mobile gaming market is diverse and complex, but hyper-casual games stand out with their pure and simple gameplay experience. These games, with their universal appeal and addictive mechanics, have successfully attracted hundreds of millions of users worldwide, emerging as a significant force in the mobile gaming industry.

This phenomenal standalone puzzle game is a prime example of success. By stripping away complex mechanics and intricate designs, it distinguished itself with a back-to-basics core gameplay loop, winning the hearts of players globally and securing a top spot on casual game charts.

I. Product Introduction

In November 2024, the game’s DAU (Daily Active Users) surpassed 40 million, while its MAU (Monthly Active Users) reached 150 million. By March, downloads surged by 34%, exceeding 100 million and claiming the top position on the global mobile game download charts.

Source: Internet

Over a 365-day promotional period, the game accumulated 37,479 creative ad sets and deployed over 131,920 ad campaigns, generating massive market visibility.

For ad creatives, the game primarily used vertical videos (90.7%), with a core strategy focused on showcasing gameplay. The ads leveraged the classic "near-failure to instant success" design to trigger a sense of satisfaction, incorporating elements like color-changing blocks and irregular puzzles to diversify the experience. Additionally, some ads featured real players, while others innovatively blended short dramas with puzzle mechanics on platforms like TikTok to enhance engagement.

Source: AppGrowing

In terms of channels, the game adopted a diversified approach. Beyond Meta and Google Ads, it strategically partnered with global ad platforms such as Mintegral, Unity Ads, AppLovin, and Flat Ads to build a comprehensive user acquisition network. Geographically, it pursued a "dual-engine" globalization strategy, targeting both mature markets (e.g., the U.S., Germany) and high-potential emerging markets (e.g., the Philippines, Turkey), ensuring balanced coverage across regions.

Source: AppGrowing

In the market environment where global user acquisition costs continue to rise, the game faces challenges in optimizing ad placements. To further expand market scale and brand influence, the current development focus is on continuously acquiring core user groups with high engagement and retention rates while improving ad monetization efficiency through refined operations, ultimately maximizing both user scale and commercial returns. However, in achieving these goals, it faces core issues such as rising user acquisition costs, slow growth in download rates, and ROAS falling short of expectations. To address these critical pain points, Flat Ads has custom-built a multi-dimensional growth engine.

II. Flat Ads Global Marketing Engine

1. User Acquisition Cost Optimization

In the era where traffic dividends have peaked, game developers must establish precise traffic funnels to maximize the value of every marketing budget, avoid ineffective placements, and minimize trial-and-error costs.

On the bidding end, Flat Ads combines real-time data analysis with a tiered bidding strategy, capturing high-value users while implementing intelligent price suppression mechanisms for low-quality channels. It also increases placements during low-competition periods to reduce bidding costs, resulting in a 22% overall decrease in single-user acquisition costs.

Additionally, Flat Ads leverages big data to analyze user historical data, establishing a complete user segmentation model. By deeply tracking key user behavior paths, it pushes ads to the most suitable users, effectively enhancing ad effectiveness and achieving precise user acquisition. Furthermore, relying on extensive experience in similar game ad placements, Flat Ads thoroughly mines historical premium channel data and optimizes channel combinations based on the game's characteristics and target user profiles, significantly saving time and testing costs traditionally required to find target users and high-quality channels, achieving a 35% major increase in user acquisition efficiency.

2. Dual-Optimization Strategy Boosts Daily Installs

Flat Ads has a strong presence in both mature and emerging markets globally like the U.S., Canada, and Germany, as well as high-growth areas such as Turkey, Indonesia, and Brazil. Tailored to regional characteristics, our team has developed a library of 200+ high-conversion creatives. Using Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) technology, we intelligently combine creative elements, with core gameplay showcases (45%) directly boosting conversion rates, situational short dramas (30%) effectively increasing user dwell time, and special effects-driven creatives (25%) significantly improving click-through rates. This intelligent creative system has helped increase the game’s average daily downloads by 37%, consistently breaking through user acquisition bottlenecks.

In channel expansion, Flat Ads leverages an exclusive developer traffic ecosystem covering 200+ countries and 700 million+ users, enabling the hit game to reach hundreds of millions of devices daily and efficiently engage global users. Additionally, our multi-dimensional data model rapidly identifies high-quality traffic, while a dynamic budget allocation mechanism concentrates 80% of the budget on high-ROI traffic. This combined approach has driven daily impressions to exceed 120 million, with premium channels consistently contributing over 65% of total downloads.

Powered by the dual engines of "intelligent creatives + precision channels," the game achieved 30 consecutive days of growth in daily new downloads, peaking at over 30,000 downloads in a single day. This success has established a sustainable global growth model.

3. Precision Operation Continuously Boost ROAS

As a leading advertising platform in the industry, Flat Ads has deeply invested in the casual gaming sector, operating hundreds of hit H5 mini-games that rank at the top of various casual gaming charts. These premium traffic pools cover various gamer demographics, with daily active users exceeding tens of millions, providing this game with a precise and vast pool of high-quality users, offering a golden user acquisition scenario that combines scale effects with precise targeting capabilities.

Within the ad placement chain, Flat Ads has established an intelligent A/B testing system to continuously test differentiated materials and channel combinations, along with the synergy effect of ad placements. Finally, regarding user touchpoints, it finds efficient placement windows for each region through time-segmented testing, continuously exploring optimal solutions for effective conversions.

Relying on its golden traffic and continuously optimized testing systems, Flat Ads builds a complete closed loop from user acquisition to conversion, successfully achieving a 30%-40% increase in D1&D7 ROAS.

III. Impressive Results

1. Main Market ROAS Anchors Industry Benchmark

In mature markets, 30-day ROAS grew from 10% on Day 1 to 120%, a 12-fold increase. Emerging markets also performed exceptionally well, rising from 8% on Day 1 to 105%, a 13-fold growth. The game achieved steady revenue growth across all markets.

2. Daily Installs Breakthrough Across All Regions

Core markets maintained stable dominance, with daily scale reaching 1,800–2,200. Russia sustained a high range of 1,500–2,000, demonstrating the strong user stickiness and stable monetization capabilities of mature markets.

Emerging markets exhibited explosive growth. Southeast Asia stood out, with Indonesia reaching a daily scale of 15,000–17,000. LatinAmerica also showed strong momentum, with Brazil and Mexico both exceeding 1,000 daily, reflecting robust growth potential and significant commercial promise.

As a globally leading intelligent marketing platform, Flat Ads remains committed to advancing performance marketing through precision delivery technologies and global channel resources. We provide global enterprises with more efficient and intelligent digital marketing solutions. Through continuously optimized algorithm models and localized operational strategies, we empower partners to reach target users and maximize overseas market expansion. Moving forward, Flat Ads looks forward to collaborating with more outstanding companies to explore new global opportunities and achieve sustained brand value growth.