How to collect a million project participants through integration into Vkontakte applications

    This fall, more than a million people joined Red Quest . We found most of these people through Vkontakte. Today I want to talk about how we, the Grape agency , experimented with various formats of integration into applications and what results it brought.

    To begin with - a little about the game : Red Quest is an all-Russian project in the city quest format. United by the legend of saving the world and seeking to get a million rubles as a reward, every day the participants of the game (they are called Seekers) perform two types of tasks, “staff” (for intelligence, they can be done at the computer) and “intelligence” (command in real life).



    The audience of the project is young people aged 16 to 25 years (of course, active and friends with the Internet).

    Vkontakte is a great place to search for such people . We also used other social networks in the Red Quest SMM activity, however, the greatest coverage needed to achieve the set KPIs and directly attract traffic could only be provided by Vkontakte. Accordingly, the bet was made precisely on her.

    Initially, the main source of traffic from Vkontakte was the communities we developed and targeted advertising. At the same time, given the goal of attracting the maximum number of audiences in a short period of time, the emphasis was placed on direct advertising.

    The Vkontakte targeting worked pretty well: with its help, we attracted about 10% of all Seekers. At the same time, the task was not so simple: the fact is that the potential audience of Red Quest did not fit well into the framework set by targeting. It can not be limited geographically - in Red Quest, with the same success, you can play from anywhere in the world. It is difficult to limit it by age or interests - completing tasks can be interesting for both 14-year-old metallers and 30-year-old managers spending holidays in Goa. In such a situation, too broad a scope of targeting led to a decrease in CTR and, consequently, an increase in CPC.

    The solution to the problem was the creation of “targeted” creative for various audience clusters and the constant adjustment of messages. But here there are pitfalls: with an increase in targeting parameters, CPC grows automatically, and it is not a fact that the person who clicked on the ad will nevertheless become a participant in Red Quest.

    And here, just in time, the new Vkontakte rules came in , which allowed clicks on external links from applications on the service. Immediately after the introduction of the new rules, we started experimenting in this area. Here I must say thanks to the application developers who supported our experiment.

    As part of our collaboration with developers, elements related to Red Quest were integrated into popular applications. Surveys became one of these formats: application users were asked to answer a number of questions about Red Quest in order to receive special bonuses. Answers had to be found on redquest.mts.ru.
    Another approach was simpler: users of applications were asked for the code that was hidden in the blog entries of the leaders of the Seekers - Pasha Gitelman and Katya Pokatilova.

    A special case is integration with the Dig game. Its developer, the company Progrestar, branded the artifacts and clothes of the game’s characters with the Red Quest symbols, created a special Red Quest map where the player could find a fallen spaceship and gather a source of uninterrupted energy on its basis, and also made adjustments to the gameplay itself, settling on the islands players "victims of the fire" affected by natural disasters.

    As a result, we got a promotion mechanismhaving high characteristics of the duration of contact and involvement: starting to search for answers to questions or a hidden code, the user was immersed in the atmosphere of the game, learned about it and saw how others perform tasks. Moreover, in the case of the survey, we had the opportunity to direct the movement of the user on our site, showing him the most interesting points. In order to solve the problem of “cheaters” trying to get bonuses in applications by cunning, our copywriter Stepa Trifonov created new questions every few days, replacing the ones worked out.

    Thus, we got the opportunity to pay developers not just for contact or per click, but for registration and, in fact, for a new player.

    CPA (Cost Per Action) payment mechanism is also interesting for developers, offering a relevant audience, because in this case they can increase their income several times in relation to other systems for calculating advertising pay.

    Of course, we must take into account that the high performance of this mechanism in our case was strengthened by the game’s regulation unusual for city quests: firstly, it is free, secondly, you can participate in it from anywhere in the world, and thirdly, you can win it You can even register on the last day.

    That is, to save the world and win a million in the final quest of Red Quest on December 3, you can even register at the last moment.
    Thanks to this format, we were able to ensure a constant influx of new users, even by turning off ads, we still receive several thousand registrations per day.

    PS The Red Quest case is really unique, and there are a lot of interesting things in it besides the promotion on Vkontakte. Somehow later I will describe its other parties, in particular the viral element.


    Also popular now: