User Acquisition Insights with Misha Syrotiuk

In this series of articles, UA managers will answer six questions to share their insights on UA and industry trends.

Misha Syrotiuk is Head of Growth at Huuuge Games, an international games developer and publisher, focused on the fast-growing multibillion-dollar mobile gaming market. Huuuge is well known for its popular social casino titles including Huuuge Casino Slots, Star Slots Casino, Billionaire Casino Slots, and casual games such as Traffic Puzzle and Dominoes Party.

1. In addition to adjoe’s platform, which other UA partners are you working with?

At Huuuge, we cooperate with main UA partners for mobile games. This includes the main social and search channels but also ad networks, programmatic DSPs, discovery platforms, and direct publishers. We are also experimenting with less obvious media types – for example, influencer marketing, cooperation with phone manufacturers, etc.

2. What are your most significant learnings from the past 12 months?

Not all media sources are made equal. If your short-term performance goals are the same for all UA partners, you may end up not working with some of them, as they may perform differently in the short term versus the long term. Do make sure that you not only measure your short-term performance (for example ROAS D7, CPA, or retention) but also your long-term performance (for example on Day 30 or Day 90).

If your short-term performance goals are the same for all UA partners, you may end up not working with some of them, as they may perform differently in the short term versus the long term.

Misha Syrotiuk, Head of Growth at Huuuge Games

3. Can you tell us a bit about your top users?

Social casino gamers are indeed very niche. They like playing slots and are typically older than, for example, users of hypercasual games. A lot of our UA partners provide targeting opportunities that enable us to target the right audience. With others, we are able to target publishers with whom we believe our users are spending their free time. With discovery platforms, users like to try our game as well as being motivated by the platform itself and may gain additional rewards.

4. When looking at your user base, did you see any changes in behavior during the pandemic?

Yes, we noticed that users were spending more time in the game, and session times increased. On the other hand, UA costs decreased, so a lot of performance metrics improved.

Users were in general spending more time online, and our retargeting efforts paid off, since we were able to find them and target them with the right message. We also made sure that there was more content in our games, as users could easily jump between different mobile games. One of the ways to keep them engaged with our games was to provide more and more interesting content around playing slots.

5. Which types of sources do you typically work with?

Since we operate in a niche and very competitive market, we try to make sure that we are present on all types of inventory. This includes gaming and nongaming. It might seem like it’s easier to advertise our games within gaming inventory. But, because there is heavy competition, sometimes, CPMs are cheaper on nongaming inventory.

The challenge here comes with the right targeting and creatives, so that ad impressions are not wasted. In the last years, we also saw an increase in loyalty and rewarded publishers being part of our UA portfolio (like adjoe for example). We are happy to see both the scale of our activities and the quality of users.

6. And last but not least, what is your favorite mobile game?

My favorite mobile game is one from our portfolio – Traffic Puzzle!