3 Creative Strategies to Maximize Homer City`s CVR and IVR Using Interactive Endcards

Homer City is one of Mynet’s latest releases, published in February 2020. Our creative studio Mindworks partnered with Mynet to provide them with a creative strategy that would focus on two main goals:

1. Acquire quality users at scale
2. Increase the game’s exposure

Spoiler alert: this partnership has been a success, as the Mindworks team managed to use their creative expertise to get Homer City to the top of the charts! So how did they do it?

Let’s talk about Homer City

If you’re not familiar with this game, Homer City was published in February 2020 by Mynet. It’s a free baseball game that tests the players’ batting skills and the goal is pretty straightforward: smash the most building windows before the time is up.

In terms of gameplay, Homer City features simple and clear mechanics: players earn coins as they advance to the next round and they can use those coins to customize their character or unlock new playable characters. The 10th round features a “boss fight” where players compete against an extremely difficult opponent for a special prize (no spoilers!). The sound effects are also pretty interesting, with the sounds of smashing windows being particularly satisfying.

Typical rounds of Homer City.

3 creative strategies to make Homer City a success

In order to make this game a success, the Mindworks team created a set of interactive endcards and used 3 strategies to achieve their goal of making Homer City a popular new release:

1. Emphasize the game’s core gameplay feature: by focusing the ad creative on breaking the windows to generate that satisfying sound of smashing windows to get players to download the game

1. Add enticing special effects: by adding special effects to the flying baseball, the creatives manage to trigger players’ reflex of tapping the screen as they’re about to hit the ball, improving the ad creative’s engagement rates

1. Provide guidance: by providing players with hints on how and when to hit the baseball, then skipping to the download, this can successfully improve ROI

Using pointers to help players get the perfect hit

The power of interactive endcards

So why did the Mindworks team choose interactive endcards to get Homer City the exposure it needed to become a hugely popular game? Three main reasons:

1. Interactive endcards are significantly better at getting players’ attention quicker and easier than other formats
2. Unlike other interactive ad formats, interactive endcards make the transition to the download page seem much more natural
3. Compared to playable ads, interactive endcards are significantly shorter, so it takes less time for users to understand how to play the game, while at the same time saving on ad creative production costs

Click to play

Achievement unlocked: US Chart Topper

Our partnership with Mynet on Homer City started on February 14th. By efficiently targeting casual sports game fans, the Mindworks team was able to make good use of the creatives they built, resulting in some amazing achievements:

• 210 times more clicks on ad creatives
• 367 times more game downloads
• 69% increase in CVR
• 42% increase in IVR

Thanks to these amazing results, Homer City hit the #1 spot on the Free Games chart in the US market and stayed there for several days. In fact, the game is so popular that it’s still in the Top 10 charts, with no signs of ranking down.

What our partners said about this project

We spoke with Sinan Icer, Director of Growth at Mynet Publishing & Funpac Games and here’s what he had to say about this partnership:

“The Mindworks team has produced incredible interactive playable ads for our superstar baseball game, Homer City. While optimizing the campaigns, you need to find the right balance between your creative performance and CPI bids. Thanks to these highly engageable creatives produced by Mindworks, we have seen a CVR increase by more than 40% and a 70% boost to our IVR. Thanks to these engagement and conversion rates increasing dramatically, we were easily able to hit our CPI targets without affecting our volume.”

Want to become our next success story?

If you’ve read this far, we hope you’re interested in giving your games the success they deserve. Mindworks now offers a limited-time offer that gives you the chance to try an interactive endcard for free! Don’t miss your chance to get your free endcard produced by the Mindworks team, so make sure you contact us today!