900% increased spend in the first 8 months with Singular

TutoTOONS is a mobile entertainment company focused on developing and publishing games for kids ages 3 to 12. Launched as a small startup back in 2014, TutoTOONS has since been rapidly growing and recently passed a 1B downloads milestone.

Intending to expand the kids’ mobile gaming industry and create engaging, high-quality games that offer a safe space online for children to have fun and learn in, TutoTOONS has developed an immense global fanbase and is continuously improving and developing exciting games for kids to play.

Right now, TutoTOONS is also open to onboard kids games developers who are looking for a publisher!

In 2.5 Years, TutoTOONS has grown from putting minimal efforts into ad monetization and no UA to two dedicated teams of 10 people in total. This has resulted in impressive ad revenue growth and UA spend from 0 to a few million annually, but as many companies know, with hypergrowth comes significant challenges.

TutoTOONS had the added challenge of needing to reach an underage market in a privacy-safe world. “Showing ads in kids apps is complicated and we have to do it properly, in an appropriate way”, explained Stefano Accossato, Head of UA & Ad Monetization. The pinnacle challenge for TutoTOONS (and any kids app) is that in a COPPA environment, no personal identifiers can be passed between parties (i.e. ad networks).

And so began TutoTOON’s journey to find the right MMP.

Stefano continued, “As soon as we went deeper into user acquisition and saw it as a way to grow the business, we also understood how difficult this would be in our line of business [kids apps]. We don’t collect identifiers or personal data.

TutoTOONS started their UA journey with the self attributing networks. “But they’re very limited and you put your whole trust into them and can’t be sure that the data and installs that are attributed can really be attributed to that campaign,” said Stefano. “We realized we needed to expand our channels to better understand our performance. But the big question was, how can that be done in a compliant way when all attribution is based on identifiers?”

And so began TutoTOON’s journey to find the right MMP.

Stefano happened to have heard about Singular at a conference and so they were thrown into the mix for evaluation. He said that right off the bat, the biggest surprise was that Singular offered both analytics and attribution within one package. “Usually you get attribution from an MMP but if you want to do very deep data analysis and quickly see all your cohorts and the cohort evolution of different metrics, at some point you need to integrate the MMP within a BI system. But this means two separate fees – one for the MMP and one for the analytics provider. At the beginning it sounded almost too good to be true that Singular was offering both in one, with competitive pricing!”

On top of that, “at the time, nobody really had a COPPA compliant solution for kids games that could do attribution and was certified. Nobody could do it. Singular couldn’t do it. But Singular stood out as the solution willing to collaborate and get involved in working directly with the compliance partners to figure out what was needed.”

Solution aside, Singular’s customer success and support really tipped the deck. “The support we received was really efficient. Not just in terms of communication but also constant attentiveness. We really felt (and feel) heard by their team.”

“To work with us, Singular had to build an attribution solution that met compliant protocols. They worked directly with our compliancy partners and managed to drive all the technical development and made all the necessary back end changes to make sure the attribution worked compliantly.”

Looking at where they have come to Singular today, Stefano says, “Today I can’t tell you what is happening within Singular’s code. I don’t read code. But the solution is very simple. Singular gave us a simple guideline to work with for each network and it shows us which identifiers we have to cut from the tracking links. No rocket science. We just need to be attentive when we do link creation and partner configuration. We also know that we can always reach out to Singular if something doesn’t work or doesn’t go as planned.”

As a company in hypergrowth, Singular has also given TutoTOONS the visibility to grow with an optimized strategy in place. “Before Singular, we were already doing UA, but we had no clue about ARPU and ROAS, we just had our estimations and internal formulas so that we didn’t lose control. Singular gave us real control over this situation. Only once we had this control we could start building a team and start increasing the spend.”

Stefano notes that through their journey so far, “We’ve never felt like a small player with Singular, even though at the beginning we technically were. They trusted us and together we have grown, so in the end, it was a win-win solution for all of us. This is what I think collaboration is. Really believing in each other from the first day, even before knowing what the results could be, but trusting the commitment from both sides.”

With Singular set up and running, TutoTOONS could finally set up a model to track ARPU, and as a consequence ROAS. “ARPU and ROAS are the basis of everything if we want a clear indication of our monetization curve. Having visibility on performance is a major success as it finally enabled us to start planning our activity and see what was needed to do that (i.e. building a team) – a great indicator that something is going in the right direction.”

With a real strategy in place, TutoTOONS was able to start scaling by increasing UA spends (which correlates to increased installs and users).

“In some networks we went from 0 to literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend.”

With such a positive trajectory, TutoTOONS is looking ahead and considering questions like:

Should you work with as many networks as possible? Or choose a few that work the best and focus on them? Stefano notes that there is no right answer here. “It’s individual and needs to be tested but we wouldn’t be able to look at testing without Singular.”

He adds that the life of any gaming company – kids or otherwise – is in launching new games. “Singular helped us to crack our launch strategy on how to work for optimal ad monetization and quick optimizations as the game rolls out and the reports roll in.”