How Fidget Town accelerated user acquisition with TikTok

Introduction

Fidget Town is an online fidget trading game from South Korea targeting Generation Alpha. Fidget Town has successfully expanded globally by leveraging TikTok as a primary user acquisition channel.

Overview

Fidget Town is an online fidget trading game from South Korea, beloved by Gen-Alpha worldwide. Fidget Town provides a unique experience of collecting and trading digital fidgets with friends online. Users can also create and submit their fidgets and monetize them. Initially, trading fidgets in real life was a global trend among pre-teens. The Fidget Town team got the idea of bringing it to a virtual world while watching TikTok content.

Challenges

As Fidget Town gained local popularity, the team aimed to expand its market to a global scale. Its foremost goal in global expansion was acquiring and growing its users cost-efficiently.

Solutions

Choosing the right Tiktok Marketing Measurement Partner

To run TikTok marketing campaigns, advertisers must deploy an MMP approved by TikTok as an official Measurement Marketing Partner. Among those partners, Fidget Town chose Airbridge for its quick and dedicated customer success support, reasonable pricing scheme, and, most importantly, data accuracy.

The Fidget Town team tracked crucial metrics such as active users, revenue, and retention daily with Airbridge. Since many users create numerous accounts on Fidget Town to get multiple sign-up rewards, counting users on an account basis was inaccurate. Airbridge helped the team understand the success of their service clearly by providing device-based tracking, which proved to be more accurate in reflecting Fidget Town’s actual user numbers. They were also able to track critical metrics related to revenue, such as ARPU, ARPPU, and ARPDAU, on a device basis using the Active Users report on Airbridge. The report enabled them to quickly get a holistic overview of their real-time metrics.

Focusing on Tiktok as a primary user acquisition platform

To raise global awareness and acquire new users, the team leveraged TikTok as a significant user acquisition channel. They actively introduced new fidget items on their TikTok account and utilized user-generated content as posts. Content that performed well organically was promoted with TikTok Spark Ads to reach a wider audience and get more users to install the app. They sought to rapidly grow their users by increasing their interaction on TikTok (via content views, channel follows, etc.). By focusing on TikTok as a primary user acquisition platform early on, Fidget Town has achieved over 1M app installs worldwide within a year since its launch. Also, one of its primary hashtags got 80M+ impressions on TikTok.

Targeting and communicating with the right audience

As Fidget Town launched globally, running app install campaigns on TikTok was a critical strategy for obtaining initial users. Since targeting the right audience likely to convert was a pivotal factor in lowering the CPA, they chose to set up Smart Targeting on TikTok Ads for automatic targeting. They also organized TikTok marketing campaigns leveraging seasonal events like Easter (a.k.a Easter Egg campaign) to capture the worldwide users' interest. As TikTok allowed the team to target and directly interact with the right audience, Fidget Town has achieved massive growth in its users with a significantly low CPA, when lowest at around $0.2.

TikTok has played a crucial role in helping Fidget Town communicate and nurture its users, which in turn helped maintain an average of about 230K MAU and 40K DAU, with the Day 28 retention at 7%.

Understanding a comprehensive user journey

The Fidget Town team wanted to discover potential power users with higher LTV among the audience and find out how to grab their interests effectively. By utilizing both Amplitude and Airbridge - which seamlessly integrates - they automatically ingested the attribution data from Airbridge to Amplitude and combined it with behavioral data in Amplitude. The team grouped the users by their source of acquisition to discover which campaign or ad creative successfully led to a higher funnel conversion rate of downstream events or higher retention rate or LTV which are strong indicators of power users. They continuously optimized the marketing campaigns and content to capture high-quality users based on these learnings.

Results

Fidget Town is light and instantly playable like other hyper-casual games, but has successfully maintained higher retention and LTV. It has seen rapid global growth, utilizing TikTok to interact with its users. Fidget Town will continue its journey to achieve its mission of building a communication platform that best understands Gen-Alpha.