Carioca Club

Challenge

Carioca Club’s primary objective was to grow daily active users (DAUs) and expand its player base. However, scaling DAUs in today’s competitive mobile landscape requires more than just increasing installs. It demands cost-efficient acquisition and meticulous creative strategy.

While the app was already driving user acquisition, high CPIs were limiting scale, and early churn meant that too many new installs weren’t converting into consistent daily activity. The growth challenge was clear: bring in larger volumes of quality users at a lower cost, while ensuring they stayed engaged beyond the first session.

To succeed, Carioca Club needed a strategy that combined acquisition efficiency, creative innovation, and retention-focused optimization: turning installs into loyal daily actives and setting the stage for long-term growth.

Approach

To unlock sustainable growth, we built a data-driven framework that combined acquisition efficiency with creative innovation and retention insights:

• Retention as the north star: Campaign success was measured against cost per retained user on Day 1.
• Agile multi-channel testing: Swift experimentation across multiple UA channels allowed us to scale top-performing campaigns quickly while cutting underperformers.
• Extensive creative production & testing: We established a high-volume creative pipeline. Dozens of variations were systematically tested across hooks, formats, and themes, lowering CPI and attracting higher-quality users more aligned with the in-app experience.
• Cross-team collaboration: Rocketship and Carioca Club worked closely together, each focusing on complementary growth levers. While Rocketship drove efficiency on the UA side, Carioca Club invested heavily in improving product metrics, enhancing user experience, and boosting in-app retention. This alignment allowed for rapid iteration cycles, where creative and campaign insights were paired with product improvements, ensuring that new users not only installed but also stayed engaged.

Results

This integrated strategy delivered measurable improvements across all growth levers:

• CPI decreased by 30%, unlocking greater acquisition scale.
• Day 1 retention increased by 36%, and Day 7 retention improved by 48%, strengthening user engagement.
• Cost per retained user dropped by nearly 50%, maximizing efficiency.
• Daily active users grew by 52%, achieving the core growth objective.