OPAPP - A Facebook for Business (and more) winning formula

What is OPAPP

OPAPP is the official mobile application (currently available in Android and iOS) of OPAP, the leading gaming operator and one of the most recognized Group of companies in Greece.

The creation of OPAPP was mainly driven by two things. The need which came from our customer's end, as well as a strategic target which was set by OPAP's digital team, as part of a more large scale digital transformation of the company which is about to unfold.

It essentially is a very useful and powerful tool, a "swiss knife" and an assistant in the hands of a player, anytime and anywhere he wants to use it. It provides many useful functionalities, functionalities which the players wanted to get in the tip of their fingers, such as to be able to:

• Create playslips for all OPAP games with many fun ways, save them as a QR code and scan them in any OPAP store
• Check their winnings instantly
• Find all draws results and look back at statistics
• Watch KINO draws live
• Find the nearest OPAP store
• And many more

With the ability to create a playslip online (QR code) and play it offline (by visiting an OPAP store), we essentially integrated the two worlds of online and offline, which is especially important for OPAP, as it is an organization with one of the largest retail networks in Greece, numbering more than 4.500 OPAP stores across Greece, which - as you can imagine - brings in the majority of OPAP's turnover.

Launch of OPAPP

We launched OPAPP on April 2015. Our campaign had 2 main objectives:

• Increase app installs/downloads and at the same time drive down the app install cost (main objective)
• Drive awareness

In order to achieve those goals, we utilized a big range of performance, as well as awareness digital media, namely:

• Facebook for Business and Instagram
• Google Search
• YouTube
• Yahoo
• Local - Greek - performance platforms and apps
• CPM premium placement buying was also performed from major Greek online publishers

An important though note here is that, due to Google's policies on gambling, unfortunately a very powerful mobile medium was not accessible for our objectives, namely AdMob, which has a very large mobile inventory and which would have been extremely utilizable for our targeting. On top of this, no retargeting is made possible through Google channels which further handicaps our targeting.

What we achieved

It has been close to 1.5 years since the launch of OPAPP and the results which we have achieved are very impressive:

• We are getting really close to having 1.000.000 app downloads by the end of 2016 (874K in September and 931K in October)
• OPAPP still is in the list of the top Greek apps both in Google Play Store and Apple AppStore with very good user ratings and scoring
• It has received many awards in many prestigious award ceremonies
• This performance/growth marketing case made it as a worldwide success store for Facebook for Business

Facebook channel performance

Out of all channels we used, in this case of OPAPP, Facebook for Business proved to be best performing. We are constantly trying to adopt all newest forms of advertising which Facebook offers and we thus heavily utilized the following Facebook and Instagram products for app installs:

1. Image ads
2. Video ads
3. Carousel (combining image and video ads)

With respect to the targeting, we performed broad, as well as laser targeting by utilizing:

1. Custom Audiences
2. Lookalike Audiences
3. Demographics and interest based audiences
4. Audiences based on app activity
5. Combination of the above

Through our inhouse campaign handling (structure, strategy, targeting, bidding and optimization), combined with Facebook’s range of creative ad formats and superior targeting tools, we were able to achieve the following results through the Facebook for business channel:

• Reach of the 72% of the total Facebook Greek based audience reached via mobile
• 4x increase in app installs
• -32% lower Cost Per Install (CPI) bringing it down even below 1€ which is extremely low for app install campaigns
• +14% higher Click To Conversion (CTC)

Mr. Vassilis Katsikadis, the SEM expert of OPAP S.A. and member of my team, who was the main contributor to this great success, pointed out that "The campaign’s high click-to-conversion rate and low cost-per-app install drove results that exceeded our initial expectations, allowing us to reach our app-installs target almost one month earlier than expected."

In a nutshell, Facebook advertising helped us raise awareness and drive a great number of app installs in a cost-efficient manner. With the vast variety of creative options available, we were able to effectively inform the target audience about our app’s unique features, while achieving extremely low cost per app install figures.

Panos Bassios

Head of performance marketing, digital media and analytics, OPAP S.A.