Proposal: Fund Player Acquisition Campaigns to Pinpoint Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Optimize the Funnel

Background

The launch of ICE Poker Flex Tournament Mode on September 12th delivered a new, more accessible, deflationary gameplay mode. This new ICE sink allows us to linearly scale our daily ICE burn (and thus materially improve our most crucial KPI, our burn-to-earn ratio) as we increase our daily active players. While shipping additional features to improve the onboarding and gameplay experience is critical, we ultimately need to acquire new players.

We recently published the Decentral Games Marketing Strategy Overview (https://youtu.be/rmwSBczC-ZI). As a part of this strategy, we plan to run User Acquisition (UA) campaigns on several platforms (e.g. Permission, BitMedia, AdRoll). We’ve already started a small campaign with Permission.

To conduct these various paid acquisition campaigns,

1. We pay for inventory on various platforms.
2. People then click on the ads, which route them to one of our strategic ICE Poker Flex landing pages.
3. We track the attribution using Web Events and UTM parameters and can publish the funnel data to the community.

We also expect to have some opportunities around sponsorships and newsletters as well, but we are primarily focused on the above ads platforms.

Proposal

Allocate 125,000 DAI to run strategic Player Acquisition campaigns over 4 months: November - February.

Any unused funds will rollover to continue UA efforts following this period. At least 80% of these funds will be spent on UA campaigns with ads platforms; the < 20% component would be sponsorships and newsletters, if any.

The DG Team will publish spend amounts by platform/partner monthly along with performance overviews. Specifically, the team will share the spend and key performance metrics for each campaign.

More Details

We’re not coming into this with the expectation that these campaigns will be profitable in the short term or drive thousands of new users immediately. Creating a solid UA funnel takes time and requires iterating on all parts of the funnel.

Ultimately, our goal with these advertising campaigns is two-fold:

1. To get a baseline customer acquisition cost (CAC) that we can use to benchmark our user acquisition efforts against.
2. To push more traffic into our funnel that enables us to better test and improve our onboarding.

Following deployment of these campaigns, we hope to have insight and data on the following:

• What is our baseline Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
• Which ads platforms outperform?
• Which ads/creatives outperform?
• What geographies and user profiles are best to target?
• Which landing pages and onboarding flows have the least amount of drop off?

125,000 DAI over 4 months (< 1% of the DG DAO’s holdings) is sufficient to get to statistical significance across various platforms. A profitable player acquisition funnel will be a very strong ecosystem lever as we will be able to drive our burn-to-earn ratio > 1 as needed.

It’s appropriate for the DG Treasury to cover these campaigns as all revenues associated with ICE Poker (wearable mints, activations, upgrades, royalties, etc) accrue to the DG Treasury.