Panini America acquires high quality users at 58% lower CPA for its NFL Blitz app

Panini America partners with sports leagues around the world to license collectibles, trading cards, and stickers. The company also offers a series of apps, including NFL Blitz that brings NFL trading cards to the digital world. Seeking to drive downloads of its apps, Panini America partnered with Social Native, a platform that connects brands and creators to rapidly develop social content at a low cost. With a slew of creative to test and optimize, Panini America came to Snapchat in search of a lower cost per acquisition than it was able to find on other platforms at reliable scale.

Panini America leveraged Snapchat’s different targeting criteria to reach sport and gaming fans with ease. In addition to lookalikes of its existing customers and Snapchat Lifestyle Categories like Football Fans, it found tremendous success using Snapchat’s location-based targeting to reach Snapchatters who had recently visited Football Stadiums. This targeting approach coupled with automated bid optimization for installs allowed Panini America to efficiently find the Snapchatters most likely to install its app.
Thanks to rapid creative iteration powered by Social Native, Panini America was able to quickly learn what worked to drive action. After testing a range, from high-gloss ads to selfie-style videos, the company discovered that creative with a more user-generated, authentic feel performed best. By testing and learning within this style, Panini America has been able to apply its best practices from NFL Blitz to promotion of its FIFA app, thereby driving success on Snapchat across its other product lines. 

By iterating on creative and testing different targeting parameters, Panini America was able to learn, drive results, and scale performance quickly. This led to a 58% lower cost per acquisition vs. goal at a volume three times higher than it was able to achieve on other platforms. Snapchatters not only downloaded the app, but also proved to be high quality users. In fact, they spent 20% more time spent in-app vs. users acquired elsewhere. This efficient, high quality scale has driven Panini to shift more budget to Snapchat and expand its campaigns to promote its entire suite of apps.