Evo.io

About the Brand

Evo.io is a Web3 esports tournament platform that uses crypto rails to settle entry fees and prize pools across competitive gaming titles. The brand differentiates itself through near-instant prize-pool settlement, transparent on-chain payout records, and a tournament library spanning the highest-engagement Web3 and traditional e-sports titles.

Target Audience: Adult Web3-active gamers—particularly users with tournament-play history on traditional Esports platforms who hold crypto wallets and would benefit from on-chain prize pool settlement.

Growth Stage: Scale-up.

The Challenge 

Convert click volume into actual tournament entries at a CPA that the brand's prize pool fee structure could absorb. But these obstacles made it difficult:

Key Obstacles

• Mainstream-platform exclusion: Esports tournaments with crypto are restricted on Google, Meta, and TikTok.
• Click-quality drift: Before Blockchain-Ads, click volume was high, but tournament entry conversion was poor.
• Audience-precision gap: Mainstream platforms can't distinguish an "active tournament-play user" from a "casual gaming-content viewer."
• Geo-fragmentation: Title-by-title popularity varies dramatically by region; the team needed audience-by-geo creative pairings the existing channels could not service.

Why Blockchain-Ads?

The pre-Blockchain-Ads stack delivered click volume but not tournament entries. Meaning the campaigns were paying for gaming-content viewers, not active tournament players, and that was a problem. To solve this, the team decided to use Blockchain-Ads, leveraging the following capabilities:

• Wallet-level audience targeting: segments built on confirmed gaming-related on-chain behaviour.
• Web3 publisher network: placements adjacent to esports-betting media and gaming-focused crypto editorial.
• Tournament-entry attribution: measuring actual entry behaviour, not just clicks.
• Wallet retargeting: for connected-but-not-entered cohorts.

Unique Capabilities Leveraged

• Web3-gaming wallet segments: wallets with NFT-game ownership history and tournament-platform participation.
• CRM-seeded look-alikes: from Evo.io's existing tournament-active player base.
• Title-affinity wallet segments: wallets demonstrating affinity to specific competitive gaming titles via on-chain behaviour.
• Wallet retargeting: for connected wallets that browsed tournament lobbies without entering.

Before Blockchain-Ads → After Blockchain-Ads

• CPA (per Tournament-Entered Player): ~$315 → $118
• CTR: 0.10% → 1.34% (raw); ~1.0% effective post-quality-filter
• Click → Tournament Entry: 0.14% → 0.48%
• 30-day Repeat-Tournament-Entry Rate: 24% → 51%
• 90-day ROAS: 1.1x → 2.7x

Tournament-Entered Players acquired through Blockchain-Ads showed 51% 30-day repeat-entry rates and 2.3x average tournaments-entered per player vs. blended baseline. The campaign delivered the brand's first paid acquisition channel whose CPA aligned with prize-pool fee economics — opening defensible expansion paths into title × geo cells the brand had previously been unable to reach.

Phase 1 — Learning (Month 1)

Objective: Identify wallet-behavioral profiles most likely to convert into tournament entries.

Actions:

• Four wallet behavioral segments tested: Web3-gaming wallet segments (NFT-game ownership + on-chain gaming activity), CRM-seeded tournament-active lookalikes, DeFi power-users (control), Stablecoin-velocity power-users
• Six creative variants — split between title-specific tournament-action and brand-led angles
• Geo split: NA (35%), Western Europe (30%), LATAM (20%), SEA (15%)

Insights:

• CRM-seeded lookalikes converted at parity volume to Web3-gaming segments but with 2.4x the 30-day repeat-tournament-entry rate.
• Title-specific tournament-action creative outperformed brand-led on click-to-entry rate by 47%.
• LATAM over-indexed on Counter-Strike titles; SEA over-indexed on Mobile Legends and PUBG; NA over-indexed on Call of Duty and Valorant.

Phase 2 — Consideration (Month 2–4)

Objective: Concentrate budget on lookalike and Web3-gaming segments, tighten creative-by-title-by-geo pairing.

Actions:

• 70% of budget reallocated to CRM-seeded lookalikes and Web3-gaming segments.
• Creative cycle moved to weekly with title-specific variants per geo cell.
• Funnel rebuilt: a wallet-aware tournament-lobby preview surfaced before sign-up, showing live prize-pool size and active-entry counts — reducing first-entry drop-off by ~28%.

Performance Improvements:

• Headline CTR descended 2.4% → 1.0%.
• CPC stayed compressed at $0.56.
• Click-to-tournament-entry rate climbed 0.14% → 0.48%.

Phase 3 — Acquisition + Retargeting (Month 5–9)

Objective: Scale around major tournament windows and lock retention through retargeting.

Actions:

• Daily spend lifted 2.5x against winning cohorts.
• Tournament-launch-window bid surging activated around the platform's flagship tournaments (weekly $50K+ prize pools).
• Wallet-based retargeting for connected wallets that browsed tournaments without entering.
• Behavioral retargeting for visitors who registered without entering within 7 days.
• Geo expansion into Brazil, Vietnam, Argentina — all three cleared the CPA threshold.

Outcome:

• Steady-state CPA settled at $118.
• Retargeted cohorts entered tournaments at 2.6x the rate of cold prospecting.
• 30-day repeat-tournament-entry rate hit 51% of acquired cohort.