Ignition Game

About the Brand

Ignition Game is a premium-positioned crypto poker and casino operator known for high-stakes ring games, scheduled tournament structure, and a player base that skews more sophisticated than the category average.

Target Audience: Adult crypto-holders with poker affinity—typically 28–55, with an existing relationship to the live or regulated online poker world.

Growth Stage: Enterprise / Mature Operator.

The Challenge 

Ignition Games needed to acquire first-time depositors who love poker and stay active through tournament play, not bonus-chasers who churn after the welcome offer. But that wasn't easy for the following reasons:

• Mainstream-platform exclusion. Standard for the category; particularly acute for poker-led brands.
• Audience-precision gap. Generic "casino interest" segments deliver casino-led players, not poker-affinity ones.
• Tournament-window mismatch. Existing channels couldn't surge bid around the brand's tournament schedule—the highest-intent windows in the brand's calendar.
• Brand-positioning friction. Open-exchange placements undermined a brand whose equity is built on serious-poker positioning.

Why Blockchain-Ads?

The pre-Blockchain-Ads stack delivered FTDs but the wrong kind—bonus-chasers who never engaged the tournament product. But with Blockchain-Ads, the team could change that by leveraging the following:

• Wallet-level audience targeting—the the ability to define "poker affinity" by behavioural overlap with the brand's existing tournament players.
• Premium curated inventory — a Web3 publisher network whose context reinforced the brand's positioning.
• Tournament-calendar bid surging — ability to align media spend with the brand's highest-intent windows.
• CRM-seeded lookalike modelling against Ignition's tournament-active player base.

Unique Capabilities Leveraged

• CRM-seeded look-alikes modelled modeled on tournament-active players, not casino-led ones.
• Cross-chain DeFi user segments with strategic-game behavioural overlap.
• Scheduled-event bid surging for the brand's tournament series.
• Wallet retargeting for connected wallets that browsed tournament lobbies without registering.

Performance Metrics

Before Blockchain-Ads → After Blockchain-Ads

• CPA (per Poker-Affinity FTD): ~$280 → $123
• CTR: 0.10% → 0.44%
• Click → FTD: 0.55% → 1.41%
• 30-day Tournament Engagement: 38% → 63%
• 90-day ROAS: 1.4x → 3.4x

Blockchain-Ads cohorts posted 63% 30-day tournament engagement and a +39% second-deposit rate, with many players entering the recurring-tournament structure within that same period. The channel is selected for genuine tournament lovers, not general gambling interest. Downstream, the tournament product's softness ratio held firm even as new-player volume scaled

Phase 1 — Learning (Month 1)

Objective: Identify the wallet-behavioral segments most likely to engage tournament product.

Actions:

• Four wallet behavioral segments tested: CRM-seeded tournament-active lookalikes (primary hypothesis), DeFi power-users (strategic-game behavioral overlap), Stablecoin power-users, High-balance multi-chain holders (control)
• Six creative variants — split between tournament-led and casino-led control
• Geo split: NA (50%), LATAM (25%), Western Europe (25%)

Insights:

• Tournament-lookalikes converted at 3.4x the rate of high-balance control at parity CPA.
• Tournament-led creative converted at 1.9x the FTD rate of casino-led creative and showed 47% higher 30-day tournament-engagement rate.
• LATAM over-indexed on Sunday-Million-style scheduled tournaments; NA over-indexed on smaller-stakes sit-and-go formats.

Phase 2 — Consideration (Month 2–3)

Objective: Concentrate budget on tournament-affinity audiences and tighten creative-by-format pairing.

Actions:

• 70% of budget reallocated to CRM-seeded lookalikes and DeFi power-user segments.
• Two-track creative library: scheduled-tournament creative (LATAM, EU) and SnG-format creative (NA).
• Funnel rebuilt: a wallet-aware tournament-lobby preview surfaced ahead of the standard sign-up flow — reducing first-step drop-off by ~24%.

Performance Improvements:

• CTR climbed 0.21% → 0.46%.
• CPC compressed $2.21 → $1.62.
• Click-to-FTD rate improved 0.62% → 1.32%.

Phase 3 — Acquisition + Retargeting (Month 4–9)

Objective: Scale around the brand's tournament calendar and lock retention through retargeting.

Actions:

• Daily spend lifted 2.9x against winning cohorts.
• Tournament-window bid surging activated around the brand's flagship Sunday Million and Tuesday Turbo events.
• Wallet-based retargeting for connected wallets that browsed tournament lobbies without registering.
• Behavioral retargeting for visitors who registered without depositing within 5 days.
• Geo expansion into Brazil and Argentina — both cleared the CPA threshold.

Outcome:

• Steady-state CPA settled at $123.
• Retargeted cohorts converted at 2.4x the rate of cold prospecting.
• 30-day tournament-engagement rate hit 63% for Blockchain-Ads cohorts vs. 38% baseline.

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