About
Pocket Paws is a cozy game for dog lovers. It’s a nostalgic, feel-good world where players can compete, collect, breed, and nurture puppies.
Following its launch in 2024, Pocket Paws showed promising retention and engagement signals, indicating strong long-term potential. Landmark Games, the publisher of Pocket Paws, partnered with AppAgent to turn that potential into scalable and profitable growth.
The Brief
Pocket Paws had a strong product and early traction, but the growth setup was not yet built for efficient scaling.
The team needed a more structured system to:
- scale spend without compromising ROAS
- identify and systematically repeat high-performing creative concepts
- reduce reliance on a limited number of advertising channels
- improve app store conversion rates and organic discoverability
The goal was to build a connected growth system across Creatives, UA, and ASO – one that could support sustainable scaling.
Process
Finding the creative winning formula
AppAgent began by testing different audience motivations, hooks, and creative formats to understand what resonated with players.
Early creative testing quickly revealed a pattern: breeding and collecting dogs consistently outperformed all other player motivations. We immediately aligned our creative strategy and production focus around this vital insight.
The biggest breakthrough came when a new 12-second creative formula significantly outperformed the rest of the portfolio, becoming the foundation for large-scale UA growth. The winning ad achieved a CPI over 90% lower than the average of previous creative tests. On Meta performance campaigns alone, spend scaled 4.5x while CPI improved by 50%, unlocking profitable scaling on the channel.
The top-performing ad structure combined four distinct elements:
- A highly relatable visual featuring a cute three-colored dachshund puppy, a breed already highly popular within online dog communities.
- A trending audio hook – a viral TikTok-style sound commonly paired with cute animal content.
- A clear core feature: “breed a cute puppy”.
- A native format tailored to the visual style of primary short-form video acquisition channels.
To prevent fatigue and keep momentum, AppAgent executed rapid iterations. We systematically tested different dog breeds, backgrounds, viral sounds, and captions, while keeping the exact same winning structural framework.
This strategy successfully moved the needle: while our top-performing individual asset changed every two weeks to beat creative fatigue, overall performance and acquisition efficiency remained rock-solid.
Rebuilding UA for Scale
Once we unlocked the creative engine in February, we rebuilt the UA setup to support meaningful budget expansion — scaling monthly UA spend ~3x versus the 2025 baseline while increasing overall ROAS by ~45%.
- Channel diversification: While Meta remained our main performance channel, we expanded into new traffic sources to unlock additional scale.
Over several months, we added channels such as TikTok, Unity, Gamelight, Mintegral, Almedia, Exmox, KashKick, and Prodege. This reduced reliance on Meta and created a more balanced channel mix.
- Cross-platform balance: We deliberately increased budgets on Android to achieve a balanced 50/50 platform spend split. This ensured that the acquisition engine did not fully rely on a single platform’s network ecosystem or changing algorithms.
- Testing velocity: Creative testing ran continuously to feed this expanded channel network. Production scaled from an initial ~15 ads per month up to ~50 ads per month.
Backed by our validated formula, the creative win rate jumped to 60%, allowing us to refresh performance campaigns weekly with fresh, high-performing assets.
To monitor and manage these cross-channel performance trends in real time, AppAgent also developed a centralized dashboard.
App Store Optimization: Aligning the Store with What Was Working
To fully capture the influx of paid traffic and boost organic discovery, we refined the app store presence to seamlessly mirror what our game had to offer.
1. Strategic Rebranding: We updated the official App Title from Pocket Paws: Dog Champion, to Pocket Paws: My Lovely Dogs. This pivot moved the store positioning away from a competition-led motivator and toward the game’s core emotional drivers: breeding, collecting, and nurturing.
2. Metadata Optimization: We overhauled the subtitle, keyword fields, and descriptions for both Android and IOS to maximize search visibility.
3. A/B Testing: We ran more than 25 systematic A/B conversion experiments across app icons and screenshots to isolate the absolute highest-converting visual assets.
The Impact: This unified optimization, combined with the halo effect of our increased UA spend, skyrocketed the game from a low-visibility position of #121 for high-volume keywords to the #1 spot in search results for “dog games”.
With stronger rankings and higher UA investment, organic installs scaled ~8× over the period.
Dave Burpitt CEO @ Landmark GamesOur engagement with AppAgent has been measurably impactful and valuable from the very beginning. We started with a comprehensive audit of both our game, covering product and game design, and our marketing strategy, including creatives, channel mix, and ASO. AppAgent provided detailed analysis alongside an actionable, goal-oriented strategy that we executed together over the following months.
AppAgent fully immersed themselves in the strategy in a highly professional, passionate, and organised manner. Their approach was both methodical and flexible, allowing them to react quickly to new learnings and adjust budgets and priorities while always keeping our goals in focus.
The intensive work carried out by AppAgent has delivered multiple standout hero creatives, unlocked broader marketability, and ultimately enabled us to scale far beyond our original expectations. The team has remained highly engaged, responsive, and proactive throughout the partnership, and we are proud to have them as partners of Landmark.
AppAgent’s Best Practices
- Treat growth as one connected funnel. Creative, UA, and ASO perform best when aligned around the same user insight.
- Start with the strongest player motivation. The biggest unlocks come from deeply understanding and visually highlighting what users truly value about the gameplay.
- Diversify early: Avoid over-reliance on a single network by building a multi-channel inventory mix to ensure stability at scale.
- Iterate inside the winning formula: Once a creative breakthrough is identified, maximize its lifespan by rapidly iterating variations (breeds, hooks, audio) to outpace creative fatigue.
AppAgent’s Conclusion
While sustainable scaling required a rigorous combination of multi-channel management, ongoing ASO experiments, and sharp data analysis, the single largest unlock for Pocket Paws was creative execution.
By consistently testing and refining, we identified what truly resonates with the audience and turned those insights into scalable creative formulas.
Creative is the key driver of performance today. It has the power to unlock growth across channels when executed fast, iterated constantly, and aligned with both audience motivations and current trends.
As the landscape evolves quickly, the ability to adapt creative strategy on the go is critical. The path ahead is exciting – we are already building on even stronger signals.