Paid Acquisition · Reddit · Round 3 “static-test”

Round 3 Readout & the Round 4 Plan

One week of Reddit static ads is done. Here is what the numbers say, what we can and cannot prove from them, which creatives won, and the exact 3×3 hook test I want to run next — with a falsifiable prediction of what it will (and will not) move.

$320.70
Spent
10
Ads (hooks)
628,696
Impressions
4,873
Clicks
0.775%
Blended CTR
4,206
Players landed
~7 days
Jul 3 – 10

TL;DR

  • Clean test, and it paid off at the top of the funnel. Even spend (~$32/ad), even reach, one content version. Round-3 creatives lifted first-run completion to 25% on the best ad (vs 10% on the prior campaign) and D1 to 6% (vs 2%).
  • CTR lies — and boss is the proof. The reigning “boss” hook has the #2 click-through rate (0.949%, a statistical tie for #1) yet is dead last on everything after the click: 6% completion, worst return, worst cost per engaged player ($1.39 vs $0.22). Pick winners on clicks and you carry your worst ad.
  • The winning angles are access / habit / trust; the losers are mechanic-brag. instant, daily, honest, time won. cards, combat, boss lost. Players click “instant, daily, honest, quick,” not “it’s a deckbuilder with cards and bosses.”
  • The real retention lever is the title screen, not the ad. 61% of everyone we buy never even reaches the path-picker. Once a run starts, every ad’s players behave identically. No hook fixes that.
  • D7 is not measurable yet. R3 reads 0% only because it hasn’t aged 7 days. The one matured Reddit campaign (climax_curiosity) sits at D7 ≈ 1% — our best current estimate. Re-read R3’s real D7 on/after Jul 16.
  • Round 4 = 3 winners × 3 new hooks (9 ads). It will sharpen CTR and cost-per-player. It will not move D7. It should be the last wide creative round before we pivot budget/effort to the title-screen leak.

What we ran

One campaign, r3-static-test, with 10 ad groups — each a distinct hook, ~$32 each, split evenly. A separate older campaign, “The climax / curiosity”, is paused and not part of this test, but because it is fully aged it is our only matured D7 reference.

  • $320.70 total spend · 628,696 impressions · 4,873 clicks · 0.775% CTR · $0.07 CPC · $0.51 eCPM.
  • Reddit restated the total down from a mid-flight ~$340 as it removed invalid traffic — normal, and it means these are the clean, final billed numbers.
  • 4,206 of the 4,873 clicks became actual players (86% click→player — a strong landing rate). The missing ~14% is normal pre-boot loss: bots, instant back-buttons, ad-block, slow connections.
  • Blended engaged economics: ~$0.076 per player, ~$0.49 per completed first run, ~$2.00 per D1-returning player.
Reddit campaigns view
Reddit Ads · campaign level. r3-static-test: $320.70 / 628,696 impr / 4,873 clicks / 0.775% CTR. The paused “climax / curiosity” is the prior round.
Backend per-campaign retention
Our dashboard · per-ad players, runs/player, completion, D1, D7. Note climax_curiosity (matured) shows D7 = 1%; every R3 row still reads 0% (too young).
Reddit ad-groups view
Reddit Ads · ad-group level — the 10 hooks with per-ad impressions, CTR, CPC and spend.

The 10 ads, ranked

The real creatives that ran, each with its actual headline copy and its result. Ranked by cost per completed first run — the money metric (how cheaply an ad buys a player who actually plays), not by clicks.

Tier key: Winner carry forward · Middle keep only if cheap · Loser cut · Clickbait great CTR, collapses after the click.

The full data

Every ad, every metric, plus the three derived cost numbers in funnel order: cost per player, cost per activation (played ≥1 run), and cost per completed first run. Sorted by completed-run cost. The matured prior campaign is at the bottom as the D7 benchmark.

Ad / hookImpr.CTRClicksPlayers Runs/plActiv.Compl.D1D7$/player$/activ.$/compl. run

Activ. = share of landed players who played ≥1 run (the theorem's activation KPI); the rate comes from the raw event stream and is applied to final players + spend for $/activ. Note activation is always above completion (you must start a run to finish one), so the two columns show the start→finish drop. D1/D7 are shown as the dashboard rounds them (whole %); absolute returners per ad are tiny (8–24 for D1), which is exactly why D1 is only directional — see below.

What we can — and cannot — statistically confirm

The single most important discipline here: a metric is only usable if it has enough events to beat noise. This test is over-powered at the top of the funnel and under-powered at the bottom. Treat each tier accordingly.

CTR  Confirmed

56k–73k impressions per ad. Differences at the extremes are unambiguous.

instant 0.957% vs cards 0.665% → z ≈ 6.0, p < 1e-8. Real.

The catch: instant (0.957%) and boss (0.949%) are a statistical tie on CTR — and that tie is the whole lesson. Clicks are cheap and easy to win; they do not tell you who plays.

Completion rate  Confirmed

23 to ~150 completers per ad — enough to separate tiers cleanly. This is the most decision-useful confirmed metric.

instant 25% [CI ~21.6–28.7] vs boss 6% [CI ~4.1–8.9] → z ≈ 8.9, p < 1e-16. Non-overlapping.

Top tier (instant, daily) separates cleanly from the bottom (boss, cards, combat). The cost-per-engaged-player spread of 6.4× (instant $0.22 → boss $1.39) is robust in direction.

D1 retention  Suggestive only

Only 8–24 returners per ad. The best-band vs worst-band gap is real-ish; nothing finer is.

daily 6% vs cards 2% → z ≈ 2.9, raw p ≈ 0.004. BUT 10 ads = 45 comparisons; the multiple-comparison threshold is p ≈ 0.001 (z ≈ 3.3). The gap does NOT clear it.

Use D1 as a directional tiebreaker (a “top-band” of daily/honest vs a “bottom-band” of boss/cards), never to rank ads one-by-one. The dashboard also rounds D1 to whole %, adding ±0.5% slop.

D7 retention  Not yet measurable

Every R3 ad reads 0% because on Jul 10 only the Jul-3 sub-cohort has aged a full 7 days — a tiny slice with ~0 returners. This is “too early,” not “confirmed zero.”

Best available read = the matured prior campaign climax_curiosity: D7 = 1% (~11 of 1,114) [CI ~0.5–1.8%], with D1 = 2%. R3 winners have 3× that D1 (6% vs 2%) → IF the ratio holds, R3 winner D7 ≈ 1.5–3%. Extrapolation, not measured.

Action: re-read R3’s real D7 on/after Jul 16 (the last cohort matures then). Pausing spend does not stop D7 from maturing on players already acquired.

The in-app funnel  Confirmed — and it’s the real story

From the raw event stream, the single biggest drop in the whole funnel is one rung:

TITLE → PATH-PICKER: 61% of all landed players never reach the picker. Winners reach it 51.7% vs losers 19.7% (z ≈ 16). But once a run STARTS, the run-2 rate is identical: 27.7% vs 27.2% (z ≈ 0.14).

Meaning: the ad only changes click-quality at the top. The game converts everyone’s starters equally well. So retention is a title-screen + return-hook problem, not an ad problem. Bad ads buy curiosity-clickers who bounce the instant they see the real game.

The winners: top 5, then the top 3 we carry

Ranked by cost per engaged player, cross-checked against completion, runs, and the D1 band (they agree, which is what gives confidence).

#AdHookAngleWhy it’s here$/compl. run
1instant creativeinstantZero-friction access#1 on nearly everything: best CTR, best completion (25%), cheapest player ($0.054), most volume. Non-negotiable.$0.22
2daily creativedailyShared daily ritualBest-band D1 (6%), 2nd completion (23%), deepest replay after time (1.28). Builds a return reason into the concept.$0.34
3time creativetimeQuick / fits-a-breakDeepest sessions of all (1.33 runs), solid completion (19%). Strong — but shares instant’s “speed” axis.$0.41
4honest creativehonestAnti-F2P / trustBest-band D1 (6%), solid completion (19%). A distinct positioning axis + the game’s real differentiator.$0.43
5dev creativedevSolo-dev story2nd-cheapest player ($0.067) and high volume, but shallow (15% completion, 3% D1). Efficient, not sticky.$0.45
The three I want to carry: instant · daily · honest

Not simply the top-3 by cost. The rule is proven performance × distinct positioning axis, weighted toward return (our actual goal is try → like → return):

  • instant — the flagship. Cheapest, highest-converting, highest-CTR. The access axis.
  • daily — the only hook whose concept is a return reason. Best-band D1. The habit axis.
  • honest — best-band D1 and a third distinct axis (trust), aligned with what genuinely sets this game apart. Keeps the three lanes non-overlapping.

Why not time, which out-ranks honest on cost? Because time and instant are the same axis (speed/access). Carrying both wastes a slot on a duplicate lane — so time’s learnings fold into instant’s new hook variants instead.

Do not carry boss — the clickbait trap

boss is the reigning champion and ties for the #1 CTR, so a clicks-first read would auto-promote it. But it is last on completion (6%), bottom on D1, and the most expensive engaged player in the whole set ($1.39/run, 6.4× instant). It buys the click and loses the player. This is the single mistake the data most clearly warns against.

Round 4 — the 9 ads we’re running next

The final set (chosen creatives): the 3 champions stay live as controls — the base to beat — and each lane adds 2 new hooks, generated on-style, one desire × barrier each. That is the theorem’s refinement round (3 concepts × 3), which also replicates the concept round.

Round 4 ad plan — the nine ads
The nine Round-4 ads. ★ Winner 1–3 are the R3 champions, still running as controls; the six New · to test are the chosen creatives (r4-instant-a opt 1, r4-instant-b opt 1, r4-daily-a opt 2, r4-daily-b opt 1, r4-honest-a opt 3, r4-honest-b opt 2). Open the poster in a new tab ↗

The rules that keep it clean

Prediction: what Round 4 will (and won’t) do

Stated up front and falsifiable, so we can grade it later.

MetricR3 actualR4 targetConfidence
Blended CTR0.775%0.85% – 1.0%High — lift daily/honest toward instant’s 0.96%
Cost per player$0.076$0.060 – $0.070High
Players for ~$3204,2064,600 – 5,300Medium-high (+10–25%)
Best new hook vs its incumbent—≥1 concept improves; else incumbent winsMedium (a win for the control is still a valid, money-saving result)
D7~1% (proxy)~1% — unchangedHigh that hooks will NOT move it
Per-ad D1 / D7 significancenonestill noneCertain — sample too small
What I aim to solve with this round

Round 3 found the winning angles (access / habit / trust) and killed the losers. Round 4 squeezes the last cost-efficiency out of those angles — cheaper, higher-quality clicks per dollar, and a proven best-in-class hook for each of the three lanes to scale later.

What it deliberately does not attempt: retention. D7 is set downstream, at the title screen (61% drop) and the return hook. So Round 4 should be the last wide creative round. After it, the leverage moves off the ad account and onto the product: fix title → picker, add a reason to come back, then re-read the matured D7 on Jul 16 to decide whether paid acquisition is a channel worth scaling at all.

Next steps

Two tracks run at once: a new creative round we launch now, and a fixed-date retention read on the round that just ended.

Rule for all of it: new round = new prefix — r4-, never r3-

Name every Round 4 ad and its UTMs with a fresh r4- prefix (r4-instant-a, r4-instant-b, r4-instant-ctrl …). Two reasons, both load-bearing:

  • Clean attribution — R4 shows up as its own cohort in the dashboard, cleanly separable from R3.
  • It protects the R3 read we’re still waiting on — reusing r3-* UTMs would pour new July players into the R3 cohort and corrupt the Jul 16 D7 verdict (Step 3). Keep the buckets separate.
1
Launch now · runs ~7 days

Run Round 4 — the 3×3 hook test

Ship the 9 new hooks (instant / daily / honest × 3 fresh lines each) plus the 3 incumbents as controls — all under the r4- prefix.

  • Hold audience, even budget-split, daily caps and landing identical to R3 so the only variable is the hook. Budget ~$320, ~1 week.
  • Pre-declared win metric: cost per player who reaches the path-picker (CTR × click-quality) — the metric that survives the boss clickbait trap and that this budget can actually power.
  • Ban mechanic-brag framings; stay inside the proven access / habit / trust lanes.
2
When R4 ends · ~+7 days

Review the outcomes

Read Round 4 on CTR and click-quality only, and pick the best hook per concept versus its control.

  • Do not read per-ad D1/D7 — at ~12 ads it is noise, exactly as in R3.
  • Graduate the winning hooks into a tighter, higher-budget scale set; retire the rest. If no new hook beats its control, the control wins — still a money-saving result.
  • Fold this together with the Step-3 retention verdict to decide whether paid acquisition is a channel worth scaling at all.
3
Fixed calendar checkpoint · in parallel 2026-07-16

Track the old ads’ retention — re-read R3 D1 & D7

R3’s D7 only matures on/after Jul 16 (the last cohort was acquired ~Jul 9, plus the 7-day window); D1 is nearly mature but keeps firming. Pausing spend does not stop this data from arriving.

  • On/after Jul 16, pull the matured R3 D1 and D7, per-ad and blended, and compare to the climax_curiosity benchmark (D7 ≈ 1%).
  • This is the single number that says whether the winners actually retain — nothing available today answers it.
  • Runs in parallel with Steps 1–2: it is a date on the calendar, not a step that waits on Round 4.

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