Choosing the Proper Strategy for Educational Apps: Tap Tap Tales’ Experience

Contributions PR & Marketing

January 28, 2018 — by Valerie Afimova

About Tap Tap Tales

Currently, Tap Tap Tales has a total of
about 15 million downloads since
2015. The average in 2017 was 16,500
daily downloads and about 35,000
daily active users.

Tap Tap Tales is a company devoted to educational apps for children. They started in 2015 with the app Maya the Bee and have since been publishing around 5 apps per year. They currently have 12 published apps.

Tap Tap Tales’ background includes extensive experience developing, publishing, and distributing applications and video games. The team aspires to keep releasing educational games with high quality contents that will contribute greatly to the developmental process of children.

Tap Tap Tales’ numerous educational game releases feature world renown characters made possible by license agreements

Monetization Challenges

High Production Costs

The company started with a freemium model with a single in-app purchase and no ads, expecting parents to buy the activities. All games had 20% of activities free. Although they had a good conversion, it was not enough to cover the production costs.

Struggles with In-app Purchases

As the company offered high quality educational content that parents would perceive as very positive for their children, it was hard to implement in-app purchases that wouldn’t disrupt UX and parents’ expectations.

Lack of Support + Kids Apps Restrictions

“We had to create an environment where kids are safe and not all strategies are appropriate.” - Pau Ors CTO and Co-founder

The publishers had no person of contact from a previous monetization partner that took the time to understand their challenges as well as helped both to improve revenue and experience for the kids. Furthermore, while they could filter mature ad content, they needed more restrictions as the users were too young (from 2 to 7 years old) even with the filter.

Solution: Smart Ad Formats & Placements

Implementing Less Distracting Ads

Interstitials work well as they provide a stable eCPM and kids can close them and keep playing. As for rewarded videos, the developers has just started using them since they believe rewards will keep the users engaged.

Showing Ads Before Activities

During the game play there are no ads. They appear only before playing an activity. Previously, the developers tried showing video ads after kids were done with an activity but sometimes kids didn’t even finish viewing them, leading to lost impressions.

Using Cross Promotional Tools

During the first three months of each app about 70% of the users come from cross promo. Before the developers had their own system that was difficult to maintain. Appodeal offered the same functionality but with a better control and endless options that allowed to promote all apps or even 3D party apps and get revenue for it. It turned out to be not intrusive and very effective.

The Results

“We finally got the support for each app and a valuable piece of advice to follow. Now we are able to use the non-aggressive strategy that is acceptable for kids and boosts the revenue simultaneously”, stated Pau Ors CTO and Co-founder.