MoonSpin Achieves 4.3x Higher Betting Activity Among Players Who Installed its Progressive Web App

The Challenge: What Happens After the Session Ends 

For MoonSpin, the conversation with a player used to end when the session ended. The player closed the tab or put their phone down, and the MoonSpin team had no way to reach them until they came back on their own. The team could write the perfect campaign. They just had no channel to deliver it. 

Web Push was already one of MoonSpin's best channels. There was nothing wrong with it; it just had a hard limit. It could reach a player on the site, and nowhere else. The moment they left, the connection was gone. 

A mobile app would fix that. But an app also means a second codebase to build, a second release process to run, and app store review to clear, which is harder and slower for gaming apps than for most other industries. That's a lot of work to buy a single capability: reaching players once they've left the site. So the real question wasn't how to build an app. It was whether MoonSpin needed one at all. 

The Solution: The Website, on the Home Screen 

MoonSpin built its own Progressive Web App (PWA) so players can install MoonSpin's existing website straight to their phone's home screen, where it opens and behaves like an app. It isn't a new product or a rebuild. It's the site MoonSpin already had, in a form that lives on the phone. 

Optimove Web Push, Web Pop-Ups, Web Inbox, and email reach players who install it, on the same campaigns and the same platform MoonSpin already used. The channels didn't change. What changed is where they land. 
 
MoonSpin can now reach an installed player after they've left the site. No app store, no second codebase to maintain. 

How MoonSpin Measured It 

The customer relationship management (CRM) team looked at June data for players already receiving Web Push, comparing those who had installed the Progressive Web App against those who hadn't. Both groups received the same campaigns, so the comparison isolates the effect of installing rather than differences in campaign content. 

What it doesn't rule out is self-selection. Players who install a home screen app chose to install it, and the kind of player who takes that step was probably more engaged to begin with. This data can't separate those two things, and MoonSpin isn't claiming it can. It's also one month, shaped by whatever promotions and seasonal patterns fell inside it. Whether the gap holds is what the team will be watching next. 

In short: not a controlled test, but an honest look at real numbers. 

The Results 

All players below received the same Web Push campaigns over one month, June. The only difference between the two groups is whether they had installed the Progressive Web App.  

The two middle rows answer different questions - how much players bet on average, and how much they bet if they bet at all. For installers, the answer barely changes, 474 against 477 (rounded), because almost all of them played. For non-installers it jumps from 111 to 132, because about one in six never placed a bet at all. 

All four numbers moved the same direction by similar amounts. One number could be a fluke; the whole table isn't. 

Maybe the app makes players more active. Maybe the most active players are just the ones who bother to install it. Either way, the players with MoonSpin on their home screen are the valuable ones, so the move is the same: get the app onto more home screens. 

"The reason this worked is that we didn't have to rebuild anything. Web Push, Web Pop-Ups, Web Inbox - all of it already ran on Optimove. The PWA just extended it past the browser. Our most engaged players are now the ones with us on their home screen." 

Ana Ceausescu, Brand Manager, MoonSpin 

The Bottom Line 

MoonSpin could have spent a year building a mobile app just to send notifications outside the browser. Instead, the team put its own website on the home screen and got the same result, on the platform it was already paying for, using campaigns it had already written.