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How Digidarts Turned Playo’s App Campaigns Into a Scalable, Cost-Efficient Growth Engine Across India & the UAE

About the Campaign

Background

Playo is a Bengaluru-headquartered sports community platform that helps amateur athletes discover playpals, book sports venues, and participate in local games and events across more than 50 sports.

With a strong presence in India and an expanding footprint in the UAE, Playo connects sports enthusiasts with venues, trainers, and fellow players through a single platform.

The challenge wasn't simply to drive app installs. The real challenge was turning installs into completed bookings. Playo needed to scale player acquisition and venue bookings across its core Indian markets while expanding in the UAE, without allowing acquisition costs to rise disproportionately.

Digidarts therefore focused on a performance-led growth strategy built around one principle: Optimise for bookings, not just installs.

Within two months, Playo's campaigns delivered 147% growth in booking conversions in India and 333% growth in the UAE, while improving cost efficiency and outperforming client-set targets.

Objective

Key campaign objectives:

Scale app installs and sign-ups across key Indian metros and the UAE.
Increase completed in-app bookings rather than optimising for installs alone.
Improve cost per booking and cost per booking user.
Beat client-set monthly targets for acquisition efficiency.
Identify high-performing cities and audience segments for budget allocation.
Improve conversion tracking accuracy across GA4, GTM, and LinkRunner.
Build a repeatable acquisition framework that could support efficient market expansion.

Our Approach

Instead of running a single generic app-install campaign, Digidarts structured campaigns around distinct acquisition objectives: player acquisition and venue-booking acquisition.

This allowed each campaign to be optimised against its intended outcome, creating a clearer path from acquisition to meaningful in-app activity.

The focus shifted from generating more installs to acquiring users who were more likely to complete a booking.

Install volume alone couldn't establish whether newly acquired users were generating value for Playo.

Digidarts implemented a dedicated event to track a user's first in-app booking, creating a more reliable signal of fresh-user conversion.

Custom events for Venue Booking, Add to Cart, Purchase, and Payment further strengthened visibility into user behaviour across the booking funnel.

The focus: measure the action that matters, then optimise towards it.

Google's audience signals were continuously refined to improve acquisition quality.

Retargeting audiences of past bookers were layered with in-market and affinity audiences to reach users more likely to engage with the platform and complete bookings.

This approach helped move campaign optimisation beyond broad acquisition towards higher-intent users.

Digidarts refined ad placements to concentrate investment where campaign performance was strongest.

Geo-specific creatives were developed for individual cities and markets, incorporating local cues and landmarks to improve relevance and recall.

Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all message, campaigns were adapted to the locations where Playo was looking to drive bookings.

Budget allocation was guided by booking efficiency, not just install volume.

Digidarts concentrated investment in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune, while excluding underperforming locations.

Bengaluru emerged as the strongest market, delivering the highest booking volume at the most efficient cost.

This city-level approach enabled Playo to scale where acquisition performance was strongest while limiting inefficient spend elsewhere.

The UAE strategy focused on building acquisition momentum in Dubai while improving the transition from installs to bookings.

Digidarts scaled the Dubai Book Venue install campaign and introduced a dedicated in-app booking campaign for Dubai.

The dedicated booking campaign delivered the most efficient sign-up cost among UAE campaigns, while the market recorded significant month-on-month growth in installs and booking conversions.

Reliable optimisation required reliable data.

Digidarts addressed tracking inconsistencies across GA4, GTM, and LinkRunner, including a double-firing issue affecting the Purchase event.

Custom conversion events were implemented through GTM, and event data was cross-validated across GA4, Meta Events Manager, and LinkRunner, bringing tracking accuracy to approximately 90%.

This created a more dependable foundation for evaluating campaign performance, identifying conversion bottlenecks, and making budget allocation decisions.

Results & Impact

147%

Growth in booking conversions in India (completed in-app bookings)

333%

Growth in booking conversions across the UAE

38%

Improvement in cost per booking user in India (38% below client targets)

27%

Improvement in cost per booking user in the UAE

80%

Growth in in-app booking events across India

298%

Growth in in-app booking events across the UAE

176%

Growth in installs across the UAE with CPI rising just 14%

15% / 18%

Growth in installs (15%) and sign-ups (18%) in India

51%

Click-to-install conversion rate in UAE showing strong ad engagement

93%

Booking-to-completed-booking-user conversion signalling strong funnel progression

Bengaluru

Top performing city in India, delivering highest booking volume at lowest cost

Dubai

Dedicated booking campaign delivered the most efficient sign-up cost in UAE

Bottom Line

Playo's growth wasn't driven by app installs alone.

It came from building a performance marketing engine that connected acquisition with completed bookings.

Intent-based campaigns established clearer acquisition goals. First-booking tracking gave optimisation a meaningful conversion signal. Audience intelligence and geo-specific creatives improved targeting and market relevance. City-level budget allocation concentrated spend where booking efficiency was strongest, while a stronger tracking foundation made campaign decisions more reliable.

The result: 147% growth in booking conversions in India, 333% in the UAE, and up to 38% improvement in cost per booking user — all within two months.

For a sports and booking platform, the real measure of growth isn't how many people install the app. It's how many people find their next game and complete the booking.