How Paper.io 2 Turned the US Into Its Biggest, Most Profitable UA Market

The Challenge

Finding the highest-value users in an already-large audience. 

Paper.io 2 already has a large, mature user base. The challenge isn't acquiring more users, it's identifying and winning the smaller pool of high-potential, high-value players within that audience, a pool that shrinks and gets more competitive every year as the game matures.

Winning the US without sacrificing value. 

As Paper.io 2's largest and most valuable market, the US is also where competition for high-value users is fiercest. Most demand sources either play it safe on volume here or chase installs at the expense of long-term return, exactly the wrong trade-off for a legacy title that needs quality over quantity to keep growing.

How Helix Helped

Helix has been a core part of that market's growth, becoming a top network by spend and helping the game keep expanding in one of the most contested markets in mobile gaming.

High-LTV targeting, backed by real retention: Rather than bidding for broad reach, Helix's model identified and prioritized the highest-predicted-value users within the US auction, holding D120 ROAS 15 points above the game's ROAS target even through the most aggressive phase of the scale-up. That targeting wasn't just a forecast: users acquired through Helix showed D7 retention 32% higher than the account's blended average, confirming the LTV gains were real and giving the model confidence to keep bidding up.

A smarter ad experience, engineered for performance: Three things drove the quality behind the scale:

1. Better-performing ad selection — Helix's model consistently selected the creatives and formats most likely to convert high-value players, driving installs per mille well above the blended network average without relying on sheer volume.

2. Active rotation against ad fatigue — creatives were rotated systematically to keep performance from decaying over time, protecting IPM and user quality as spend scaled up rather than letting returns erode.

3. Player-friendly formats — by favoring ad formats that fit naturally into the player experience rather than interrupting it, Helix widened the pool of profitable US users available to bid on.

That quality showed up in speed too: with more than half of predicted D120 value recovered within the first week and full breakeven reached in around 5 weeks, the team could keep scaling into the US without a long, uncertain wait to know it was working.