How Scrambly improved retention, marketing efficiency, and product decisions with Mixpanel.

Scrambly is a loyalty and app discovery platform that allows users to explore and engage with apps and games while earning rewards. The platform works with top-tier gaming and non-gaming app developers, driving high-value user acquisition by rewarding continuous engagement. With over 1 million registered users and 200,000 monthly active users, Scrambly partners with both mid-sized and publicly traded advertisers to create a sustainable and data-driven growth model.

From the moment Scrambly launched, the team knew that understanding user behavior would be crucial to success. With a dual focus on engagement and advertiser-driven growth, Scrambly needed a robust analytics system to track how users interacted with the platform, what motivated them to return, and which acquisition channels delivered the best long-term value. However, their initial analytics approach quickly proved insufficient.

At first, the team relied on Google Analytics and manual SQL queries to extract insights. These methods lacked the depth and flexibility necessary to fully understand user behavior. Scrambly struggled with fragmented data across web and mobile, making it difficult to create a unified customer journey. The company’s multi-channel marketing strategy, spanning Google Ads, Facebook, and various ad networks, further complicated things—different acquisition sources resulted in drastically different user behaviors, and tracking retention across them was nearly impossible.

As a rapidly growing company in a highly competitive industry, Scrambly needed to optimize its acquisition strategy while maintaining strong retention rates. With increasing customer acquisition costs, making the right product and marketing decisions became a matter of survival. According to CEO Alexander Grankin, “In our industry, user acquisition is incredibly expensive, and retention is everything. We needed to make aggressive, data-driven product choices—and the only way to do that was to have instant access to the right data. This is where Mixpanel became indispensable.”

Scrambly turned to Mixpanel to centralize its analytics and empower teams with real-time, actionable insights. The first step was to unify cross-platform data, ensuring that both web and mobile engagement metrics were accurately tracked in one place. By integrating Mixpanel with Segment, Scrambly streamlined event tracking and ensured data consistency across acquisition channels and devices.

One of the biggest game-changers was Mixpanel’s ability to analyze user retention and engagement by acquisition source. Previously, Scrambly had no clear way to see how different marketing channels influenced long-term customer value. With Mixpanel, the team could instantly break down user cohorts by origin, platform, and behavioral traits, allowing them to identify high-retention user segments and optimize marketing spend accordingly.

The impact of Mixpanel extended beyond marketing. The Monetization, Marketing, and Customer Support teams all adopted Mixpanel for different use cases. Customer Support uses it to identify fraudulent users, while the Monetization team tracks which in-app offers perform best. “We needed a tool where I could pull any piece of data instantly and analyze different user segments on the fly. Mixpanel gave us exactly that,” says Grankin. The technical foundation for this transformation was built by Scrambly’s Co-Founder and CTO, Illia Frantsevskyi.

Increased user onboarding completion by 20%

With Mixpanel’s insights, Scrambly significantly improved user onboarding, increasing completion rates by 20%. By closely analyzing drop-off points and running A/B tests, the team was able to make strategic UX improvements that encouraged users to complete the onboarding process. “Mixpanel helped us break down onboarding into granular steps and pinpoint exactly where users were dropping off. By refining our onboarding flow, we saw a measurable improvement in engagement and retention,” explains Grankin.

Optimized $500k+ monthly ad spend for higher ROI

Marketing efficiency also saw a dramatic boost, with Scrambly optimizing over $500,000 in monthly ad spend by identifying the most profitable acquisition channels. Through Mixpanel’s cohort analysis, the team discovered significant behavioral differences between users acquired from different platforms. “Customer behavior varies drastically by acquisition channel—Facebook users behave completely differently from those coming via Google Ads. Mixpanel allowed us to see this instantly and adjust our bidding strategy, ensuring we focused on the most valuable segments,” says Grankin. This insight led to substantial savings and a more profitable marketing strategy.

Identified a key predictive event for retention

Scrambly leveraged Mixpanel’s event-based tracking to find an early indicator of user retention and lifetime value (LTV). This helped them optimize paid campaigns beyond basic signup tracking.

“We needed an event that happened early in the user journey but was a strong predictor of long-term retention. Using Mixpanel, we found a key event within an hour and a half—and this completely changed our marketing strategy. Google Ads campaigns started performing significantly better, and our acquisition costs dropped substantially”, notes Grankin.

Democratized data across teams

Previously, data analysis was limited to the engineering and analytics teams. With Mixpanel’s self-service capabilities, Scrambly enabled the Marketing, Monetization, and Customer Support teams to make data-driven decisions independently.

“Now, our Customer Support agents can quickly identify fraudulent users by pulling Mixpanel reports themselves. Our Marketing team can break down user segments by demographics and acquisition channels. Our Monetization team can track which offers perform best. 70% of our team now actively uses Mixpanel,” states Grankin.

Shifted roadmap to prioritize mobile growth

Through retention analysis, Scrambly discovered that Android app users had nearly double the retention rate of web users. As a result, the team decided to shift resources toward mobile, planning a redesign of the website into a mobile-first experience and launching an iOS app.

“Mixpanel showed us that our Android users retained nearly twice as well as our web users. That insight led us to double down on mobile development, ensuring our product roadmap focused on the highest-value user segments.” says Grankin.

With its foundation in data-driven decision-making firmly established, Scrambly is setting its sights on continued expansion. The company is actively launching in Japan, Korea, France, the UK, and Germany, requiring even more granular analysis of user behavior across different geographies. Mixpanel’s advanced cohort analysis and segmentation will play a critical role in understanding regional differences and refining localization strategies.

Scrambly is also doubling down on mobile growth, after Mixpanel insights revealed that Android users had nearly twice the retention rate of web users. This data-driven realization has led the company to prioritize mobile-first development, shifting the website’s role into a more streamlined onboarding experience for the mobile app.

Beyond international expansion and mobile-first development, Scrambly plans to further refine its predictive analytics models, using Mixpanel’s retention and cohort tools to fine-tune acquisition strategies. The company also intends to integrate Mixpanel deeper into its automated marketing workflows for real-time campaign optimizations based on engagement trends.

“We want to become the #1 rewarded user acquisition platform in the world. The only way to do that is through data-driven decisions, and Mixpanel is at the core of our analytics strategy,” says Grankin. With Mixpanel in place, Scrambly is well-positioned to scale efficiently, optimize marketing spend, and build a product that keeps users engaged long-term.