PERFORMANCE MARKETING · USER ACQUISITION
Bykea moves Karachi by motorbike. Happy Ads moved Bykea's user numbers — 3,500 new first-time riders in a single month, on a Cost Per First Ride model that made every rupee count.
The Challenge
Bykea — Pakistan's leading bike-hailing and delivery super-app — operates in Karachi's notoriously complex urban mobility environment. As the pioneer of motorbike-based ride-hailing in Pakistan, Bykea faced a unique acquisition challenge: educating potential new users on the bike-hailing model (different from car-hailing expectations), overcoming safety perception barriers, and competing with Careem's bike service and a growing field of local motorbike operators.
The campaign was run via InMobi's mobile platform on a Cost Per First Ride model — meaning success was measured exclusively in completed first rides, not installs or registrations. This created a tight alignment between Bykea's commercial objectives (real riders) and Happy Ads' campaign performance metrics. InMobi's rich audience data for Pakistani mobile users provided the targeting foundation, but the creative and optimisation strategy needed to convert intent into completed rides.
Karachi's specific user behaviour patterns added complexity: peak ride demand is concentrated in specific time windows (office commute hours), specific geographic corridors (DHA to downtown, Gulshan to PECHS), and specific demographic segments (office-going young professionals aged 20–35 who couldn't afford car-hailing daily). The campaign needed geo-temporal precision to reach the right people at the moments of highest first-ride conversion probability.
The Solution
Happy Ads ran the Bykea campaign through InMobi's mobile advertising network on a strict CPFR model — campaign spend was optimised entirely against completed first-ride events fed back from Bykea's MMP in real time. The audience targeting combined InMobi's Pakistani user data with Bykea's own high-LTV rider profiles to build lookalike audiences of users most likely to complete a first ride and continue using the app.
Creative was built around the Bykea proposition's specific advantages over car-hailing: faster in traffic (motorbikes navigate Karachi's gridlock more effectively than cars), cheaper per trip, and available in areas of Karachi where car-hailing had poor supply. The 'beat Karachi traffic' creative angle — showing a Bykea rider arriving while cars sat still — was the highest-converting creative variant in A/B testing.
Geo-temporal campaign scheduling concentrated spend on Karachi's peak commute windows and highest-density residential and commercial corridors. The combination of precise audience targeting, performance-optimised creative, and InMobi's mobile reach delivered 3,500 first-time rides in a single month — making it the most efficient CPFR outcome in Bykea's performance marketing history.
Key Results
3,500
First Rides — Single Month in Karachi
CPFR
Model — InMobi Network + MMP Integration
Karachi
Traffic-Beating Creative — Highest Converter
Bike
Hailing Adoption — Pakistan Pioneer
Key Insights
01
02
No performance creative for a Karachi mobility app should ignore Karachi's traffic. It is the problem every commuter thinks about every morning. Bykea's motorbike model is structurally superior to car-hailing in heavy traffic — a genuine product advantage. Happy Ads' highest-converting Bykea creative was the one that showed this most vividly: a Bykea bike navigating through stationary cars. The creative didn't need to be clever. It needed to be accurate.
03
The conventional wisdom in mobile performance marketing is that CPFR models work well in mature markets (where MMP integration is reliable and ride completion rates are high) but struggle in emerging markets (where app stability, payment infrastructure, and supply availability create friction between intent and completion). Bykea's 3,500 rides in a single month — in Karachi, through InMobi — disproves this assumption. Emerging market CPFR works when the product works and the partner understands local execution.
