CatCasino

Balancing Personalization and Promotion: How ZingBrain AI Transformed CatCasino

ZingBrain AI helped CatCasino move from manual game placements to a smart promotion system, increasing unique game discovery and active days per player while driving significant revenue growth for promoted titles.

Partner

CatCasino

Well-known brand with an active and experienced player base.

website

catcasino.com

Overview

CatCasino is a well-known brand with an active and experienced player base. Many of their players are already familiar with a large portion of the game catalog and are constantly looking for new titles to try.

The team wanted to introduce personalization into the lobby to better adapt to these player behaviors and make game discovery easier.

At the same time, CatCasino works closely with game providers and regularly promotes specific titles as part of commercial partnerships. This created an additional challenge: ensuring that promoted games receive strong visibility without negatively affecting the player experience.

The goal was to find a balance where promotional placements would not disrupt personalization or reduce player engagement, while still delivering measurable growth in the performance of promoted games.

To achieve this, CatCasino partnered with ZingBrain AI to introduce personalized game recommendations directly into the player journey.

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The Challenge

Before introducing personalization, the lobby relied mostly on traditional sections and manually managed placements.

This created several limitations:

Experienced players had limited support when searching for new games
Finding new games depended heavily on static sections and manual sorting
Promoted titles often required top placements that could affect how relevant some players found the lobby
The team needed a way to promote games without negatively impacting engagement or key metrics

CatCasino wanted a system that could help players discover new games naturally while still supporting the commercial promotion of specific providers and titles.

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The Solution

To introduce personalization in a way that felt natural to players, the teams implemented two key recommendation touchpoints.

“Suggested for You” Section on the Main Page

A personalized “Suggested for You” section was placed at the very top of the main casino lobby.

This section became the primary place where players start choosing what to play next. Instead of showing the same games to every user, the system ranks games individually for each player based on their behavior and preferences.

For experienced players who are constantly exploring new titles, this section makes it significantly easier to discover relevant games they have not yet tried.

Over time, it naturally adapts to each player’s interests as their behavior evolves.

Similar Games Pop-Up on Game Exit

To support continuous game exploration during a session, CatCasino also introduced a Similar Games pop-up that appears when a player closes a game.

Instead of returning directly to the lobby, players are shown several games with similar mechanics, themes, or gameplay features.

This creates a smooth discovery flow and helps players move naturally from one game to another without breaking the session.

For players who enjoy exploring the catalog, this feature became an important part of the in-session experience.

Smart Game Promotion Through the Zing Backoffice

Game promotion is an important part of CatCasino’s commercial strategy.

Using the Zing Game Promotion tool in the backoffice, casino managers add specific games to the promotion list each month.

Once added, these games are automatically integrated into both recommendation modules:

In the Main Recommended section, promoted games appear in order of their relevance to a particular player.
In the Similar Games pop-up, promoted titles can appear at top positions if they are genuinely similar to the game the player has just played.

This ensures that promotional visibility is achieved naturally, without forcing irrelevant titles into the player’s experience.

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The Result

The personalized sections quickly became a central part of the CatCasino lobby.

The Main Recommended section rapidly turned into the most used game section on the brand and became one of the main sources of game launches.

At the same time, the smart promotion logic helped increase the performance of games included in the Game Promotion program.

Key outcomes included:

The Main Recommended section becoming the most popular place for players to launch games
Increased turnover and GGR across games added to the promotion tool
Strong and growing engagement with the recommendation sections
A balanced system where promotion and personalization work together instead of competing

Over time, we observed that players who actively engage with Zing recommendation sections tend to demonstrate stronger engagement and monetization metrics, highlighting the role of personalized discovery in long-term player behavior.

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Metrics

To measure the impact of personalization, the teams ran a 50/50 A/B test:

Group A continued using the manually managed static lobby
Group B received the fully personalized experience powered by Zing

Uplift in the Test Group (vs Control):

Turnover & GGR per Player: +9%
Bets per Player: +6%
Unique Games per Player: +12%
Active Days per Player: +3%

Impact on Promoted Games

The introduction of the Zing Game Promotion Tool also significantly changed how promotional titles perform.

Previously, most of the GGR uplift typically came only from games placed in the top 5–10 positions in the lobby. With personalized and rotation-based promotion, CatCasino was able to promote 100+ games simultaneously, exposing them to players for whom those titles were actually relevant.

As a result, promoted games began receiving traffic from new and more suitable player segments, leading to consistent growth in both turnover and GGR across the entire promotion list.

The exact uplift depended on the baseline popularity of each title. In many cases, promoted games saw around +40% GGR growth compared to the previous period, while some lesser-known titles experienced increases of several hundred percent after being included in the promotion program.

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What the teams say

“To really unlock the full potential of personalization and ML models, you need close and open communication between the teams. With the CatCasino guys, that connection was there from day one. I’m thrilled that we have been able to experiment, learn and improve together over the years, both on our products and the way we built them.”

Oleg Smolerov

CPO – ZingBrain AI

“Before ZingBrain, helping players find new games in the lobby still depended on manual placements and standard sections. That works to a point, but for experienced players who are always looking for something new, it’s not always enough. At the same time, we regularly promote games as part of our provider partnerships, so it was important to make sure those promotions didn’t harm the player experience.

“With ZingBrain, we managed to find a good balance. Players now discover games through the recommendation sections much more naturally, and promoted titles are integrated in a way that still feels relevant for the player. It made the lobby both easier to manage for our team and more engaging for our audience.”

Oleksii Podlipnyi

Head of Technical Product – CatCasino

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Conclusion

For CatCasino, personalization was not just a case of adding another feature to the lobby.

It was about building a smarter way to explore games that works for both players and the business.

By combining personalized recommendations with intelligent promotion logic, the brand created a lobby where players can easily discover new games while promotional titles still receive strong visibility.

The result is a balanced ecosystem where player engagement and commercial objectives grow together, without compromising the gaming experience.