From App Store to Browser: How We Built a Gaming Portal in 28 Days That Captured 25% of a Mobile Studio’s Existing Traffic

Published by Bastion Prime | WooCommerce Migration Specialists

This case study is based on a real project delivered for a mobile game studio in 2025. Certain metrics and implementation details have been slightly modified to protect client confidentiality

There is a specific kind of ambition that keeps builders awake at night. Not the restless anxiety of a struggling business — the focused, electric energy of a team that has already proven their model and is now asking a bigger question.

The mobile gaming studio that came to Bastion Prime in early 2025 was that kind of team. They had shipped titles across Google Play and the App Store. They had reviews. They had retention metrics that most studios would trade their entire roadmap for. They had an audience — hundreds of thousands of players who had found their games, downloaded them, loved them, and come back.

What they didn’t have was ownership of that audience.

Every player who discovered their games through Google Play was, in a meaningful sense, Google’s player first. Every download on the App Store lived inside Apple’s ecosystem, governed by Apple’s rules, subject to Apple’s 30% cut, and visible to Apple’s algorithm — not the studio’s.

They wanted to change that. Not by abandoning mobile — they were too smart for that — but by building a parallel channel. A browser gaming portal where their existing library would live in a format anyone could access directly, without a download, without an account, without an app store standing between the player and the experience.

They came to us with a vision. They left with a platform.

Note: At our client’s specific request, all brand names, revenue figures, and identifying business details have been kept confidential. We pushed hard to publish this case study with full attribution — the results are genuinely exceptional — but the studio preferred privacy. What follows is a complete account of our work from our side of the build.

The Strategic Brief: What They Actually Needed

On the surface, the ask seemed straightforward: build a website where we can host browser games.

In reality, the brief had five distinct layers that each required a different kind of thinking.

Layer 1: A consumer-facing game portal. Not a corporate website with a games section. An actual destination that felt like a product — somewhere players would choose to go, not just a URL they’d stumble into. The UX had to compete with established browser gaming portals that have been iterating on their designs for a decade.

Layer 2: A content management system for a growing library. The studio was launching with 12 browser-adapted titles and planned to add new games on a rolling monthly cadence. The CMS had to make game publishing frictionless — the development team needed to deploy a new title without touching code.

Layer 3: A player data infrastructure. This was the strategic core of the entire project. The studio wanted to know their players — not just count them. Registration, session data, game preferences, return visit frequency, monetization behavior. They needed a CRM that could receive this data and make it actionable.

Layer 4: An SEO architecture that would capture existing search demand. Their mobile games already had name recognition. Players were Googling their game titles. The new portal needed to rank for those searches — capturing traffic that was currently landing on the App Store and Google Play pages, not on a property the studio owned.

Layer 5: A traffic migration strategy. How do you move a meaningful percentage of your mobile audience to a new web destination without disrupting the mobile experience or violating platform terms? This required careful thinking about cross-promotion, deep linking, and user psychology.

This was not a website project. This was a digital expansion strategy with a website at the center of it.

Why This Project Required Salesforce

Before we get into the build, it’s worth explaining a decision that some clients initially question: why integrate Salesforce into a gaming portal?

The answer comes down to what you want to do with player data — and most studios dramatically underestimate how much player data is worth if it’s properly organized and actioned.

Here’s a simplified picture of what happens without CRM integration:

A player discovers your portal, plays three games, creates an account, and then doesn’t return for six weeks. Without CRM infrastructure, this player is a line in your analytics. You know they existed. You can’t do anything meaningful with that knowledge.

Here’s what happens with Salesforce integration:

That same player is a Contact record in Salesforce with a complete behavioral profile. Their three game preferences are tagged. Their session length is logged. Their registration date creates a lifecycle trigger. After 14 days of inactivity, an automated email fires with a personalized recommendation based on the specific genres they played. After 45 days, a win-back sequence begins. After they return and complete a premium game unlock, their record is updated and a cross-sell recommendation fires.

At scale — which was precisely where this studio was heading — the difference between “line in analytics” and “actionable Contact record” is not incremental. It’s the difference between a traffic website and a player relationship business.

The studio understood this immediately. Salesforce was not a question — it was a requirement.

The Architecture We Built

Stack Selection

After the discovery phase, we settled on the following technology stack:

Information Architecture

The portal’s information architecture was designed around three user journeys simultaneously:

The Discovery Journey — a new visitor who has never heard of the studio, finds the portal through organic search or social, and needs to be converted into a registered player within their first session.

The Loyalty Journey — an existing mobile player who arrives with brand recognition, wants to find their familiar titles in browser format, and needs a frictionless bridge from mobile to web.

The Monetization Journey — a returning registered player who has demonstrated engagement and is ready to be offered premium content, ad-free access, or game bundles.

Each journey required different page templates, different CTAs, and different Salesforce workflow triggers.

The 28-Day Build: Week by Week

Week 1 — Discovery, Architecture, and Design System (Days 1–7)

The first week was entirely non-visual. We conducted a comprehensive audit of the studio’s existing mobile titles to understand how each game would translate to browser format — aspect ratios, control schemes, session length expectations. We mapped the complete Salesforce object schema: what data would be captured at registration, what behavioral events would trigger workflow automations, and how Salesforce records would map to WooCommerce user roles.

Design direction was established on Day 4: dark mode primary (the natural choice for a gaming platform), with a high-contrast accent system that could differentiate game genres visually. Typography: Space Grotesk for UI elements (technical, gaming-adjacent feel) paired with Inter for body text. Color system: deep navy base, electric blue primary accent, amber secondary, with per-genre color coding for the game library.

By Day 7, we had a complete wireframe of every page template and the full Salesforce object map approved by the client.

Week 2 — Core Platform Development (Days 8–14)

The homepage was built around a featured game carousel — a hero section that auto-rotated the studio’s flagship titles with immediate “Play Now” access for guest users and personalized “Continue Playing” for registered users. Below the fold: genre-filtered game grid, recently added section, and a registration prompt with a clear value proposition (“Play free. No download. No app store.”).

Individual game pages were the most technically complex deliverable of the project. Each required:

• Responsive iframe embedding that maintained consistent aspect ratio across all device sizes
• A custom pre-loader that masked the game initialization period and reinforced brand identity
• Session tracking integration that fired a Salesforce event on game start, game pause, and session end
• A rating and comment system linked to the player’s Salesforce Contact record
• Related games module driven by genre tags, not manual curation

The custom WordPress plugin we developed for game management deserves specific mention. Game publishing was reduced to a form: title, description, genre tags, thumbnail image, iframe embed code, access tier (free/premium), and estimated play time. Publish. The game was live within 60 seconds, correctly categorized, SEO-optimized, and connected to the Salesforce schema.

Week 3 — Salesforce Integration and Email Automation (Days 15–21)

This week was the heart of the project’s strategic value.

Player Registration → Salesforce Contact: Every new account creation on the portal creates a real-time Salesforce Contact record with source attribution (organic search, direct, referral, specific game page), registration device type, and first game played.

Game Session Events: Custom JavaScript event listeners fire Salesforce events on game start, milestone completion (if applicable), and session end. These events update the Contact record with game preference data and session length metrics.

Lifecycle Automation Triggers:

The App Store Bridge deserves specific attention. When a registered portal player visits a game page for a title that has a corresponding mobile version, Salesforce triggers a cross-channel email with direct App Store and Google Play download links. When a player arrives at the portal from a link embedded in the mobile game’s settings or credits screen, their source is attributed and the “from mobile” flag on their Contact record unlocks a welcome-back treatment.

This created the bidirectional traffic flow the studio had envisioned: mobile players discovering the browser portal, browser players downloading mobile titles.

Week 4 — SEO, QA, Performance, and Launch (Days 22–28)

SEO Architecture:

The SEO build was specifically designed to capture search traffic that was already flowing to third-party pages for the studio’s game titles. We implemented:

Game-specific landing pages — each title had a dedicated page optimized for its exact name search, including structured data markup (VideoGame schema) that enables Google rich results with rating display, genre classification, and play time.

Genre hub pages — category pages for each game genre (puzzle, platformer, RPG, arcade, strategy) optimized for broad genre searches with editorial content and curated game grids.

Brand-level SEO — the studio’s name and flagship title names were established as primary target keywords with dedicated content and internal linking structure.

Technical SEO foundation — XML sitemap with priority weighting, canonical tags on all game pages, hreflang implementation for regional variants, Core Web Vitals optimization targeting green scores across all metrics.

Performance benchmarks achieved before launch:

QA ran for 48 hours across 12 device configurations. Every game embed was tested for correct rendering, session tracking accuracy was verified against Salesforce event logs, and all email automation sequences were triggered manually to confirm correct personalization logic.

Launch occurred on Day 28 at 3 AM. The mobile games had been updated in the preceding days with a subtle “Also available to play free in your browser” prompt in their settings screens, linking to the portal.

The First 30 Days After Launch

The studio had set an internal benchmark of 10% traffic capture from their mobile audience within the first month. A conservative figure — their actual number was more than double.

25% of their combined Google Play and App Store monthly active users visited the browser portal within 30 days of launch.

Let’s unpack what that means:

If a studio has 400,000 monthly active mobile users, 25% migration to a new channel in Month 1 represents 100,000 portal visits from an audience that already has brand loyalty, already trusts the product, and arrives with zero acquisition cost.

These are not cold traffic visitors. They are warm, high-intent players who went out of their way to visit a new platform because they already liked what the studio made.

Salesforce data from the first 30 days:

That last number is worth pausing on. The browser portal drove 2,847 mobile game downloads in its first month — from players who were already on the portal, playing browser versions, and then converted to mobile through the App Store Bridge automation.

The portal wasn’t just capturing mobile traffic. It was generating mobile traffic.

The Traffic Migration Model: What 25% Actually Means

The traffic migration figure requires context to appreciate properly. Platform-to-owned-property migration benchmarks from comparable digital expansion projects suggest the following:

The reason for the above-benchmark performance comes down to two factors:

The warm audience effect. Traffic migrated from a mobile audience that already had brand affinity. These weren’t strangers — they were fans. A 25% capture rate from a cold audience would be extraordinary. From a warm audience, with in-app prompts and a frictionless experience, 25% becomes a floor, not a ceiling.

The frictionless entry. The portal required no download, no app store, no payment to access the full free library. The barrier to first session was literally zero. Click link, game loads, play. Seconds.

The registration rate — 30.2% — is what converts a session into a relationship. More than one in three visitors created an account, giving the studio a Salesforce Contact record and a direct communication channel for every one of them.

The Asset Being Built

Twenty-eight days. One portal. 34,200 player records in Salesforce. 2,847 mobile downloads from browser-to-app attribution.

But the more significant number is the one that compounds:

Every registered player who returns next month becomes a player with two months of behavioral data in their Salesforce record. Every genre preference tag refines the recommendation engine. Every re-engagement email that converts makes the next one more effective. Every mobile download attributed to the portal strengthens the case for continuing to invest in the browser channel.

What was built in 28 days is not a finished product. It’s a system that gets more valuable every day it runs.

This is the difference between a website and a platform. A website exists. A platform compounds.

The studio that came to us had already built something excellent on mobile. They were smart enough to know that owning a fraction of that audience’s attention — directly, without an intermediary, without a 30% tax — was worth the investment of building correctly.

We believe this was one of the most technically complete and strategically sound projects we’ve delivered. The client’s request for confidentiality is, frankly, the most professional compliment they could have paid us. The results speak loudly enough that they’d rather keep the competitive advantage than the credit.

We’re proud of that.

If you’re a digital product company — games, software, subscriptions, content — and you’re building an audience on third-party platforms while your own web property remains underdeveloped, the economics of what this studio built apply directly to you.

The investment in building your own channel — properly, with CRM infrastructure, with SEO architecture, with the automation layer that turns visitors into relationships — is not a luxury. It’s the difference between renting your audience and owning it.

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For companies requiring enterprise-level integration including Salesforce custom build, this project falls within the scope of our Premium Package and Salesforce Sync Enterprise tier.

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Bastion Prime is a UK-registered technology agency (TSG TECH LTD, Co. No. 16633250) specializing in WooCommerce platform development, Salesforce CRM integration, and digital channel strategy for growth-stage digital businesses in the USA and UK. All client details in this case study have been withheld at the e