ASA & CPP Playbook for Mobile Game, Ian Pernia, AppTweak.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] the next session is called uh ASA and CPP playbook for mobile games um and I'd like to welcome on stage Ian peria from App twe um so a little bit who we are so uh I work at app twe we are an app store marketing and intelligence platform we help mobile leaders optimize their apps paid and organic performance in the App Store we are the industry's most comprehensive platform we offer a lot of great tools including uh App Store

optimization and keyword intelligence Apple search ads management app reviews management Market intelligent reports API capabilities and a lot of different reporting features we are trusted by over 2,000 plus mobile leaders highly rated on G2 and work with a lot of great um companies and Brands and some of you might recognize yourself up there today we are powered by our Atlas called AI so Atlas or our AI called Atlas sorry uh Atlas has been trained on millions of App Store data points including over 20 million keywords 6 million apps and provides us a lot of great features that help us better understand the apps algorithms and how different apps and keywords are grouped together we have offices around the world I myself I'm going to be working in some of the Asian offices this summer so that's pretty exciting uh but we were able to offer you know uh boots on the ground and provide localized support in a lot of different markets

uh a little bit about me so I have a for I'm senior appal consultant here at abti I've been uh working in the ASO industry for about four years now I'm also the Apple search ads team lead here at appek I'm a Bay area native Sports Enthusiast and mobile gamer myself my favorite genre being card battle strategy games cool so now the introductions out of the way we can talk about why we're all here today so today's agenda we're going to start off talking about just the fundamentals of Apple search ads and custom product pages just to make sure we're all on the same page then uh I'm going to go through some statistics on CPP usage in mobile games that our data science team was able to put together and then finally what I think will be especially interesting for everyone here today will be some examples of effective cpps that I've been able to find uh using apps cool so um introduction Apple search ad so why is Apple search ad is a unique ad Network well first of all um it's the only advertising platform native to the Apple App Store there's over 650 50 million weekly active users

who are high inent and I think that's especially important is that they're high intent users actively searching uh for apps and games to download uh in terms of specifics there's no ATT optin or scad network setup which I know is a big pain for a lot of developers these days and it still allows post install um conversion tracking events via the um ASC API and then also what's particularly interesting with app tweak is the Synergy the unique Synergy that Apple search ads has with ASO and how you can leverage both of them to improve both your paid and organic performance cool so here are the four main inventories for Apple search ads you have the search results search tab today Tab and product page ads each of the different formats has their pros and cons but for the purpose of today's presentation we'll be focusing primarily on the search results campaign uh just because these are the main placement in the App Store and give you the most

control over keyword bids targeting Etc so when it comes to setting up search results campaigns Apple recommends the the four standard campaign types so you um separate your campaigns based on theme so you have brand and competitor campaigns which are pretty straightforward you have Discovery campaigns which historically has been a way for you to let Apple's algorithm identify new keywords for you to Target uh but in recent years with mixed results and the fact that a lot of search ads platforms are starting to release their own keyword recommendations like we do at app twe we find that Discovery campaigns are losing a little bit of value these days uh but the biggest and um most interesting campaign to talk about is the generic campaign so generic campaigns are going to be your biggest lever for incremental wins and increased visibility uh and then we recommend to break down your generic campaigns further by separating them into groups based on user intent so instead of having all your generic keywords in one campaign you can break

them down even further based on user intent and when you do that that actually sets you up really nicely for implementing custom product pages which I'll talk about in a second uh and then when it comes to managing campaigns I think the first step is just understanding what the different kpis are at each stage of the funnel so first you have Impressions this is impacted by your cost per bid and the relevancy of the keyword that you're bidding on and then next you have Taps and installs which is determ by the appeal of the ad itself so if you've ever run into the situation if you're running Apple search Jets campaigns where you see high Impressions below tap through rate or high tap through rate below conversion rate these are actually perfect opportunities to implement a custom product page strategy cool so what are custom product pages well it's first important to understand that there are custom pages in General on both the App Store and the Google Play Store so starting with the

Play Store you have a lot more customization options including both creatives and keywords um as well as you know title description things like that but the downside is that Google app campaigns is really the only compatible network so far and there's much less use cases than on iOS so on iOS you do have limited customization options limited only to promotional text screenshots and videos but it is compatible Apple search ads and other networks and the compatibility of Apple search ads is what uh we're here to talk about today sorry uh going back one second just is a quick overview of what's customizable on each platform so as you see on iOS on the le- hand side it's really only the the screenshots of the video and then right underneath that is the promo text while on Google Play you have a lot more customization options in terms of Icon title description screenshots but again a lot less uh different capabilities

cool so back to iOS so the core benefit of running custom product pages is essentially having alternative landing pages that can show specific content to different user segments so essentially you can align your creatives and messaging with different user intent uh creating more relevant ads increasing tap through rate and uh resulting in lower ad Spin and with the goal of increasing your organic cured rankings as well and then when to use cpps or how to use them so cpps are really most effective when your audience segments are addressable addressable and targetable so essentially addressable is in they resonate with different messages or visuals than your default and targetable as in they can be isolated and tracked so essentially what the process boils down to is finding keywords related to a specific user segment and their user intent and creating custom Pages tailored to that

segment and here we have an example from HBO Max so you can imagine HBO Max has a lot of users coming looking for the HBO brand shows TVs movies things like that but they also have another audience segment interested in live sports so by creating a custom product page you can have a page dedicated to specifically showing live sports so someone searching for live sports related keywords aren't shown the default TVs and movies and instead are showing athletes and you know live games so now that we understand what cpps are uh can go into some of the statistics on the top 50 games in the App Store that our data science team was able to put together so first the top categories using cpps are the games card categories casino and puzzle games with the top keywords with the most cpps in pretty much all Casino related terms casino slots poker uh keywords like that and when we correlated this with average revenue per user it does tell a

pretty um concise story where the games with the highest revenues are able to afford the cost associated with creating custom product pages so there's the cost of the creative um the execution itself and then the acquisition cost that comes from Apple search chat so games with the highest revenues are tend to be able to afford those costs but what I think is particularly interesting is the lack of adoption or um yeah lack of adoption for role playing games and adventure games I think there's a lot of opportunity there so hopefully some of the examples I can show will um inspire people in those categories and then here are some statistics on the ad groups themselves so what we find is that most of the ad groups using cpps are um using them to Target generic keywords and then when compared to the default product page we can actually see that um the default product pages have higher tap through rates and conversion rates

so on the surface level this makes it seem like cpps might not actually be that effective but if you take a step back and you know look at the larger picture the statistics actually make sense because if you're using cpps to Target generic keywords typically those generic keywords are lower performing so when comparing the success of a CPP doesn't really make sense to compare it to the performance of your current default product page but instead to do a post pre- and post analysis for from when you implement the CPP so our team was able to do that and what we find is that there's significant improvements and conversion at all different steps of the funnel from tap to rate conversion rate and the biggest jump coming from the impression to install rate so essentially in implementing a CPP creating more tailored uh messaging and creatives will impr improve the different steps of the funnel and finally I think what would be interesting for everyone here is some examples that we were able to find uh

via app twe so first we have Empire and puzzles here so if you take a look at the default product page you can see that they're giving a wide overview of all the different features they have both RPG elements and Match 3 elements but when you look at the cpps what they're doing is using a CPP to Target the different audience segments and the keywords related to those audiences so first you have a CPP that's targeting a lot of RPG and Casual game related keywords and as a result you can see they're showing a lot of the RPG gameplay decision making customization upgrading options and are also using some of the Casual game Aesthetics that we see are pretty popular with you know those click baity type ads these days and one thing that's particularly interesting is that they're not actually showing the match 3 gameplay in anywhere in the CPP so again they're targeting RPG casual game related keywords and have a CPP dedicated to that audience the second one however they're targeting a lot of Match 3 related

gameplay keywords and as a result the CPP itself is showing a heavy emphasis on the match 3 gameplay even having the before and after feature which is pretty popular among other Match 3 titles so I think they do a great job of understanding they have users interested in RPG casual game related elements and audience interested in match three game playay elements and creating two different pages targeted to those audiences next we have solitire cache so again casino games being the top uh users of cpps and casino game keywords being the most competitive Sol solitary cash was running a CPP on those exact terms casino games and high uh volume Casino related keywords and if you look at the default product page they are essentially showing the standard screenshot layout highlighting traditional solitire gameplay and kind of having a more standard um look and feel but when you compare that to the CPP the CBP is using a much more

eye-catching design using the splash screen promoting when Real Money having dollar bills flying around everywhere and a lot of less focus on the actual soliter gameplay itself so if you think about their strategy they're trying to Target the highest volume most competitive Casino related terms uh and as a result need a creative that's more eye-catching that can compete with the crowded Casino space also they know people interested in casino games are in it to win real money and and as a result they're promoting that uh USP front and center with um a heavy emphasis on that so again they understand that people interested in traditional solitire gameplay and people interested in the casino style games are different audiences and have created a CPP that can better relate to the casino game Space uh next we have Mech aren so I think macarina is doing a really really great job so if you see the default product page pretty standard uh screenshot out highlighting a bunch of

different features and just really giving a general overview of the look and feel of the game uh but then when it comes to the custom product pages for cpp1 they're targeting a lot of battle arena MOBA multiplayer online games those type of keywords and as a result they've kind of changed their positioning quite a bit so if you see instead of highlighting kind of the overview of the entire game they're really trying to focus on highlighting the different multiplayer aspects um showing 40 million users 4.9 App Store rating playing with real players online multiplayer so again they understand that people looking for battle arena terms might be interested in these features as opposed to learning about the you know General features of the game so they created a CPP really dedicated to try to positioning themselves as a popular online multiplayer game to compete with other players in that space and then cpp2 takes a completely different approach so cpp2 is tarting a lot of robot specific keywords Transformers Optimus Prime things like

that and if you notice the CPP itself is a lot more robot focused so they're showing the robots and different poses showing how they communicate with each other and the gameplay itself has been shrunk down to just fitting within the handset device so again they're targeting robot Transformers Optimus Prime related keywords and a result the CPP is more robot focused than gameplay focus and finally we have a pretty simple but effective example especially if you are a game working with popular IP um one thing that animation Throwdown does is that their default product page uh highlights the core ccg gameplay showcases the full character roster highlighting a bunch of different characters and cards but the CPP it's pretty straightforward uh they're targeting Family Guy related keywords and as a result they want to show Family Guy characters locations uh and really if you notice they don't mention deck building or card game related gameplay until the third screenshot so again

understanding that Family Guy is a Big Driver of traffic for them and want to create a CPP leveraging the brand popularity to capitalize on that traffic um so that's pretty much all I had for you today so if you have any questions feel free we have some time here or you can scan the QR code here to set up a meeting with me and other members of ab twe to discuss more but again thank you for your time and hope you all enjoy the rest of the event thank you all right um did we have any question because we have time for at least one I can't see oh over there coming the microphone is coming cool uh thanks Ian for the insightful presentation uh I was curious about um what is the input from the partner side or the the partner that you're working with on setting up a

custom product page what do they need to do versus what do you guys do yeah great question so we do offer a lot of different levels of support so some of the times the the clients they understand okay this is we have different audience segments they already are aware of the different personas things like that and then they kind of come to us just for the creative execution that s so that's a pretty straightforward part but then there's some clients who are you know working with us on a monthly basis and they're kind of thinking of new things to do and that's where we take more of a lead and start with brainstorming first understanding what are the different audience segments that you currently have what are the keywords that are assciated with each audience segment and a user intent and then how can we take what you currently have in your default product page and tailor it more to what those users are looking for so um essentially to answer your question depends on how much level of support they need but uh depending on what they need we can have uh different solutions to address those needs

awesome thank you all thank you so much [Music] [Applause] [Music]