ASO + RETENTION = Game Changer - Sergio Martinez, Agatha Bejan, Phiture

[Music] thank you [Music] next on our insights track right here in room number three ASO plus retention equals Game Changer 20 minute session it brings in the users but how do you keep them playing here we're going to learn all about retention and how it interacts together and how optimizing both can help your visibility your conversion and your spend within the game with Sergio Martinez

all right uh welcome and thank you for coming today we're gonna be talking about how your ASL and your retention strategy can go together to improve your games LTV so it becomes a really Game Changer my name is Sergio Martinez she's Agatha Beijing did I say it right yeah okay so good and I am an ASO senior consultant for uh feature and she is the director of subscription um ceramic subscription optimization there you go but uh we thought we touch base on ASL let me share a bit of my career uh background so let's get here so I graduated as a tech journalist many years ago and that's when I discovered that my career needed to be around gaming uh six years ago more or less I joined uh the ASO world and last year I just joined feature I know this may not be enough for a gaming show so I'll just add that I'm a Pokemon League a champion that I am a Zombie Slayer on Call of Duty and that um yeah

I finished once on fortnite it was by accident still counts so now that we know each other a bit better um let's go to Define what ASO is so ASL has many definitions and I think that the most accurate one would be like comparing it to um storefront windows so you know like in any store like you have this storefront where you're showing your goods in this case we will show your uh games and we need to convince people to get our product so um Us in real life like you know like this storefront will be just the entertain store and in our case it would be the entrance to many teams working together like retention ASO design even monetization on every kind of of teams but um let's focus a little bit more on ASL so um like Super Mario ASO has two main missions for Mario would build you know like beaten Bowser and then um saving Prince of speech um for us it would be all about increasing

feasibility and conversion so visibility is all about getting your game in front of people and this is um conversion sorry would be like once you've shown your game Let's convince people to get there to install it so that could be a could sound simple but it's actually hard because we know that there are more than 5 million apps out there so that's why we have the Asus tag right here it comes quite handy right now uh you can see here that we have um that is divided this is sorry this is a strategic framework so to do ASO and we have divided in two parts like Goldson foundation so go undergoes we have increasing visibility and conversion which are like the main goals for ASO and below that we have the different actions we can take to uh affect one the other or both at the same time so for example if we want to increase the stability first of all we need to do a good metadata update and then you can start thinking about you know like getting feature like maybe

um getting like some ads done and if you want to increase your conversion now it's time to think about your visual assets like your title your screenshots your icon because that's what people are gonna be seeing there and also if we want to touch both at the same time localization is key because not many people out there do it right and you know when people see something that on in the language they speak it's easier for everybody and for them to actually install your your game in this case but actually before we touch on what color should the icon be we need to understand what type of traffic we get so we need to understand where people see us so we can develop like strong strategies for this okay so imagine you're playing Pokemon and you are gonna fight Squirtle the turtle like the water one and you have a Charmander so it's the fire one that didn't just work we need to understand really the type of traffic we are getting so we can develop strong strategies for example these are all the

ways people can discover us and it's one of them has a different Focus so for if your traffic comes from top charts and featuring focus a lot on your visuals because that's what people are going to be seeing first however if your traffic comes from search that's all good but um just focus on visuals yeah that's good but do also focus a bit on the metadata because that's how people are gonna look for you and maybe you could add like some ASA some Google ads there to leverage it and however if your traffic comes from ads like it's all good but at least make sure your assets are kind of similar to the ones you are showing on the store so people understand it's the same and about liveops we'll talk just in a bit uh if we talk about increasing visibility uh the data is actually a great Ally here because it can increase your impressions and insults by thousands and you know um it's a great tool here but

uh getting featured doesn't happen just by accident so um there are some things you need to take into consideration like for example having great relationships with your app store on Google Play uh store uh representative if you don't have one it's not the end of the world because you can actually like get to them some other ways but you need to uh pitch your game roadmap often and also ahead of time to make sure they understand how your game is going to be the perfect match for the game of the day also you could consider like getting some explosive um temporary exclusivity or um you could just do your qvrs and send it to them because uh Apple cares a lot about the storytelling of your pitch but Google cares a lot about your numbers so let's make this the focus of our qvr also you could be keeping your ratings above four stars and keeping your crash rate to the minimum that's key also and don't forget to keep up with the latest third tools like for example CPP PPO Etc also like Ops and speaking of which

uh light bulbs are a great great way to increase your visibility but also your retention and monetization because for Asos I said it's good for visibility they are shown everywhere like we have like the search results the store Front Page many places um and it also can be used to Target new users so it's a good way to be visible and also to convert because we target them and well for retention they are a great way because we can keep users active by like targeting them and also to we can Target the labs users the one that are not playing anymore and for monetization yeah you can actually select the price of your event so you can do like Pokemon go did like this year with the Pokemon go first and you can select the price and make your monetization go bigger and now I'm gonna pass it to Agate who's gonna tell us all about uh retention so thank you Sergio um also I hope everyone can hear me um I would like to also uh wish happy

birthday to Sergio who decided to enter a new decade here with us so uh thank you so much for uh for being here um hi everyone I am um I'm Agatha and this is supposed to be a gift oh yeah it works there sorry it doesn't work here um and just like uh light and Shadow and so in retention um are two sides of the same coin uh this is a great adaptation after one of my favorite games The Legend of Zelda um my talk is going to be purely focused on retention I'm mindful that this is an ASL track so thank you for having me as an uh as an intruder I've spent my um my last decade working for a few gaming companies as part of their marketing product and live Ops so that was a very interesting um interesting journey and I've been I've been around for the birth of push notifications and rebirth of them and pretty much everything around the around the Sun for CRM and yeah

outside work I really love casual games I am absolutely obsessed with crushing candies and everything else that can be done in a casual game so um I will be very I will be quickly focusing on why retention marketing as Sergio mentioned um is very important in ASL and especially in app store to make sure that you have a strong retention to continue to be pushing by the be pushed by the app stores but let alone the fact that it costs you a lot to to acquire a new users and it costs you a lot to acquire a new paying user so I believe at this stage this one mixed with um with a pretty low retention of day one in gaming retention marketing is going to become a differentiator for uh for the gaming companies and I'm mindful that many games companies serial retention or CRM rather is a tool not necessarily part of the game

development but I am here to disagree not only because it's my job but I did see in the past how having a clear a good martech stack um is going to help a gaming company to amplify the work of their um of their game team and as as you can see game development really and retention marketing are really focused a lot on um kind of the same things they have similar goals make sure that you increase the purchase for uh frequency and you repeat the you increase the repeated purchase right in order to lead to higher higher LTV also I have to apologize I'm really a nerve wreck right now so if my voice is shivering please bear with me um getting back to getting back to the purpose of a talk um I would say that games companies from what I've seen are really gold mines of data so having a strong Martin stack in order to work along with your with your Tech stack for game development is is

really going to be a game changer for um for for everyone making sure that you make the most of of your own data which is technically free data um and that's that's really that's really important um also CRM channels I saw in the past CRM channels being treated as an afterthought um and that is a shame because when when things when when bad things happen when maybe a piece of content has one too many bugs or maybe when we notice a chain rate higher than expected in the life cycle of a player that's when we turn our face to push notifications to emails basically to our colleagues from CRM and ask them to do Miracles but it's hard unless you make CRM channels integrated part of your game development work so um that is something that I would love for everyone to to consider um when even from the pre-production phase of the game because ultimately active players have the highest LTV so making sure that you have a targeted

personalized CRM strategy is going to really amplify the work of your game development team and that's that's what everyone wants at this stage to make sure that the resources are good use this is a little bit of an example of how a good CRM strategy could look like for for a mobile game is really focused on how each channel is going to contribute to each phase of a player life cycle how you can make the best use of push notifications how you can make make the best use of in-app messages and emails for each stage of of your player life cycle um and yeah this this presentation is going to be shared afterwards but as you can see each each stage could benefit of um of a good set of channels and yeah I promise I'm gonna be quick so I was quick uh be loyal to what matters

um make sure that you use your own data for marketing too not only for not only for game development or part maybe treat game development and CRM in an equal way um plan for CRM channels from the get-go and make sure that you support that with uh like with the game Sorry with CRM strategies that are purely targeted and personalized um and yeah if if anyone needs any help or would like to discuss further outside the um outside the this session uh we're gonna be at uh Booth zero b06 and that is really that thank you so much for listening thank you so much thank you for that any questions from the audience let's see if anyone has questions Sergio any questions I've got a question and it's a it's a it's a tricky one let me tell you your favorite metric the one thing that

you personally keep an eye on and worry about day in Day Out sorry I'm not sure whether you heard that Sergio you got it yeah hey fantastic one metric one metric of all of them that you personally stare at and worry about and and and get excited when it goes up and and burst into tears when it goes down I would say for sure that's install straight like I mean yeah what it goes up it's like super good when it goes down is you have to do your work and understand why it's going down because sometimes it's a matter of aligning with your client and understanding the goals so yeah um I think retention definitely but um retention is a really complex one right so um in terms of yeah in terms of um all the all the work we do for CRM that that continues to be a focus for us even if it's day one retention even if it's day five returns that is one of the biggest Focus even for CRM and if there was one thing that Google and apple could open up and let you know

they're going to Grant you one wish and you get you get you get to find out the secret the secret information what would that be I want to know the algorithm so yeah that'd be awesome I know that's hard but at least to know which factors matter the most for the algorithm that would be super great how do you feel about that um I definitely that definitely that and we struggle a lot of course now that the gdpr and privacy changes are kind of reshifting the reshifting the entire Market stack I would say definitely trying to understand how how the platforms are allowing us to be there uh that would be a good one well we're gonna get back on track we oh there is a question make it a very quick one I'm going to sneakily squeeze you in before our next session thank you I have a question about the retention so obviously retention depends also on the product itself so how do you sort of clean the results of various retention

channels to really make sure that they they made the difference and it wasn't just something that happened in the product at the same time that is a wonderful question and I think he's is really important to make sure that the way we work at the moment is sorry I was keep hearing myself the way we work at the moment is really by having clear control groups having a clear understanding of how how we measure and I think the data and the measurements are are going to be the answer here I don't think it's going to be fully separated um but the whole point is not to work um against each other the whole point is to work uh with each other so each part of every time when something happens in the game after you launch a new piece of content or you have a different type of live event the idea of CRM is to amplify that so with clear control groups where you keep players away from the CRM content that's what is going to help you define a little bit better or more accurate

um how the importance of CRM and why is it amplifying what what your team does Does this answer the question yeah good yeah anything further to add Sergio no I'm all good thank you fantastic thank you to Agatha and Sergio thank you for that great talk thanks so much thank you