Crafting promotions that work and how I created one that didn’t

[Music] [Music] all right well hey thank you very much for coming and joining us while I share some of the things that are we okay if I wander over here or why am I just gonna be like so sadly off-camera that it's just not gonna work you know what we're OK alright so thanks for coming and listening to some of the things that I've done horribly wrong well trying to promote some of my stuff and then what I've learned in the process of researching that and then what we've learned actually looking at promotions that work well and how players behave on Amazon devices so the first thing I'd like to show you guys is for reasons that promotions fail now there are a lot more reasons than just these that promotions fail terrible copy bad art

I've chosen these four to talk about today because these are the four hardest ones to find if your art is good and your copy is tight these are the hard ones to figure out so yeah I failed on pretty much all of these and my first promotion so let's go ahead and take a look how I messed all this up so I have an Alexis skills app it's a voice services app it's a really cool political trivia game and I thought hey Amazon has this really cool t-shirt printing service so I'll go ahead and put some of my political quotes on these t-shirts and I'll sell them and I made a Facebook campaign for this and it sucked I mean it was terrible not even my mom liked it right and I mean first of all the art is horrible I'm actually making you work really hard to see what this is can any of you actually read that from where you are no okay huge fail number one - I mean I didn't even give people a reason to like it I

mean okay this is close so what who cares and then even if you liked the quote okay really you can get these any time there's no reason to get one now so why wouldn't you just wait until later I also screwed up audience targeting I'll tell you more about how I messed up my target audience on Facebook and a little bit the only thing I didn't mess up was timing the ad I actually did this right before an election cycle so I thought I was brilliant and I probably got like two sales that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise because I did the timing right so the first thing I really missed on was an emotional connection now it turns out what I research what an emotional connection is I need to recognize two parts of who we are as consumers were this big emotional bag of needs and wants like an elephant that says oh my gosh I really want that cigarette even

though I'm trying to quit or that you know extra slice of cake and then we're this little tiny logical writer on top of that elephant no no no don't have that cigarette it's not good for you or you'll wear those pounds later with that extra piece of cake alright how good is a little writer controlling the elephant and the elephant want something kid not very good but if you need to do something like go to the gym how good is the writer getting the elephant to move okay he sucks at that too right the elephant doesn't move if the elephant doesn't want to move so I mean how many free apps and games are out there what maybe a million seven hundred fifty thousand how many of you have all of them right okay no one does but you've seen the ads why didn't you click on the ad to get one I mean it's free right but there's still opportunity cost so you got to be able to justify this in order to get the elephant and the writer to move so what I want to do is talk about getting the elephant to move there is something in your game that made it

desirable to build your game there's something cool about your game which is why you wrote it it may be because you can you know really do a good lot of personal expression in your game you've got a mechanic that really instantiates a state of flow or there's maybe a really kind of cool collectors thing you've got this awesome hearthstone card collector thing going on but there's an emotional reason that your game is attractive and that gets the elephant to want to move now the elephant is excited and the elephant is going I want I want but there's a big difference between deciding you want something and then deciding you're actually going to go ahead click on it install it download it and play it but you know you're gonna buy something and that's why we need to get the value clear because we need to get this guy the writer to go ahead and tell the elephant oh it's okay to go and help him get there so ways we can do that in the offers that you make in

addition to pulling out those emotional ties to your game give the writer a reason to let the elephant go talk to about additional currency you can get maybe you know hey if you download today or if you download from this ad we'll give you some free currency packs hard currency or soft currency packs maybe there's a time special event you can tie to or have some additional downloadable content but to give you need to give that elephant writer a reason to go ahead and click on it now something that's not going to be there if they wait you know a week or so you don't have to tell them it's a week but something that says this isn't going to last forever the deal is going to change and it may be a deal you don't like as much later so give that often a chance to move now for creating value often just you know a discount 50% off or 25% off is good enough and we give you some really cool tools if you're an Amazon that let you create these sales you can

like if you have a premium game put it on sale you can put your in-app purchases on sale we've also got really cool tools so that when you do put something on sale you can tell whether the increased volume at a lower price got you more money than you would have gotten had you gotten less volume at a higher price so I mean you don't want to put stuff on sale if ultimately you're gonna lose money doing it right so we've got tools that help you with that the the you know and so the you know a good example is dropping the price we'll make these slides available later now reaching your target audience is important and you don't want to do the mistake that I made because I said my shirt should be great for everyone interested in cutting-edge technology because this was an Alexa skills app right Alexa new technology voice technology high-tech my shirts should be in great for everyone who loves high-tech like my political trivia game okay that is so wrong so wrong my shirts were better for

political hacks and and not postscript devs right so I really kind of missed my target market what I should have done was marketed at you know political conventions or in Republican and Democrat newsletters that I've got this really cool trivia game if you guys have a match-three game that has a Renaissance theme you could advertise to everyone who loves games really that's no one in particular or you could try to narrow that audience to people who enjoy medieval stuff if you're not taking out a little tiny 2x2 inch ad in the local Renaissance Faire newsletter you're missing a huge potential of your target market for a match-three game that would otherwise just get lost in the noise so narrow down that target market and okay things that fail I've noticed the duration is too short you don't get enough impressions maybe people need to see something they're interested in two or three times before they finally click

and engage on it often audiences are saturated with other things like the match three example tons of match three games out there and not targeting for your customers next thing is when to run a sale if you're going to it's not when you need the money it's actually when your customers need the money because a sale is bad if it rains or users to wait for sales if it doesn't generate more revenue if it doesn't encourage users to stay in the game these are bad times to run a sale successful sales occur when they can have an irregular cadence in other words you're not training your user they actually generate more revenue and their time point user inventories or low here's an example of what I mean by user inventories I've got a game I've got some soft currency up here coins you can buy coin bundles and these are extra valuable things maybe these are power-ups or maybe these are sore or something so you can put soft

currency on sale in terms of real dollars or you can put the power-ups or swords on sale in terms of the number of coins it takes to buy them so what do you do well the best thing to do is to talk to William Grosso over at scientific revenues and he can customise sale timing for each individual user in your game but if you haven't done that yet try these general guidelines so let's say that you're looking at an inventory situation where your customer is in general and you guys all know what your average customers coin balance is right when your customers have a large balance of unspent coins and a relatively low balance of power-ups they need a good reason to start spending some of those coins now you can see because the balance of power-ups is decreasing they still like the power-ups they're just not replacing them so why don't you put the power-ups on sale this is a good time to reduce the number of coins it takes to buy a powerup so you're starting to eat into that inventory of coins and now with people having a lower

inventory of coins again because they just bought more power-ups people are more likely to go out and buy more currency packs so understanding what you have an unusual excess of either power-ups the hard currency item or the soft currency item is important now while we were digging around finding all of this data we also collected some particularly interesting data from the UK store and from Mario was going to tell us a little bit about that UK specific data that we got thank you Mike so so I think that Mike had a very good point what he was saying that you know for example if you if you have to put out a fire you know to know which room is actually a fire otherwise your fire extinguisher is completely useless right so when it comes to games in particular well as game developers we need to know what's going on right and at Amazon and an app store in particular we I think we have a privileged perspective because we can see what's going on what are the trends and there are a few very

interesting insights that I really won't like to to share with you guys and this one is specific around the tablets customers here in UK and their behavior so you might note that at Amazon we have a line of devices and one of the most popular if not the most popular device for games is the fire tablet which is a tablet that you can get for less than 50 quid actually on days like prime date you can get it for like 35 quid she's maybe the price of an expensive cocktail in London so what what are these these customers these players doing with these devices there is this misconception that Amazon devices are used just to consume Amazon video or or Netflix actually the biggest category or by usage is games these devices are proactively used by players to play games and what type of games is the question they always get from from developers is okay what is resonating with these type of Amazon

customers well on five tablets half of the players are playing casual games so if you are if you're developer and you're thinking about okay what type of customer can I target and what type of game resonates well casual should be your big focus another inside the it's not on the slide but I think is very valuable to understand is for example the biggest chunk of players on tablets are actually female female playing casual games so if you look at if you think about the specific vertical you might think about you know a maybe 50 60 year old lady playing candy crush and if you would ask her like that I should feed the description of my mom and if I would ask her do you consider yourself a gamer or a power user she'll probably say no never but maybe she's spending like 70 80 quid per month on candy crush right which actually definitely defines her as a

power user well now as a game as game developers but in particular as sometimes advertisers and if we want to run effective promotions like mindset we need to know what is going on not on a very generic high level range level but we need to know exactly what is going on and I think that these ladies is very very interesting so we we went deep and deep dive into what is the players behavior on on these tablets and what are they doing not just every month every year but every day and every single hour of today and so what you can see here is across a typical week what is the distribution of usage by game type on Amazon devices and you can you can take very interesting learnings here so take a look at action games for example action games have a spike across the working day is from Monday to Friday

in the mornings and then they dramatically drop off in the evenings and if you look at the timings usually action games are played around the breaks so Iran for example lunchtime but another interesting learning is that look at the weekends well I shouldn't there are huge spikes in the morning so you can think of maybe players which are maybe going at work and playing action games which are usually more time consuming the casual games over the week but over the weekends in the mornings of Saturday and Sunday that's where they go heavy and keep playing action games when it comes to puzzle games that's a very different story actually we see huge spikes of ug usage during the last hours of the day right you see you can see around pretty much between 6 and 10 p.m. that's where there is the spikes for puzzle games and we know that the average page for this kind of players is usually older as well so think about what can you do with this

type of data think about you're running a promotion you're running or you're running an in-game event or you're running a discount or or even you're running push notifications to increase the usage of your game if you have the puzzle game well you should definitely focus your money when it comes to marketing advertisement for example around the laters hour of the day but if your game is an action game you should focus your spend across the weekend and that's not and that also should inform you strategy when it comes to in-game events then Michaels was mentioning if you are already have natural spikes across the weekend why don't you think about compensating these pipes when you don't have them across the week running in-game events that only run for weekday for working days for action games for example there are other interesting learnings which he which are the seasonal spikes and when it comes this

is an average across all categories of games then there is a direct correlation between the school holidays actually Christmas time of course is the biggest spike as given developers we all know that Christmas is is the big one but you can see they're clear spiking across all the health terms these are holidays and there is a consistent usage of games across summer holidays so you can you can do different things you can leverage these bikes and focus your spending when you know there are some hot topics or hot bands happening like like the school holidays or you can think about okay what can I do to compensate this and average my spend across the times where my game is not actually being used and the last piece of data I want to share with you today is around the probably the biggest tension that there is in the

mobile world in mobile games were right now which is premium against free apps yes freemium there is a big difference in in behavior there is all the spikes that you see across the year there those are actually weekend so that's the only thing that these two graphs have in common but as you can see enough which are the orange one in up is very much consistent across the year there is of course is slight spike around Christmas time when it comes to premium Christmas time and and also the school holidays is where you see the big spikes and that could be a correlation between the fact that there is more spare time there is paydays and there's been saving around before Christmas that goes into buying premium games that then you can assume across the vacations as well so the bottom line here is first of all you should always do analytics inside your game and hopefully you will see the same kind of behavior that you see here but

in general think about when is the right time to run promotions and that is really correlating with with the type of your game and when your your players are actually playing your game that should instruct your strategy around promotion in game events and in general around your marketing spend these are not the only insights that we have at Amazon there's actually much more we actually have an entire developer guidebook around the Amazon Appstore and a lot of insights like the one you seen today you can download the e-book from this link but actually if you go to the Apple deal booth upstairs there is a bunch of this guidebook that you can get and me and Mac will be around the whole day today for the big endian tomorrow around around the event and that is it so thank you very much for listening here's our details so mike is based in the US but I'm based here in

in London so if you have any question if you you know running game events and you want to know more about the App Store please reach out to me in mind thank you very much for listening and I don't know if you have time for a couple questions but yeah thank you very much [Applause] if you ask me about drones about Prime delivery I know absolutely nothing about them [Music] hey I haven't got any paid advertising yeah I'm a developer so I usually want the money coming in um didn't know could you actually can you actually pick the times that you want specific advertising slots - well for advertisement advertisements law that is well there are a few a few ad networks that allow

you to do that that is more maybe concern about the type of push notifications that you can set up to specific yeah that's what I was wondering was in here in your talk you mentioned it's best to put your Ivor's at these times but if you can't pick the times I just wondered how you did it well again you can probably craft in-game features that allow you to do that so it could be not related to specific ad network but it could be specific to when you actually show specific advertisement right and give give you know give Facebook another couple of months they'll figure out how to do that eventually [Music] [Music]