Curated Panel: How To Maximise Your ROAS & Retention Advertising On Rewarded Platforms.

[Music] we do have a panel I got it wrong last time um on how to maximize roas and retention advertising on rewarded platforms so so um could we please have our panel come to the stage all miked up thank you everyone for joining us um thank you guys for joining me at the panel um today we're going to talk about how to maximize your raws and retention advertising on rewarded platforms because as we know this is a Hot Topic there's so many rewarded platforms um it's here to stay so we want to find you know the best ones how to optimize what are the things that we should do consider in the future to make sure that the rewarder keeps growing and it's good

for the partners advertisers um so yeah today we're going to dive into all things maximizing Ross retention and we've with me joining me a Brilliant Minds will be arv founder at original games uh mates Yak growth Partnerships at pixel Federation and Vincent Tessier from um 52 entertainment Chief marketing officer thank you guys for joining me um so to start with to give our audience a little bit of context I want to understand you know how long you guys have been working with rewarded platforms um AR you you seem to be really well oriented yeah we uh we started probably two years ago and you know despite all of my reservations it it you know it's working and and we're scaling up with new partners all the time amazing amazing mes um how long rewarded has been in your part of your UA mix I'd say pretty much about two years I think we started two years back as well we started with uh with influence blind F at the time and uh

that was our first exper experience with it and then we tested like bunch of networks and it's been part of the mix ever since perfect and Vincent what's the percentage that's I think it's been a year and a half uh we started with a few networks and then last year we expanded and try others basically yeah amazing all right so I have a game and a prize to be honest so for you the ones of you who stay with us at the end the best quality question will be able to win this little fairy cow I'm from Edinburgh from Scotland so uh if you stay with us um you can get that so I'm going to pass this now to you AR and you guys will be able to decide who's who's talking next so we can gamify the experience a little bit more okay um so what are the unique benefits That You observe from rewarded marketing compared to you know traditional UA mix what are some unique things I mean this is this is an interesting one so um and I'm also getting this this toy out of this this rewarded panel right so we have we have one we have one casual game um and you know focusing all our 50 staff on it

um what's interesting is the retention metrics from reward are typically better so if you're talking to investors all the time or you're trying to raise money maybe just worth only showing the rewarded retention so that's interesting um but I I think the bigger thing is um in terms of scale user quality appears to be okay and we'll talk more about that um and it is it is a reliable scaling source to a degree so I think um I'm very comfortable testing new partners knowing that we'll probably at some scale it's not you know it may not scale like a Facebook or um an apple uh but the um the like it's like it's like a safe B at least to a certain point I guess that's the big one perfect you can now pick who speak next here do I have to give this to him too yes okay there it goes thank you my friend to a degree is what I I I keep in mind in your sentence it's an interesting channel to a degree right and that's I guess what we had to discuss is that it's a fairly new channel although we can argue you know reward of a wall has been there forever

you guys have a bunch of games though right yeah yeah yeah around 50 and um 52 something like that yes uh but yeah so we have essentially the material and different genes to test different channels basically but the point is it's not new it's just you know essentially scaled or got got a renewed life because again offer wall and correct me if I'm wrong but norer world you essentially you know reward users uh to get some some um um whatever post install you know action to get their points in the game they playing so the mechanism is there forever and offerall never really took off at least in term of you know sexiness Factor uh compared to the past two years with rewarded platforms and again the key thing in what you just said aleny is it's an interesting channel to a degree I will add that it's an interesting platform is actually a little bit timec consuming because you need your team to tailor potentially the user experience the ad experience

potentially you need a specific Ras prediction to make sure it's actually profitable otherwise you can I don't know maybe lose money right if you not do it properly so you need to put resources in front of this channel what this what your I'm going to need the cow now sorry I said I would throw it at you like so a bit of action all right uh so yeah I completely agree we um the way we've been working with the your word platform is that we were not able to scale up significantly but we were able to explore more of them and each of them being able to offer us like a scale to a point so there's a possibility to move in terms of scale not really upwards but more like to the sides and uh Implement more and more networks into your portfolio uh each of them are working a bit differently so might you might expect different results definitely and uh another interesting point for us is uh it it also varies from game to game like uh one game implemented into different platforms we' seen different results uh it might be better fit for other game game that

implements different mechanics and uh reporting we never really broke down what we should have done is that to create a separate reporting for the for the predictions for these types of players um we've been looking at it from the perspective the players coming from the regular UA completely different and completely underestimated by our end that's what we working on fixing right now yeah so did you lose money for the past two years because you didn't implement this like smart way to analyze and to optimize we were more like more cautious when it came to scaling and I seen uh average results at best with some of them so do you think there's like any particular types of games maybe genres that work better on reward than the other um you know maybe it's per platform the uniqueness of the platform like how do you determine uh what platform is working for a specific game specific genres like what you look for good question uh I mean in terms of setup when you have the early game early in-game monetization done right you should be seeing definitely better results I'm not sure if there's like a typical genre that uh incorporates this

right away but this would be the way to go for me yeah uh want see yeah sure sure anyone give me the goat or the sorry Cal I think like one of the things we learned is casual puzzle with a female audience with um ad monetization Works quite well um we we I think we tested on like hyper casual and it was not working well yeah that's perfect perfect okay so talking about like how to measure for Success uh because rewarded is as we said really different from traditional channels there's like additional work that has to be done to make sure that you're not losing money that's that's true so what kind of you know key metrics kpis do you set to actually measure the effectiveness like what can you tell others who are struggling or who are looking to invest in rewarded to to look for who has the co I mean I would say just start by doubling your usual d0 D3 D7 Target rowers to make sure you're not going to lose money you know right away

and then you're going to relax it right so go super aggressive in your goal and then see how it goes uh and obviously monitor really really closely the retention the LTV curves if if it's different from traditional channels that's that's the key um I would say which is not so easy to do right again you need to some time and having your team to do a separate project hey the UA team is launching those new channels we know the user behavior is going to be different please analyze and adapt and then obviously you you iterate um but yeah Target robust that's your only tool in term of creatives you you you tell me but depending on the channel or the rewarded player they're going to have different needs different creative needs and and also that's something you need to understand to feed those networks with the right creatives because then again it's a competition either we talking about an rewarded app you know where they have their users like I don't know a misplay and then you compete with all those others offers right um so potentially changes the creative helps

yep anyone else wants to share yeah I'll take go got it um so yeah retention uh we were I want to say like unpleasantly surprised when it came to retention because we were looking from a different perspective at the uh user behavior and uh I guess somebody expected uh the retention pretty much plummeted after they reached the the final Milestone within the game so we had the adjust our expectation of those players as well and take that into consideration and uh yeah setting the uh but then again polishing the early in-game monetization might help to get the best of it right away because because I the point is like if you have if you're buying with an LTV model that's based on traditional uh user acquisition like you mentioned like I think it's important to understand that that model even even if it's updating uh you know every day even if it's user level like we we do cohort level modeling um you may need to make adjustments or you may need to just constantly check so what we do is constantly check that the the projected cohorts are returning the same

way they are and very happy to admit or report that um you know still looking at months and months in the deviation is like 10% from from the model and that could be even higher like the deviation could be up not not down so that that's good perfect and let's talk about some misconceptions you know because every platform is different um every traffic is different user base are different so sometimes what works on one platform will not work on the other platform right uh reward structure for example doesn't have to continue to go forever right and like how do you how do you tackle all this dynamic dynamic you know um do you talk to the channel do you check the channel do you wait for the channel feedback like what's the best solution to to understand this uh what we do is we usually talk to the channel and we want them to take a look at the event structure that we have and advise us like or basically set up the events for us and uh tell us like this might be working better and better uh I think

that might be the right way to do it because they got all the insights and uh all the clients they've been working with in the past so there's definitely the expertise to be to be shared uh whenever there's like a custom expectation to be set by by us it's usually taken into consideration but we do listen to their feedback as well but I would definitely leave it up to the to the um to the platform yeah I mean so your question was on misconceptions right so we can talk about that but I mean you know internally you're not the only one making decision right so you doing a meeting and you say hey we're going to launch this and obviously you have some some folks that you will have to um um convince or to message because the misconception is this is not real users I mean they're not necessarily boats of course they could be but potentially real human beings but they not really want to play your game they just want the reward so they're going to come play your game get the reward and then you know leave uh and so I guess that's the biggest misconception right the thing is yeah a percentage of this audience is going to going to be like a sampler it's

going to be a taste of your game and then actually they might like it right if you're doing a good job with your product so there is a way to get real engage users through this Channel and then obviously the other part is well yeah but the 90% of the people you know not going to fall in love with your game and uh but it's still from a from a business perspective you can still make it profitable you know they come they stay 15 days and you know your LTV is going to be um different a little bit more of an ad experience more aggressive so you can still make money with just short-term live um um users right the life cycle of the user that essentially how long they're going to play your game so from a business perspective it still can be good right from a philosophical perspective you might have some some people say well they don't really want your game right I guess that's the biggest misconception right it is that's true that's true that's true yeah but I mean you know I mean your sales at Cash kick so you know how to kick this to keep my job

yeah so yeah I mean misconceptions is this is all a scam and it's like that's kind of an incent misconception because that kind of traffic back in the day for folks who've been in the industry is that you're using this kind of traffic it's cheap to to push yourself up in the charts but rewarded is completely different um and it has limits right because scaling is difficult U but it may be significant um for your product I think that's important to understand I think the the idea that um the okay the big one that I thought is okay I'm going to have to go to all these channels our game designers are going to have to figure out what events in the game we got to give them and what we found is that the channels they just tell you what to do like put in the put in these these five points in the game and and it'll start working so that traditionally has been working and attempts to optimize that from our end have been not successful the channel usually knows so that's that's kind of my um my point is that it's it's good to you can keep adding these channels without having to add load to to your UA

UAM perfect so in terms of like on that topic how do you actually choose which platforms to work with there's so many and there's so many coming to play right now right UA credits yeah yeah I going to say everyone everyone gives me 50,000 to try so the one who gives you 60 you to try it first yeah yeah so that's it yeah next question right let I mean it has to work Yo No but like I mean like the reward structure or like the type of reward structure doesn't matter to you because some are like playtime some are challenge based you know different models like do you really do do you care about that for your type of game specifically I didn't even know that you didn't even know that okay maybe that's something you learned today I mean your type of game might be working a little bit better with time Bas or different things but you don't know that in advance right you don't know you need to try it um even if you know your game and you have an idea of your user profile and and motivations but ultimately you can be surprised so

I'm not sure you know having your misconceptions of hey this channel should work better with my type of you just need to try them um and then it's a matter of bandwidth and again UA credit or incentive so you know you just put this network on top of your testing list right what do you think I uh pretty much agree uh we do there's like a well still there's many rewarded platforms but there's uh at the end of the day you're going to run uh out of them like out of the ideas who to test so you're going to circle around and uh retest the ones that you started with and uh you're going to look for uh I don't what change ever since that you U last time it was the last time that you use them they might come up with with different events different different models uh it doesn't really matter for us if it's like time based or EV based like whatever works works and uh it's not really up to us to decide like if the the players like it like that model we're just going to run with it we we actually got rejected by one what was it the how they dare we don't I'm not I'm not saying the name

but it's like get out of here Arsy that was that's what they wrote so what was the reason given that I'm never mind but maybe I asked for too much money I don't know or they're afraid I'm going to stay St yeah or or I go around saying it's a scam who those but most I think most channels are open to working with everyone yeah and on top of like on coming back to that question you know stop working and it's not working better than others so like from a rewarded platform point of view uh because probably there maybe there are some in the audience who wants to listen you know from your your perspective as a publisher like what can we do better and uh what basically you think because there are just some sudden changes like we we talked that you know there's some platforms just stop working out of nowhere it was just very sudden right some are working better some are working worse so would you from your perspective how could you share what you are well for me is like yo sign the contract but the guy didn't um but I think the I think the the piece on it it suddenly stops working I I think that the the point is if if these channels are being honest that using you know their apps to kind of promote you in in

in an offer wall or in an app sometimes there there's like a burn you know you got to it has to cool off and in that sense um I told our marketing team to just to to not give up like just try later yeah um and that's been working with some of the bigger ones where we would have periods where they start you know they start performing and then 3 months later we're back but they they didn't give credit the the second time so you kept spending a little bit but and profitably until it just no that's that's the App 11 business model it's just always unprofitable yeah um I'm what I'm saying is Max it out until the point that it's um just you know not working and then stop and then come back yeah but your advice to your uat is don't put cross on this vendor just try again in three months I agree yeah unless they suck yeah if they suck don't don't come back right yes okay any more thoughts to add I just want to add that uh yeah it's it's actually difficult

to understand choose um do a proper due diligence on all the rewarded offering because again you have networks and then you have their you know app owners who launch you know businesses so shout out to David who's just founded another rewarded app not open to UA I believe but called money time I want to try that David um but the point is there is plenty of offer because it's kind of trendy right so and and I believe it's actually a real user Trend so Unity last September I think you know on stage on their annual uh even they say yeah we're going to launch a Unity loyalty program things like that so even big companies are taking this trend seriously which I mean who am I to say if it's a real Trend I mean obviously some newer networks are are blowing up but it seems to be an underlying thing you know with the economy being difficult and people just struggling you know with their disposable income so I I agree to say it's a proper real Trend

meaning there's plenty of companies launching their products so for you as a UA you know decision maker it's actually even more difficult because more choice right um so yeah yeah so just to finish off uh in the next 12 months how do you feel the rewarded platforms will play a role what what big of a role will play in your marketing strategy overall well there are definitely not going away I think there'll be just more and more coming from Hamburg if I were to guess and uh we will definitely keep them in a mix because they are working we are not well sometimes we are able to scale up sometimes we not but we are we are not throwing them out of the mix I expect like more and more to come and we just going to keep them percentage of spin I believe when we prepped you kind of ask what is our share of uh wallet right for us maybe currently I'd say less than 10% oh yeah I think for me it's 15 15 yeah ours is closer to 15 o do you have real players no it's like

I mean some of them are Bots from Vietnam but like no it's like 30 to 50 but I think um what do you mean why right I mean it's a big number I'm surprised it's huge so so my my answer to the question is like I think this this trend is growing a lot of uh casual puzzle guys like us like we actually have a spreadsheet that has cash for example and it's like there everyone's all the CEOs are leaving their feedback um and so I think I think these channels are going to keep coming more and more um Publishers know about them but I'm wondering will there be a thing where like if you're a casual player you're only you're only dis discovering new games through these platforms because you know you're going to get um you know you're going to get some you know freebies I don't think that's going to happen I think uh they're just going to be around cool cool and if somebody's considering working with rewarded still hasn't tried them it's a little bit skeptical so what we discussed you know what would you say to that um if they want to try which one give

priority to any recommendations that you have for people wanting to try check your competitors try to understand what your direct competitors are using in term of specific channels and either you jump on the same and you compete or actually maybe just go to another one so your competitor is not going to be there and so for the same users you might have more chance to you know get the install but is it a thing of like this is a scam like I think that's that's gone like so there's no reason that to try it and they all give you credit they all give you credit so just do it yeah just do it perfect what oh I agree uh just do it just do it would you have a more nuanced approach or answer no I I would go the same way I mean there's no like nothing to disagree with uh it's just it's not going to go away just implement it test it you never know you might find the U best payers over there there could there could be a concern that this is going to cannibalize traffic from you know a major SD network but I mean kind of my

my feedback to my uh CMO is like well if the you know if we're getting if it's performing maybe that's that's okay perfect thank you guys for joining me here and now I guess we can turn to the questions and the best quality question can win that F little friend over there thank you guys for sharing your insights uh I think Monica did all the best quality questions though so I'm just going to throw another one which Goos or which kind of traffic do you guys think this platforms attract I mean they attract tier three cheap traffic that's using VPN to get get money but you just filled those out but but I think to answer your question it's like this the same GEOS that that are working elsewhere some some uh some channels are locked to us for example which is the traffic that you want right yeah the biggest is still us and I have one more question since I have the mic um does it does it work to have several rewarded

platforms or is there any type of cannibalism here I mean you usually my understanding is again depending of who who talking about but some of them have their own first party app so in that sense you don't compete it's just a different app with a different user base and then you need to look at the overlap okay this user is actually using all those rewarded apps on the same device so then yeah you compete but uh it's like on networks you know all the SDK netwk have access to exactly the same inventory but they do a better job at matching your campaign with the user uh at any given time right so I would say they're not much overlap or similar overlap to SDK Network so just go ahead you can open 10 channels and just see which one performs the best at any given time for your campaigns I think consumer be sorry I think does he have the cow no do you have a cow no sorry yeah go go sorry I as I was saying so yeah the they totally makes sense to implement more at the

same time and just look at the performance and uh scratch out the ones that are not working for you come back to them later because yeah definitely cannibals might be there but still I don't see much of a sense to testing just one at a time in this particular case so what I wanted to say was that I don't think we're at a point that consumers are going through all of those channels and seeing and seeing which one gives you the better reward I think that's that's that's the concern is that you're going to launch an all of them and they're going to find okay this one has the best the best deal so I'll go there I don't think it's happening and I think another interesting point on that is like how do you know that that's happening if you look at your user reviews or support requests sometimes there's bugs with getting those rewards and it's interesting you may start seeing Trends there and you have to see those Trends you have to run parallel yeah and also like look for the honesty and what's channel is sharing with you and who's working on long-term Ross and long-term attention because that's where I think it's going this year questions ah claan

hello oh thanks um in terms of the budget you guys are spending on um rewarded and it was interesting to hear your sort of differing sharees of wallet has that been additional spend so you've grown your marketing budget or is it taking share away from your Mets are 11s I mean for for us uh we're spending on this game like in the low Millions a month um so at times 50% of that might go to these channels and it's always incremental um but they but they have a limit like it's you it's not like apple 11 where they'll just be happy to take your money indefinitely um so it's it's always incremental but you have to keep adding channels for us anyway same sim yeah same here there's one other I can add that even if you if you allocate your good SDK Network long-term Channel and you take this budget out to put that in rewarded ads I'm not sure

you're doing a good job it has to be incremental I would say hello so thank you for sharing I'm really curious to understand by how much you reduce your payback time on your games with those Network and did you see a change depending on the category for instance you divided by two on in a purchase game and like buy free on ads game for instance just be more aggressive so I say earlier like double your target Ras for the same kind of D7 I would say start there and see how it goes and obviously it's going to move your payback window it's to divide your payback window by two right uh I'm not sure you should be more aggressive than that um because then you're not going to spend anything right um but yeah I don't know how that's an interesting one that's I haven't tried I'm too cheap to try that um but yeah so that's kind of a that's kind of an SDK strategy on on UA we haven't really tried that but I think um from from our end the channels provide guidance on bids um and we're more comfortable with

that right now never trust uh never trust the channel 100% what they say right because uh I don't know you yeah don't say that out loud that's a that's a secret does answer your question CLA yeah let's take it offline as we say in in Zoom conferences anybody else want their question not answered yes I'll Happ you to not answer thanks do you guys see any crossover between the red platforms and the web 3 stuff like the kind of motivations that players have to play might be similar to nfts and crypto I didn't study the subject so I don't know but they might be indeed as soon as there is a transaction you know you can talk about crypto and nfds uh and they are transactions with the users in Reed platforms to what extent it's you know there and potentially messing with the performance I don't

know you don't want to talk about that I don't know what he I don't know the question okay I can't answer it that was interesting one maybe that's the one maybe that's I think that's an interesting point maybe we need a new speaker yeah we need we need a web three speaker to talk about maybe hybrid hybridization yeah maybe okay anym okay well thank you very much our panel can me give a round of applause than