Does paid user acquisition make sense as a way to scale my game?

[Music] my name is Martin Macmillan I'm the CEO and founder of Poland VC we helped developers calculate lifetime values and we put money into growth capsule for user acquisition if it makes sense so what we wanted to do today is pool together some some guys industry who have been through scaling games using using page view as a strategy successfully and ideally what we'd love is if you guys to come away with some kind of actionable insights and people who've been through the scaling process using user acquisition on a paid basis and I'm going to go through and we've got we've got some questions and we kind of hacked up between us earlier on and hopefully going to have time for maybe a few minutes of Q&A at the end so I'll

hand over John just maybe just guys to do a very quick round of quick round of interest sure hey guys I'm John here and meet you currently running a company god to Jill and we do a lot of marketing but also have a pretty large social casino portfolio so hi Christopher farm I run a company called Tenjin we built a lot of growth infrastructure my name is Bethany I manage the analytics and UA initiatives for monkey fun we're a mobile gaming developer great cool thanks guys one of the things that that we often see as the companies guys who come through the door and say look I think my thing my metrics look really good in a soft launch whatever and looking at how you know how metrics translate from a soft launch into a kind of into a hard launch into a global into a scaling-up environment so it seems like there's a lot of pitfalls that once

you decide to hit the gas where things can can come unstuck so I guess the first question for you guys is any any kind of real-life experiences being through from looking at a set of soft launch metrics into into actually what happens when you start to hit the gas John's gonna take that one first so we're pretty unsophisticated about this we essentially look at a will launch a game throw it up on Facebook with the Facebook ads throw like 100 200 bucks code see what how much money we make back that first day or two and then we kind of just like pretend that's our our LTV for now and then if we have that you know very low LTV when we know we could be bored pertain ninety nine hundred twenty days if we base it off that first few days then it's it's just it's so much more possible when we have a low CPI that we're chasing all day long so

it's kind of how we do our cell phone system so we have a lot of developers that try to figure out this problem and one of the interesting things that I've seen happen is they do a lot of maybe they tend to do too much but there's a lot of analysis around statistics that they use to figure out should I buy X amount of installed and that amount of installs correlates to a certain like probability that they can keep acquiring that fashion so they can do a lot of math around trying to figure out if you have a certain statistical significance of acquiring a thousand installs for your game or for your app or whatever and you've got out 2x roi they can likely heavy confidence keep spending there or not spend there anymore that's what one of the things that we see when people go from luck soft-launched they try to figure out how many insults

that they need to get to some level of confidence where they can get a certain level of LTV or ROI from that from that budget and then with that confidence they can either spend more of it or not I guess one of the things with us we go into soft-launched expecting our KPIs to be higher in our CPI is to be lower than what they will be when we do our full lunch and so a lot of that ends up getting baked in which I mean whenever you increase your budget you're going to have this issue so that seems I mean again one of the things we've seen is people assuming I think a big mistake is assuming a set of metrics is just going to hold when you start to gasp something you've got to build in almost like some level of install costs rising and probably like you know if you're trying to do at a real scale the lifetime value is dropping because the audience that you were able to target it's just not not as good right right yeah or slightly the reverse you could in some cases

we've seen people acquire like a small sample set of users and then their LCDs are like really high but then when they actually acquire a lot and it's much lower because the budget network says multiplies larger so like account for that people will generally just try to figure out like how many installs you really need to think that and any advice that I mean it's or arranged I mean um was hard to know depending on like kind of app that you're trying to turn this deal with you generally start off guessing it seems I've seen developers to start guessing I guess but overall there is some specificall stuff that people will do to figure out like I need X amount in salt to prove some type of thing ten thousand five thousand well what would be a sensible range right here who is sitting here thinking okay to start I mean to John's point I'm spending a few hundred

bucks here I'm getting some really early stuff at what point do you have a level of confidence that you that you start to think that this could become scalable or maybe that's not a question I think right after that you can see like after one hundred two hundred Souls you can start to see but to get a real base I would say a thousand installs through your funnel and then you should have pretty pretty good grasp on it but but to your point its if you if you're running the social casino and you're going after 140 plus which is the perfect target for the first thousand and then when you try to scale you after men 1835 and men know sixteen year olds and whatnot it's not going to be the same right so I think that's where a lot of people kind of run into a problem is they think oh let's scale it so let's jump outside of our perfect demographic [Music] yeah the key is you have a very methodical approach to this which is

like see how much budget you have it first and then you should have like an intuition about what your user base is and really you're trying to confirm that that's your user base so you can use like a channel that allows you to figure out your user base right something like facebook I don't really want to rattle into Facebook but you can on Facebook like target specific you can say like I want a thousand maybe I want a thousand males that are 25 and see all these different parameters and background like what is the actual users that I'm trying to get to and then you just see all the metrics that followed that and try to follow that behavior and you can tweak your game for those customers as well and all that sort of stuff Korea it seems that things that a lot of people go to Facebook is the as the first port of call to figure out the audience but then start to look outside thereafter okay yeah one other thing

that I've also seen people do is it's pretty interesting they'll they're willing to sacrifice up front to be ri- on Facebook and then they find cohorts that work for them and then they try to acquire them elsewhere because they're cheaper so you might sacrifice up front your ROI find like the LTV that are really good and then try to replicate that on another channel which have cheaper CGI's and then you make up everything on that channel so I've seen strategies like this cool very interesting so next question was going to be around kind of like the shifting sands right nothing in this world ever stays stays the same for very long what kind of the and there's a lot of trends towards away from just purely the install and looking beyond the install into different actions is that something that you guys you know focusing really buy into and what sort of things had had

you had you sort of how do you figure out the events basically that are the most most relevant for your video games okay so for us in general that is what we do we've tried just doing basic installs for the new sacrifice quality especially if you were a small company we don't have giant pockets we don't have the luxury of testing facebook out to find that perfect audience so we we look for different install different metrics we generally start with our purchase we were very fortunate and that our products purchase like first purchase is usually like Damon stone so it's an early enough in the funnel and then from there like that's not always the best one so we look at what our behaviors players are most likely going to do they'll end in high quality and that's kind of the next step that we've done as we continue to grow our user base kind

of the same with us is we are looking at those downtown things like a we know if somebody gets a level seven and they're going to be a very valuable user and they're going to be here for a half a year or a year while the people will need to level two they're not as good so we optimized for those events as well and then of course purchases simply because that's how you make money so if you're always optimizing for purchase yes the CGI's are going to be much higher but we all know the CPI doesn't really matter if it's going to bring in 100 bucks and ends up being a ten dollar CPI is good one dollar now that being said I'm a big believer in just Facebook in there optimization so yes let your purchase campaigns run but at the same time get your your your easy insult as well by just optimizing for app installs so I see a lot of people oh this let's let's start optimizing for purchasing they totally shut down their regular installs and I don't necessarily agree

with that you still need the volume could be up there in the charts all that good stuff to keep to keep a lot of different hosts is running right I will argue though charts don't mean anything like if you can't turn on the lights like this it seems really silly you're sitting here you're talking about scaling and at the end of the day it has to be ROI positive and that's always a risk to take when you are looking for a new audience group right like that's what you're doing when you're not targeting for a specific purchase or a specific event you're trying to find people that might not have fit that mold and that's really a question of can you sustain it yeah I mean you should only really chart when you know that everything backed out because charting you're going to get users that you have no idea about like you know nothing about them and so your your game at that

point has to have really good broad appeal whereas like when you start off small you can start very targeted like know your customer very well first and then you if you're translating for that group of users like just build a game for that user and like you can do very well doing that but if you're trying to build a broad appeal game the charting can matter but it's much harder to do in that sense and going back to charting when I'm talking about charting I'm talking about keyword charting so you know it's a little different of I mean the only good reason with charting charting is you get all of the advertising networks late you up all day long okay miss than that but if you have a CPI campaign going just for the install if I'm bidding after casino and your beam Africa sino and you're only going after purchasers

you're spending five bucks per install while I'm spending 16 cents per install my rank for casinos is going to be much higher than anybody else's but I do agree with its target like so I guess in terms of everything's coming back to metrics right so the whilst changing creative all these things are super important ultimately the winners in the space of those who are really on top of the metrics where you can understand and where you can very importantly interpret them so I mean I guess to each of you guys is there something I don't know Emily swimming in a sea of metrics all right have you figured out things to your for your businesses or question things that you see across the developers you work with whether the recurring thing it's back to its back to certain key key kind of ingredients in a particular recipe or is everyone's recipe different based on all of them

everyone cares about LTV and cashflow but beyond that everything is different for every developers games it's all over the map they care about different things because like your games art like it's your product and so your customers are going to be different because your products different you're those customers care about certain things that another games not going to care about for non games yeah it's pretty new they extract everything you see it seems that people sort of track everything and then kind of it filters out into some into certain key things so the LTV is important I just I ask the question because we see lots of people focus on focus on things that are quite different but I guess it's a case of trialing everything quickly it down and to figure out what's important for your business see how that performance your business and then focus on optimizing that sometimes I mean it's kind of like a arm

if you keep track I guess if you track everything it can be overwhelming and then you don't know what to do with it we actually recommend to our customers like don't track more than 10k be nice there's a lot of intuition that comes with building any type of product so whenever you build a product you're going to try and let come up with some metrics to like go after that specific product or game or whatever it is that's actually a really hard exercise to do and you should spend a lot of time thinking intuitively like what matters there's sort of this like theory that people have at the moment you've come up with a metric it becomes irrelevant I mean you should really spend a lot of time to think about it and bake it in early right so don't launch track everything and then figuring it figure it out trying to trying to build it from the ground up saying this is the type of product these are the things that we think are going to be important cool

Jonathan thinks whoo I agree with you lojacked too much stuff for us it gets overwhelming and then you feel like you're failing all the time because I'm I'm chasing them to this metric of a metric I don't know how to compensate of it everyone but so we personally attract you know pre basics retention and average revenue per user not so much daily active user integral to difficult components so just going with that some of the stuff we do is like Archdale things like that to measure consistency with targeted customers track company how well they retain and compared to others we are one of those companies that track literally everything and a lot of that's just become part of our growth depending on what day it is it depends on how you're going to define fun and that's kind of one of our things when we look at when it comes to KPI is what is fun mean

right now and maybe that means that they are joining an alliance great well what's our alliance rate all right we need to keep this at X and then eventually you're right it does become irrelevant because that's going to maintain well and great now this is the metric we're tracking so follow that so it sounds like you guys are pretty tightly integrated with with the product team as well so I guess organizationally designing obviously depending the size of the company but those feedback loops to feedback and what we're looking for in terms of a product and what that means in terms of metrics and so as well is that something you guys you guys are obviously a tight team of people we are a tight team of people yes no and we think at minimum weekly usually there's daily sinks in like slack of this is what's happening here's the numbers we're looking at this is what we need to fix and going with the design team and tweaking those things

ya know so it's super important to be to be integrated because again from our point of view we've seen kind of bi teams just swimming in metrics the whole time but really not having that proper sync up with the product which is just a missed opportunity cool and in terms of in terms of attribution and measurements and so on as well and kind of leading on leading on from from metrics so obviously you need to know web where those users are coming from the quality of the users any fraudulent installs and and particularly the organic uplift as well and all the organic uplift from which particular paid channels how do you have you guys look at look at that John again we just use Facebook so it's like easy yeah I'm not trying to page Facebook okay yeah so we track everything with adjust and bring things in that way when it comes to fraudulent stuff we don't

look very hard right now that it it's a hot topic it comes up in all these conferences people should do it but I mean it's fine we resource the answer ever but no so we we bring that in we worked with our data team our engineers to bring in the data sources from all the different networks so we do try to explore some other ones to measure ROI and profitability and so they bring that in and then we have our own in-house analytic system so with all of that we're able to track the cost of each action so as I mentioned before is well how are we defining fun right now all right well it's going to cost $2 to define fun as people playing in a PvP battle cool what metrics then or what channel brings fun players in so on and so forth cool I mean because I'm absolutely QR droid and I mean I obviously agree you

need to have a system that basically you can capture everything and query anything that you can and understand like where each user comes from how much they thought what they're doing your app being able to tie all that together the word in terms of going going back and forth and and analyzing this stuff do you guys have it baked into a to a routine is it like is it daily routine or a weekly routine to analyze stuff how do you almost carve up the day to make sure that things are happening that you expect to be happening and importantly if something's not happening you've got time to to chop it okay cool so that's my one of my main hats monkey fun actually so when it comes to big design changes those we force a meeting once a week of

I say four it's very loosely but where we sit down and we go through beautifully the changes we implemented this is the result with you a we actually track it officially every morning we meet with the execs and go over like what are our numbers what needs to be modified but it's actually something we constantly monitor throughout the day and so there's a chart that we use tableau we create a pretty picture and it's oh did the picture change the way it wasn't supposed to great we need to go now dig and look into that and it's just part of the routine this is a pretty interesting question actually because people definitely use it everyday but it's even getting faster than that now I kind of liken this to the world of like the stock market like in the beginning the stock market was you call it a broker and you're like give me a hundred shares of Microsoft and then you know

day later you'll have 100 shares it's kind of like that when you're buying ads now and then you may feel like the world of each raid you can go to e-train and like push a button buy some shares that's kind of where like barely in that world right now now like the stock market is you've got computers buying stuff like every sub second we start to see people building in that direction like we we provide you or houses to people and they're using that data like very very quickly and they're like Regis pulling it back into the system like immediately as soon as like his lights are determined they'll use things like AI on top of it and then they'll be like oh hey I found out that this thing is working I'm just going to like create a campaign on my own and like there's no goo in there so we deftly on a very very sophisticated size though but you know we see at work

people have gotten like upwards of 20 percent ROI uplift just by doing stuff like that right so I totally see a world where data is like very very important for this the first thing you is you have to get all your data in one place and then once it's in one place you can start building these types of things on top of it and automating the whole process can go from you go from a pretty environment to like a high frequency low latency that we're time with the advantage yeah so your question was originally like how fast do people check daily now but we're seeing hints of some second so yeah interesting so I think what we're almost at time I don't know if maybe this time for maybe just just one question for the panel from from the guys can't actually see any hands so dad or

if not then I think what we're probably sort of running to time so just like to thank everyone very much for participating thank [Applause] [Music]