Don't go it alone – How choosing the right partner is key to success

[Music] one for coming so we've got a pretty awesome dais here doesn't just shimmy on up here get in there and then we've got one more serious anybody thanks awesome okay so I mean obviously everybody knows you need to work with the right partners and so we we do have an amazing day of here of people who are active in all areas of the space of acquisition retention monetization so I'm also going to try as best as I can to follow Dan mcLaughlin device on speed paddles so I'm going to be skipping the intro section I'm just going to sort of slide up here there you go okay so we're talking to you so maybe I just quick one liner on what each of your companies do for the audience starting with you technically Mike yeah iron horse hello iron horse games is like a game

publisher except I'm not the publisher of record the developers say the publisher of record so I help teams improve their retention and monetization hopefully get featured and also provide some light funding and marketing sources as well hi I'm David so PC games consulting is similar to iron forth games in which I work developers and publishers worldwide to help with improving a game retention Mahlon tation business development and so forth in order to maximize revenues hi everyone my name is Martin price I run put up for bungle what we do is we help both we work on both the advertiser and the publisher side to help people acquire high value users with engaging video ads and on the publisher side obviously support with monetization hey guys my name is Mir and I basically manage the the publisher development at in Moby representing in Moby we're a 10

plus year old company we're a global monetization platform when it comes to basically making money for the publishers at the same time you know really getting the ROI for the advertisers so let's start with hi my name is Andre I am with acquired i/o we provide sass for app focus that the Thai system is their user acquisition we actually just launched today so early I was actually most excited to hear what you did for the newsletter I had no idea what acquired i/o done so yeah we probably like basically therefore to run and manage all of the channels in a proven in the performance driven fashion for advertisers who are focused on apps awesome so yeah we're just gonna kind of cover I mean this is the you know monetize require require acquire and retention track so we're gonna dive into each topic I want to encourage anybody to ask questions at any given point in time we're not going to be like you know a long queue a session but just feel free to dive in and true this is a free flow discussion so what I've done is I've gone ahead and pulled some fun more quotes I'm hoping to kind of frame our discussions so I mean we all know the user acquisition is expensive and

terrifying for large teams you know it's particularly you know up against retention rates being what they are you know user acquisition is a very very dangerous world so I guess you know what are the main I mean a higher level what are some of the main things developers small and large need to look at when they're selecting their partners to begin with or even making the decision to engage in user acquisition I mean on the product David I'm going to do a lot of you know consulting like what's your advice to developers who are considering these requisition well I think when you first start making the game you should know if it's the type of games that you can actually do your user acquisition or not if you have the right theme right color palette rights modification strategy to have high LTV if it doesn't have a lot of mana fishing in it and it's cater to a niche audience a niche Logan they don't be hard to do proper user acquisition cap scale just because the CPI is gonna be much much harder so you

know right from the beginning that should be something you should more or less know before you start to evolve during the game or after developing the game before you launch what are some of the best practices using in terms of making a game appropriate for user acquisition you know this is something that the mic and I learned when we were at congregate you know a bright and more colorful vibrant color palette helps just because it's never expected for as low lower the CPI increases conversion rate and click-through rate and so forth the theme and the genre so if you're making like a like a game that's a very nice note theme by a site by day no sci-fi users are very hardcore but they're also a subset of the general population so if you want a game that appeals a wider audience you can you know hopefully have lower CPI when you

need to keep in mind that both the theme and the genre are your mass market or at least have a large addressable audience Martin what are you guys doing on the product side you know once a developer has signed up you know for user acquisition campaign what you guys get on the product side to bring the best results you can for the developer yes it's great question so obviously we recommend using video and that you know I think everyone now across the industry that you know that's one of the best ways to kind of promote your game I mean one of the one of the things we do is a lot of work on our side to actually slide site and build create different versions of that creative and put that creative into different templates so we try not that's where we try and add value on the product side loop if you follow it in fungal we've been in the press a little more than usual this year new product announcements one was around around GDC around our dynamic templates product and what that does is take in let's say you've created game you have a

couple of promo videos you stitch together and you want to go to user acquisition what we can do is take that video and actually put it into 20 different templates of all different layouts and you know depending on the aspect ratio of the video that they will look different obviously but they're responsive they fit really nicely into into different positions in you know other partners games that work with us on the SDK side and what we do is we tune those to help drive acquisition that lower price point so whatever I so we're trying to kind of help on that with and that sounds really great with so many varieties how much how much like have a budget or how much traffic is required to really start drilling into the statistical significance of something like that oh yeah in terms like if a developers you know considering you a campaign through bungle how much they can have to spend to be able to make informed decisions based on all these always creative varieties yeah so that's something we're actively trying to actually improve on our side right so today obviously you can come in and we'd recommend the

highest budget possible yes we have focus message they will happily come talk about that more detail I think on the product side actually we want to mock rotate that we're going into new markets you know we are go Singapore office last year we're doing a lot in Southeast Asia we're going Latin America in an aggressive way so we actually want to bring down that price point given us always been known as very premium network we're absolutely building out more tools and more products like our templates actually that means you know we don't have to do we don't have to do a lot of creative work and actually it's just on the fly we've been out please multi-variant so we think we can bring that cost down yep I think you know folks on the panel could maybe give a bit more structure then put into what that kind of budget sizes but for us we used to have a kind of limited budget below we thought we can really help we try to actually lower that bar now to help sell the platform so and David can attest to this like one of the things that we do often when we do icon testing for games or even doing creative testing we have five different

variants is there wildly different from each other and you want to cast kind of the broadest spectrum in terms of the art they approach the composition the color palette that you're using you're never really sure what's going to work for a margin perspective so when you guys are generating video I creatives you're generating off of one base file you guys creating anything new like a brand new entirely different video as well because you know dealing with with decay especially when it comes to marketing creative I've seen rotations every two weeks every week if you have the budget to do it so how do you guys kind of counter that because even slight variations are going to produce at least in my experience a really pronounced it since I don't mean to put you outside having this great feedback program but yet so we do that today we create different cups where we play with duration we play with different edits right so what we do is we can take like we're working with a partner on some of the other moment we've taken like a whole bunch of assets like literally you

know like 45 minutes or an hour of different footage and we'll slice together different versions of variants and do that I think you know how we keep building that at scale is where it gets interesting 45 minutes with a video broken out I don't think I should do that well like speaking on budgets that's where I wanted to ask you this because you guys are either a large company all over the world what are you know for anybody considering these requisition what are some of the likes a base level business management questions they should be asking they're at their partners you know I mean that's obviously you know but required budget payment terms things like that so you know just like it's at a quick higher level what are some of the things that you know a developer needs to know and where do they have the most wiggle room sure I mean you know art perspective a movie has been in business you know we have banking global offices right so so the global angle really comes in the picture here now depending on small size budgets or large sites budgets of global you know user acquisition strategies here see of course we do have we do have some minimum number of you know minimum level of budgets that we would recommend basically you know to make sure that you

know the efforts being spent from from from for the other why for this monitor Tyson is really wants to promote the games etc is aligned but I think for us as a company you know the reach and the experience that we spend you know for ten plus years industry right especially video as the as the focus or angle one on basically you know the learnings that the platformers actually had in last ten years with the level of targeting capabilities we reach with the with the LTV values that we can actually bring in with the richness in the backroom rights that's that really has to be aligned in terms of what the needs of the the lappers are whether this is basically a game or it could be any kind of advice that we bring in I mean more like more like looking more for tactics that will help developers so like you know I guess like you know what like to what to what degree should they be targeting certain regions or you know how often they have to pay for those users how much like how much you have on TPI's for those I mean this is more like the industry as a whole like when somebody get any news or

acquisition it's not just a simple matter of you know here's five dollars get me one user and there's a whole host of business considerations to take on and I think for a lot of smaller developers completely outside their wheelhouse so you know what what specifically you know like if there's a checklist you could take every single partner considering what would you see on that checklist see we definitely help them promote you know as you said there are small Belapur some of the really common promote right so you know it's not that we ignore them right we on their behalf we basically kind of like offered and stretching some sort of creators for them at times making sure that there is enough of richness of these units which were bringing in again aligning in what markets they need to be or we actually go back and recognize that these are the markets that where we've seen real Pro then we can actually recommend you know how we can help them partner you guys in scaling in these markets right gone are the days like you know getting in getting an incentivized solution is like you know you can have thousands of installations they want right the objective is not that objective is basically LTV the quality of users are you going in the cohorts or the targeting capability that we build

into our system to make sure that okay this is the Chandra this is nur and these are the these are the markets that we would recommend you know we as a company can actually helping grow them cool on to last questions operational for you Andre what I mean your platform allows developers to manage up a whole bunch of partners which obviously you tend to need how what's your recommendation for developers in terms how many partners I should they should be working at I think like regards regards user acquisition as any other activity I think that should be like thought as something that has definitive goals and like timeline and other aspects of where you actually want to do that right because like if you have your target geographies and countries that you need to release the game and you have certain budget I think based on those inputs you've got to define like your channel acquisition budget like how many dollars you can allocate to try new things and which like bigger partners are you're going to pick so I think it's really depends on the size of the company and actual game

but currently what I'm saying on the market it's like it's different all the way from like five platforms to 300 platforms different advertisers work with and like channel acquisition urges range from like 10 to 25,000 per channel so it's like big enough for network to fry with and still many people statistically for the game you're trying to market cool alright let's move on to retention so I mean retention I'm going to probably focus a bit more on Mike and David because this tends to be less the product thing and more a you know consultative approach but you know what what can developers do when they're selecting their partners to prepare themselves for potential impact on retention so I'm thinking you know if you you see an ad that's maybe like mature content or something like that you know what what do you tend to recommend developers do to avoid working with partners that could potentially have a negative impact on their on retention so the thing that I usually focus on with your attention and especially as it relates to they have

the people's ads of your name is should really worry about for the other game developers as in your game it should write what you should be worrying about its maximizing the engagement with the ads like you put in the in that should be your focus I think the you know falling back to this position where you get scared or frightened that users going to leave your game that again guess what's going to happen it's going to happen is going to happen really rapidly depending on the genre of game you've chosen so I would be focusing more on maximizing the advertising integrations that you have in your game as opposed to trying to get a curated list of partners they essentially integrate from an advertising perspective I also think that you know as David said at the start when he starts thinking about advertising and start thinking about attention like a lot of a lot of the numbers that are going to come at the end result of your products development are going to be a result of the art style to each other also the genre like your KPIs specifically around retention are going to be a reflection of the genre that you chose right idle games for instance

retaining leaps and bounds better than a card battle game and runners retain extremely poorly in relation to those do so having some kind of sense of how your genre is going to retain allows you to get into a lot of operations to not freak out when you see bad KPIs that's way to do that just talk to other developers about the kpi's that they're seeing on their game usually they're really forthcoming especially if you return the favor and tell them the kind of stats you're seeing on your game like ice one when it comes to ads and retention you know there's some developers and publishers that are afraid of canalization so they do blacklist certain games or advertisers when they surpass so that's one way to do it another way to do it do you know segmenting the audience to show the classroom certain people that can't be both good and bad because some players

might complain that they might not be seen ads and may not be able to earn the rewards that they want to but I think like what might be like most important is the game if your game is good and there's strong retention then it shouldn't be that big a here is your retention agent a strong or you're seeing a particular game complaining during you know a lot of ads in your games diamond third scheme good results from their ads in your games and that crews or could not have an impact on your retention to cook but it could also be increasing your ad revenue because they're paying much higher CPM s because they want those impressions [Music] buying all your inventory the first other now you have to make sure that the a spot or dad if you're usually using a mediation platform that the mediation platform actively supports direct deals so you can actually surf those and then

negotiate a good rate there too because they also take a cut down dynamic yeah I just want to add one thing as well if you talk to partners I mean one of the things we've been building to kind of help with this is a feature called placements right so a number of our competitors support this as well but in order to segment new users what you can do is set up different placements with different price floors and that can lead into your monetization strategy so you might be like Herod I'm gonna show ads these users because they're doing good in app purchases my game right and you know I want to cultivate them I don't want to show them as many ads and that's fair enough but there might be a price point what we find out we talk to some of our larger publishers that they will show it provided they could get you know a particularly high price for them because they know declare the games that's quite normal right so they will shows they're already placement at very high price point to specific groups of users but they want someone on the kind of monetization side to help them hit those really high CPM yeah that's typically what we'd come in and let's get into the monetization stuff and

that's really the meat and potatoes of it whatever they open a frame with this quote is that you know it's a hyper competitive industry both for developers producing content and for you know us and the monetization side hyper hyper competitive and at the end of the day I think one of the probably the blocker that we've all faced terms of getting business or anything like that is constraint on time so what what can we do to better protect the tile of our of our customers and our clients and you know what can developers look for for somebody that is going to ensure that their time isn't wasted that's open for it for anyone so in secrecy the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to global monetization for partners is again you know depending on the size of the publisher and if anyone basically the audience in the reach that they have is the first choice is depending on what kind of mediation services they're using tape it becomes really complicated when you know there are large scale local publishers who are doing rewarded video I have this partner you know for it is

we have made if they have banners they have everything like you know supersonic is a partner for this thing so you know that choice you know we need to be advocates to the publisher how we go so the first thing is a platforms capability to actually hope these global partners if they reach and relationship with all these exchanges in SSP that's pretty cool second thing is you know as Martin has been saying you know with the parent says that you know the focus is on video right you know with the infrastructure and you know change is coming up with the windy with the sharpness and the technology back you know that platform traffic there you know the secret sauce and sdk etcetera right any every publisher will talk about you know they are doing is the case and what's the choice what's the cost of opportunities alright so we need to be smart enough and basically again guiding them you know if there is a space of three SDKs of or SDKs who goes out I common it's not that basically right so we need to guide them and then I see that the leads are so prevalent for these large publishers right they there's always a thin line should I put should I put my

competitors at you know you know and the day of operation has to make sure that he is making enough of a dripping with dollars to justify running the business basically right so we've been working with these lot of global partners with the video needs you know for instance some would say you know in China I would like any no gaming advertisers on my Coptics but I wouldn't do that and not mark assimilatory stable so it's a mix and match up so many of these things but in the day you have to make call the CRO that the companies are always interested in each other they're retaining fxp queuing enough to monetize at the same time they not mess you'll experience right so the the richness of all comes together to make sure that you know you really help the customer to take the next steps point on and that yeah on the other side of the equation is small and medium-sized developers right and their experience and it's been my experience in the last years looks something very similar to this for launch you go out of touch with Kate until I'm going to give that school game pick up ad partners serve reaching out and they give you the worst offer on the planet

like oh we're going to be like a $2.00 eCPM floor for us users is that great no it's not great right and you don't know because the game's not out even out performance series you PM's you're looking like it's going to be buying the traffic so what your ultimate eCPM is going to be so ultimately lots of developers get freaked out and said well I've already integrated unit yet I'm going to stick it out and watch the community and there's not going to be any competition in the waterfall right so nobody's going to compete against each other for fill rate then the game comes out lots of titles especially if they pick up audience on ffense arcade get featured that's when I add folks get super interested ok and it's the worst time to get interesting is worse time to make any changes in your game these you're going to negotiate hard with all of you guys and you guys at that point are fair right everyone at that point more or less affair but everyone's offering a great eCPM for your users if they're not also following that up with a guaranteed fill rate it's not worth anything because they could give you $100 a CPM through the u.s. users and

give you a 1% flow rate so who gives a there's going to be no fill they're not going to pay out they just get the first lot when they want it when they don't they don't the reality with situation is you need a waterfall in Whitney go out for launch and you need to be in a position where you're telling these partners I'm going to be hearing bids from you when I get a feature on this date and this is the decision this is when the decision is going to come through on which bar her music best bids are in by this time that's the way you have to handle that situation go and it feels weird especially developer because you're always preparing for defeat but in this scenario especially if you have any indication at all from other publishers reach answer games or asking about it usually I think you can get featured if you can get featured it gets traffic if it gets traffic these guys going to want it so put yourself in a position where you can you go negotiate those deals quickly and do it for the first weekend right because there's a Friday Saturday peak and then drop off after that because you're attractive drop off and the potential

revenue drop off as well one thing I want to add to that is that you know like my said that first week after lodging he's got t-shirts that's the worst week to check for you because you know all dad never going to be contacting you but you also have to deal with all the issues that come with launching your game so two things I'll recommend - allows for more flexibility one is in creating a mediation partner just because then you can have multiple ad networks in there and then they canned you know basically started out to see who can provide the most value to to you and there again and what you have to want to consider if there is is you're building a game unity you can pretty much go with anyone but if you're not building again YouTube you're building a game in air in cocos2d then they're technical considerations take into account if it's not as a single mediation SDK and SDK supports you know air or cocos2d and so forth I think also

- I'm like looking at the history of those plugin because a lot of companies might have an adobe plugging line lying around like what version of long as f-ck is in there or something like that so definitely something to check as well we're running close to low on time so I wanted to sort of as a closing thought you know I heard a couple chuckles when we mentioned that you know come feature week you guys are all gonna get a lot of emails and I think nobody here is a stranger to a flooded inbox and that creates a bit of impression let's say on people in our line of work and I think that can only be overcome by us collectively becoming more here and working of integrity so I guess as like a wishlist item like what would you what would you like to see us as partners the under could go to everybody but you know what can what can we change in the industry from from our vantage point to come forward as more sincere and with more integrity I guess I with you Andre yeah I think in general the

spaces like super fragmented and like there's just a lot of parties there doing different things some of them are doing same things and maybe in general there will be just more alignment with end-user interests within like the whole infrastructure of that ok so see what we would recommend here is that there's so much of you know if the 50 net puts in the platforms you know especially taking video is such a powerful tool to reach out you know with with with basically being message to the end user making sure we are getting the ROI viewability is extremely important and in moby as a company's really taken a stance on viewability in the fraudulent measures basically right so we would we would encourage the industry to work together to make sure that we are actually chasing that to the grooves and making sure that you know we're really getting what we wrote Iser really needs and you know just just just 1.0 or ad was basically you know we as a company have a very healthy mix of brand dollars gel

with the performance base there's always a secret sauce for a platform and a network right you know when when they do the arbitrage of converting making sure the sequins are actually met so we are growing with the viewability efforts in the fraudulent measure make measuring efforts and making sure that there's a very decent mix of video with brand dollars those powers really coming to those audience in the segments not to say that this is pub a versus B this is gaming which is non gaming pride so I think you know this is what we really think should should should be taken as an initiative together marking your thought yeah I think just quickly on that Inquisition side our work with the partner you can optimize to the robust target you want to have rights you're not spending money on something you can't back out and like this number of us who will help and sit down and really try and work towards your goal not our goal right and I think a little bit similar on the publisher side right I think think about the user experience I think you know what size ads what type of good rewarded experience there's great feedback in the industry from users and rewarded video so build in good placements for whatever that fit well but then work with the partner who won't

just give you the minimum for that for the ad impression I thought that was great comment so one thing you know we've always done and when we still do today is we don't buy it asset you know a small percentage below our floor if if the bids come in and you convert and you drive users at a higher price we'll we'll give you that money and you even a mighty brave we're not going to cut you off at a set CPM price right so I would try and work with you know partners in the ad space that will also kind of work towards helping you against that goal because it those those are then aligned perfectly to help you make the most money from your title great or really really really long time so quick one liner the building has been fee and trust because you know you want to have a long-term partners just not someone who's gonna go getting and get out and cash out money is developers money I mean see transparent be transparent about your margins as well I think when you start looking at the user acquisition business if developers have

the type of margin that you guys had and there'd be a lot of rich developers thinking about how how your margins look in relation to how much a developer is going to make and thinking about the fact that a developer can should be game best once a year like a quality game once a year and you guys are getting integrations on a much more regular basis being more forthcoming with that money and providing a recognition of the value that a game is generating for generating and sell for your business would be really helpful in terms of migration because other words I mean it's very hard to differentiate between all the different ad products out there one way to do it easily is just here's a check for lots of money yeah my good kind of goes against my quote there Mike but cool well thanks for letting us on long I apologize without any questions on the audience on any of this Oh got another five minutes all right well I'm playing for that what's new what do you guys playing it actually I

meant to ask that what are you guys playing what you playing right now on your phone I'm just taking a bunch of you stuff but nothing regular so we're here Zingo okay thanks Martin were you playing I'm playing everything yeah at the moment given you I guess most play lot of games but also mostly the new supersoul game crossbars and then ever win which is a Facebook game again huh right I play a lot of ugly games against it's really bad art and bad production values the great game design I think those often get overlooked because there's not the level polish that the all-stars have but the game design principles a lot of the experimentation within genres is happening in the ugly games and it gets overlooked so play more ugly games alright wait well myself I'm playing a little too Trailer Park Boys

shoutout to the vancouver studio anytime okay well my wishlist item one thing that would be really great in ministry if we could do this well one we could stop sending emails we could stop using you know completely that would be that would be a nice thing I think I think people would have a much better appreciation for the line of work that we're and if that was the case I'm not sure what the replacement is maybe go to somebody's door smoke signals or something who knows but one thing I'd really like to see happen and I think this comes down to a company like bungle and Mo be allowing this as a more campaign control you know that's the number one complaint I hear from developers they have zero transparency into what's being served in their segmentations with certain extent but I mean have you ever tried to disable machines o-net like you can download the game you're still going to see a hundred mobile strikeouts per session so like what can we what can we look at opening up that you know creating more transparency at the campaign level for developers now that would be like number one thing that and I think people should start using 15-second video ads more rather than the full 30 I kind F economy a little bit but like when I get to the end cut is yeah yeah just just get right

to it okay audience questions kind of dark here you see just like an average yeah well depends on the country but you ask you shouldn't be making much less than like a 15 or maybe upwards of 18 or 20 dollar bppm for a rewarded video in the u.s. other Tier one markets like Germany France certain Scandinavian countries probably did a little bit lower than that you should be able to get a deal in feature week for much higher you have a twenty five twenty eight dollar you CPM on there were to be get video if you time at China right on our platform is upwards of that we've seen really good performance in China and Japan as well I was talking with who was it was the game again will Wars to or something like that I am Phil what's his name anyway Eddie and they're doing like a I don't know $73 if you came in China I wouldn't budget on that but yeah usually apparently it happens I'm sure

it was completely organic natural no fraud involved whatsoever click the rates of like eighty percent yeah oh yeah in China we often see eCPM higher or much higher than the US just because you know Chinese games monetize very aggressively and much have much higher LTVs than Western games in general especially the MMORPG else oh geez and so forth so they can spend much more on upon users and also there's less inventory in China so that's why if you have a game that has a decent sized audience in China you know it's it can drive a decent of revenue as well it's worth noting so for iOS Android is substantial yeah that yeah that's all - Android drops off he'll probably like between like 70 to 80% of iOS performance or less typically any other questions you know know what

all right well thanks guys you hit it and thanks all for coming [Applause] [Music]