Elia Games’ Clary Xiaodan Zhang On Saving Marketers 50 Hours/Week With No-Code Automation

[Music] hello world welcome back to the Pocket Gamer podcast with your host me Brian Bago and joining me for the what seems like the first time across the whole of mad March the wonderful Peggy anals hello Peggy it's lovely to see you again how mad is your Mar Brian I have missed you um you've been working course and doing your thing and I've been prepping for Ma I missed G well I didn't miss GDC I decided that they're too close together pick one I thought the whole team is going to GDC so I'll be the lone representative of Pocket Gamer at Ma and um yeah excited to go there and literally leaving this weekend so yeah it's going to be a manic week next week but great and uh and and gearing up for so much more at Pocket Gamer it's just going to be such a busy but exciting year

exactly so it seems as though 2023 just set the standards and we're determined to beat it with the number of events the number of things that we're we're going to I've I've been out and about albeit not quite as as wide ranging I've been running a whole series of um workshops across Scotland U because I'm building a a national strategy for video games um so yeah I've seen parts of the country that I have not seen in a long long time and so many people we've had Developers Publishers Educators students policy makers it's been fantastic so I won't lie getting back into the podcast studio with you I've I've missed i' I've missed you too Our Guest is about educating because um I met her on one of my trips last year and we've been working at it you busy woman uh making it work and we got her today because she fascinated me with her approach to automation because right now where we are it's all about

diversify your channels get the most out of everything and it is a journey it's a lot to learn so we have a guide on this journey i' say we have like kind of a a sherpa right she's going to tell us what she's done how she's done it but more importantly build up some confidence in our audience that they can do it too so it's a lot of positivity from I would say I have to do it because I am a pun person from a positively delightful guest we have Clary Chong she is head of UA and monetization at Aaliyah games she is passionate about games obviously as is her entire Studio but she's also very into empowering Professionals in studios to do more with Automation in particular one thing I haven't heard a lot about No code automation systems I love that because then you don't have to be a coder and I'm obviously not Brian so uh I guess we can sit back and learn a lot with this one

Clary welcome on board we're really excited to have you here um so before we we dive in and learn more about what you have to share can we can we learn a little bit more about you and your backstory because those two hats uh UA and admon you know may not sit quite comfortably so can you tell our lovely listeners a little bit more about yourself and how you got here definitely so happy to be here today all right and then H hello everyone I'm Clary and about my story I actually started this journey in gaming while being both from the get-go I was UA manager and monetization manager at the same time like which is something rather less common in the industry but however it makes total sense in my mind because when you try and start to learn about the gaming advertising advertisement industry you do need to understand the logic behind how um waterfall how um

user acquisition campaigns all work together and how do you Benchmark and how do you analyze the performance so um a few years back when I was fresh out of school I uh just dived nose deep into Both Worlds at the same time and now it's been a few years and finally I find myself in this position of head of user acquisition and monetization at Alia games that's fantastic thank you so much so how do you balance those it sounds as though you've got both of them working at the same time so do you have any tips for the listeners on on how to do something is you know th those two very different approaches yeah definitely I guess um that's going to be a cliche about time management so really we try to allocate um the time that's needed for UA and the time that's needed for monetization of course and as uh what we understand and from now on uh so until now it's like um

UA requires more like day-to-day management all the time however monetization is something that can be done on a weekly basis on a by weekly basis so um in our daily workflow which try to really allocate time and dive deep into UA and the monetization in um in their own time so that is also where our automation system comes into play um because sometimes uh we are humans we're Pawn to errors we're PR to forgetting um one thing or another however with our systems in hand uh we get notification for when things need to be checked and that's uh really helpful for us managing Both Worlds at the same time that makes a huge amount of sense um and I guess yeah you're you're absolutely you're absolutely correct but one of the things that I'm really really came to find out

more about is this notion of being the augmented marketer that that automation is one of the ways in which you're not only managing your time but bringing these two different tasks together so how how do you use Automation and and how is it changing not only what you do But continuing to change what you do how do we use automation uh there are two major things that we use uh as our no code automation which is first of all Google sheet wow magic everybody knows this one and then the second one notion and then how do these play together um basically I think um Google sheet as a tool is like Excel we know it's actually unmatched in terms for analytics um ability and however um there is something that is extremely powerful about it is that um it is not only Analytics tool uh not only where

where you can build dashboard but also where you can input um how we do this is like every changes we make on our user acquisition and monetization campaigns are actually input in Google Sheets which later on is actually how can I say used to match between the performance of campaigns and from what I understand this is something rarely ever done in the industry a lot of companies they look at dashboards for analytics however they don't have any ways to match that to the action that's been taken on either the monetization or the user acquisition side so this is something that um really it was kind of a stroke stroke of Genius at some point we just figured out how we can actually realize that inside one single tool that everybody has no one for decades and

that's really really um quite interesting I would like to dive deeper later on and what's great about notion is like um in some ways it is probably the best organization tool where you can have everything in one place in different formats like notion database compare paired with Notions notification feature actually makes it so that um we really on top of everything um essentially we don't miss any alerts we don't miss any details and how we Bridge uh Google sheet and notion together this is yet another interesting little trick that we did um which I would like to share this is this is fascinating I have to say because of a couple things Brian number one it's it's it's it's by Def facto it's democratized because everyone can use it and so we're

having this discussion about how everyone needs to get involved in the data own the data understand the data it's a great way to do this it's probably I would imagine Clary more for maybe like a certain genre or kind of Studio because I can't see them you know like rolling this out at something like King where they are deep deep into the data but I could see this in a lot of Studios a lot of genres and a lot of sizes yeah definitely actually is so interesting because I've been talking um like in my free time to a lot of different Studios gaming Studios even Studios where they already have like almost a 100 employees um some of them they are using uh data data analytics tools but like I said they're very limited to only analytics and understanding the dashboard there is no action and there's no notification where uh it really brings the data into your

real life operation brings it to humans and uh for smaller Studios where they have no capacity to have a data team this is absolutely fantastic tool because you just need one well educated user acquisition and monetization manager and you have everything taken care of that's important because I think user acquisition and just the use of data can be terrifying for smaller Studios because it's not something that they they've had any exposure to and you know I've been speaking to to developers who are using the number of downloads or you know the the revenue per user as as the only kpis that they're they're interested in so this whole approach as you say Peggy absolutely democratizes and open this up and what a what a great approach something as simple as Google Sheets but using it in a far smarter way I think makes um a huge amount of difference um there clar so thanks again

and I think there's a lot there for listeners to take away uh regardless of the studio that they're working with um so let's let's touch on AI if if we may and because there's a lot of uncertainty around AI is it going to take marketers jobs is it going to fundamentally transform the way that we do things are you going to you know lose control I guess you seem an awful lot more caled and more rational than than many people that we've spoken to certainly very positive so why first of all um ever since the AI thing came about in November 20122 um I have been really on top of all the news all the trends and I've been willing I've been really willing to educate myself on how to use the AI tools to better um to better my workflow etc etc and um just being aware of what's the state of Art in AI right now

makes me realize that even though AI helps us in many ways there are some limitations where AI is not going to replace humans for the moment yet so first of all I would say what are AI helping us to do first of all I think AI helps me absolutely to perfect my no code automation system um even though it sounds like I'm de democratizing everything but when you're taking care of like 500 campaigns at the same time and then like you have probably like 15 important kpis to to keep under control all the time um it is not easy and the Google sheet uh function are not um what you are used to like a simple V lookup or not or something like that no the functions in the functions in my Google Sheets sometimes can take up to 20 rows and you like this is absolutely crazy and however um AI especially CH gbt

helps me so much to build these complex functions and systems in my noal tool and uh especially it helps me to uh debug sometimes you know when you have a 20- r function you uh miss a single details and you can spend hours and hours trying to figure out what's going wrong with chpt it really takes care of it in mere seconds minutes and that's the first great thing about it and um of course AI helps you with like images and stuff that's uh helpful in Creative production etc etc I'm not going to go into too much details and however what's the limitation of AI right now like first of all um there is a strong limitation in terms of how can I say customizability how like it's very hard for example if you trying to make an image um in accordance to your brand uh

image to your brand elements right now it is still extremely difficult for AI to give you consistent results however um with uh great designer great like creative manager they can really give you consistent results exactly according to your needs very quickly we've tested this internally and we realize that sometimes uh it's still more efficient to just ask the designer some things then ask AI for example and the second thing is like um this whole um or in encompassing logic because um that humans have are something that AI is not able to do right now like this cross platform analytics and then um decision making AI cannot do that for example our no Code system is from it's from Google Sheets um to not ition and there's like

some workflows in between um AI can't take that AI can't analyze things perfectly on other platforms yet and they can't really make decisions for you about what you want to do and how you want to optimize your day your workflow etc etc so I think um AI for me right now it is like great assistance like if you are willing to learn about it you would be AI powered superhumans however if you're not willing to learn it it could look extremely scary but in at the end of the day it is not replacing the critical thinking decision making and creativity that humans still have I'm not saying that's not going to happen in 20 years or even shorter than that given how things are moving but for now um I think it is fine you know we actually got together because we met at games Forum

last year and you left such an impression I was like yes here we are nearly a half a year later well actually nearly a year later and I'm still thinking about what you said because you were talking about how AI how automation allowed you to wear more hats and take on many many more challenges um first of all here we are a year later and you're talking about how it changes also the jobs the job descriptions and themselves are different do you see that the same way do you feel that same way because uh it may be that in the future a lot of professionals have multiple jobs but that's also great because then they can contribute at multiple levels right I think that's going to be a trend you see I think there in past few years it's been a crazy few years there are two major disruptive elements in um the job market and how we work first of all Co

second of all AI both are scary and wonderful in some certain ways like I think Co really made it made remote job uh democr democratized and um basically right now I'm actually full remote and that's Unthinkable just two years ago and um um because people are doing more and more of this kind of a remote job and also they have more access to such powerful tool as AI so the whole traditional concept of like going to work and do exactly the same thing from 9 to 5 is probably no longer the case anymore especially in Industry such as gaming as tag where we're really leading the changing everything um so I definitely say in the future like um people would have more opportunity to explore and to learn like Venture into different aspects with the help of AI

and they would probably have more like uh physical and timeline um freedom from remote work and the both combined definitely makes it so that um more and more companies especially probably smaller more flexible com um organizations would rethink what are the role of each person and for example I think my work my work experience has been a really good example I being a UA manager I've been a monetization manager now I'm actually taking up operations since we're venturing into non-gaming Apps I'm taking up like email marketing social media and then like Community Management all that kind of things we're experimenting constantly and Ai and remote work makes it more and more possible you can also look at different genres because you have you have sort of a basis of of knowledge that is shared

so you can say yes we're in games but we can look at look at others because we can apply these models to others I mean I want to hear more about about that Journey as well when you say apply those models to others um do you mean like we can try to use our automation system to help other types of games and Studios exactly yeah definitely I think it's it's like fully customizable it's not even how can I say it's not even a question of course we can use that for other systems as long as it's a gaming and app industry where you need a user acquisition campaigns and Etc uh you can use this system it's adaptable um it really like since it's so custom made um it really just um is going to serve you depending no matter what kind of kpis you want to look out for and no matter what kind of um um how can I say what

kind of performance that you're seeking there's a way to adapt the system um to your needs basically essentially really what the the advantage of the system is three major things like um data analytics matching actions with analytics and notification for important uh details that you are probably going to miss I guess your whole approach to to to AI is is just really practical and levelheaded because you know so many people look at it as an existential threat but it's actually quite good at being um a dumb coworker you know or or somebody with deep knowledge of a couple of things you know so you don't have to know everything it can help you fill in the blanks but we want to we want to come back to this whole notion of being able to save 50 hours a week through automation because as you've just said you know you're a oneman band who's who's kind of operating there so what

can you what can you give our listeners um in terms of diving into the the the whole automation side of things you know give us give us your tips let us learn outside of the automation system of course that takes me a lot of time the most important thing is to be really clear on your priorities so obviously for any uh UA monetization managers you're probably taking care of 500 campaigns at the same time I don't know but that's what I'm doing and um you don't have time to take a look at every single campaign so definitely go uh Global then you go game by game then you go country by country oh OS by OS country by country and um then you go into details of campaigns etc etc of course in the middle you can analyze networks analyze um this and that there's so many things to do but then really keep this um keep your daily work flow according to priorities like you

want the global to be fine then you want the game to be fine then you want OS like go with this flow and um it's essentially because I've built this system that the reporting is so efficient that essentially it really takes out all of the unnecessary details like whenever I go on my system on any given day I can find out where uh where campaign need my attention in two minutes like in two minutes I know exactly okay these are the 30 40 campaigns that I need to go and take care of today and nothing else and that that Clarity and that uh reassurance is essentially what saves me so much time what saves me so much mental energy to go do other tasks which is incredibly important because time everybody have time we have the same time per day 24 hours but your energy and how confident you are in your work changes how much

you can get done more than how much time you spend so I think that's that's the tip that's it prioritization and being confident that you know you've set up the the appropriate alerts to let you focus your time and attention where it will you know have the most impact most effect yeah definitely because I I think like in my work I see like um sometimes like UA managers they really struggle with that when you have too many things going on like really your head is clouded by oh oh here there's fire in room a there's fire in room B now the whole apartment is on fire and that's like exact essentially how some other UA managers describe their jobs they firefighters they're going everywhere whenever there's something that's needing them and for me I don't see my job as fir fighting I see my job

as I don't know it's like calming your hair you always start with the roots and then then when you go down it's all smooth yeah because you you whatever you can turn into a routine or a process then also one you have a free mind but two you can also scale and what I like about your approach is it's the alert system which is set up which is saying okay this is really where you need to focus so you're not worrying about it yeah that's where automation is saying you know take my word for it this is where you need to be looking exactly so there is a lot there for a lot of um a lot of different types of Studios but you also mentioned something I think is intriguing is that you're going to be increasingly looking not just at your game but also Beyond and to gamification and to other genres what what does that look like because that's an interesting journey in itself maybe there's something there for for you know for casual games yeah for hybrid casual

games to say I can maybe Branch out a little bit in these times rather than Focus only on one area yeah that is actually one interesting and exciting opportunity in my in my company essentially like our new project is non- gaming and we're taking all the best practices accumulated in years of like experience in gaming industry there and TR try to see if we can disrupt the industry and the industry that we're choosing is actually Sports where rankings where competitions where leaderboard and all that kind of gaming elements would absolutely apply and that's um that's where we're going I'm not sure if I can disclose a lot more but like um I would definitely say that whatever we see in gaming all the best practices and stuff are not really

applied currently in the sports industry a lot of practices are pretty basic for now and we will see how we can disrupt that that's that's interesting so again it's one of these it's one of these areas which um everyone just kind of assumes it works and and very few people are are starting to really drill down and pay attention to it and and how you engage between the you know the sports stars and the fans and the teams so I yeah we we might have to ask you back to uh talk about that in the future I think C because um oh that sounds like it might be it might be well worth our attention so one of the things that we've we've discussed clearly is is this um the automation freeing up so much time gives you the opportunity to play an experiment so so what else have you been doing uh at the studio that that's really kind of push the boundaries what else we are doing I think we've been

trying experimenting a lot with AI on Creative production so um like basically as you can see the major uh AIS out there like mid Journey etc etc now Google uh I forgot the name Gemini gini I've been I've been playing with Gemini with Google Sheets strangely enough but that's maybe another podcast all of these are actually incredible I wouldn't be surprised that anyone spend so much time playing with it and then like um having so much fun with it however like really the biggest difficulty that we see everywhere on Twitter in companies like in daily life consistency like you want something a I can give you something incredible one time or sometimes five time out of 10 however that's not exactly what you want

and when you're a company you want something exactly according to your brand according to your game as a gaming company it is incredibly difficult and we're realizing that like some of the um com some of the AI startups out there they're trying to address that issue um not always successful but um that being said even though consistency is incredibly difficult right now like AI when you ask them to ask it to do some simpler tests uh for example like resizing a creative like how can I say editing a creative to make it shorter uh not not successful long when you want to make it longer but when you want to make it shorter and into different small formats it is really helpful and we are actually starting to implement that so that we can save our cre creative managers sometimes so you know like

sometimes the previous complaint about the creative managers they're like we're creative managers but no we're actually translation and resizing managers to be to be very fair with AI we actually give some of that creativity some of that room for creativity back to our creative managers which is uh quite interesting um again not super consistent so we're experimenting with that um but we definitely see a lot of potential for it to save huge amounts of time later down the line so if we look at the blueprint here it's really saying one we can Embrace no code and have substantial results because there was always the thought that it was something that you could sort of was sort of holding things together it was like duct taping it was like it was a little bit like duct tape marketing right like oh I'll do this and it it's no Coast I'll slot this in here

and I'll just sort of pull it all together but that's not the case this is really at the basis of what you're doing so if we talk about what Studios need to be doing give me some some steps in this blueprint one would obviously be open to no code and figure out how to use it and align that with your flows but there are some other steps in there so if someone wanted to go out and at least prepare to build something like what you have what are those steps what is that thinking I think the first step is definitely understand very well your needs like I understand like for different studio for different type of games the their key priorities in performance might be different okay like let's let's be real return on investment is always the key thing that's not going to change but then um what are really the kpis that gets you um the performance that you want is it like

play time is it retention is it like level completion etc etc is it like uh bounce rate adoption all of that like really determine a few key um star kpis that you want to understand then obviously moving forward you really want to hire uh a really good U manager a good data analy analyst they don't even need to be a UA manager they need to understand data and really enjoy speaking with data all the time so that's the thing like determine your objectives find someone who really can dive deep into data and then later on um according to your the according to how your team look like if you have like a competent data analy analy of of course go build something with code go build something that's even more smooth like

completely automated instead of using the duct tape system with no code but however like really uh evaluates uh what's the value in here because building no Cod systems can go extremely quickly and building a code system even though it could save so much time down the line it might takes it might take a lot of time to go through that um bug debug bug debug face and determine what you need then determine the system that's best suited for your need and then afterwards just built right I think there's a lot to learn in there clearly because this whole notion of what I would call rapid prototyping and and the no code approach which lets you uh with your UA and your monetization hats on explore an experiment really quite quickly and it's quite unusual because

so often in the games industry you see the the creativity is confined to the the development team you know and so few other people within the company get an opportunity to have that playful approach you know so it really does start to open up the fact that um the old job roles the old kind of definitions of you do this you're responsible for making the game you're responsible for managing and running the game are really starting to converge um and it's really really interesting to hear that you're adopting a lot of the same principles that you know development teams might have had in the past and and bringing it to an area that is not traditionally seen as forgive me being creative so it it's fantastic to hear um and I think it's really for me it's just reinforcing so many of the things we've heard in the past Peggy that the one constant in games is change and that's only being accelerated with

you know the adoption of AI and and the Practical utilization of AI I've definitely heard a lot about that like UA being UA is the most boring job out there but however if you're adopting a very creative system like you're a dancer going through a circuit you know and it's very interesting all the time you're like finding little surprises in all the the little details and um being creative and customize the system is just the most fun part well as we keep saying Clary if you can't have fun in games you're doing it wrong absolutely clar has been absolutely fascinating I think we could go on for much much longer but sadly we're going to have to bring it to an end um thank you for sharing everything that you're up to um all of the insights that you've gained there's an awful lot in there that I think our listeners are going to

be able to take away and who knows maybe we can encourage you to come back and write something for the website so we can really start to drill down into some of the topics that we've just scratched the surface with today um but before we go we have two questions that we ask every guest um and it brings it all back to to games because that's why we're all here at the end of the day so the first one is what are you playing right now what's obsessing you what are you spending a lot of time with and the second one is what's your favorite game of all time what I'm obsessed with right now is it is a game uh called Royal match I don't ever seen that I'm like I am playing it with like this full intention of like professional curiosity and I'm like every step of the way I'm just like how they manag to optimize every single workflow so well you know a lot of like casual games like they throw you into it and doesn't introduce things

and then like um sometimes it all it gets incredibly difficult all of a sudden and then like sometimes you are joined by alternative gameplay creatives and you realize okay the game is not that um I thought this was was going to be the case but after I download the game I'm like oh yeah like they've given you everything they promised in their ads and I'm like this is so great so I spent time playing that it's a great example and and you're absolutely right how do you take a a very simple you know at heart basic match three game and build something epic out of it and and and you're right because i' I see so many of those adverts I've got a seven-year-old we play his iPad together so the Royal match adverts are very much a part of my life right now um and yeah you know it's we have an expression here in the UK which is it does what it says on the tin which is no surprises but it's it's all the

stronger for that yeah so I'm like really so much respect for for the team that developed this game and then like when it comes to my favorite games of all time I think that's going to be really interesting and really different like I have two the first one is uh breath of the wild um from Nintendo uh Zelda breath of the wild it is like open world game where you can do whatever you want that's my uh first favorite game and my second favorite game is dingo that's game but they are so great look I have my 1,100 5 day streak on Jingo they've done it so well 1,000 days I've been doing that almost three years so I am excited Clary to extract all of

that and make certain it ends up on the pocketgamer.biz website as well um some lessons and some learnings for our audience it's going to be invaluable thanks so much this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to sh a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast

and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future