Enabling your success through Unity ads and analytics

great let Steven Sullivan from the unity technologies today I'm going to be talking about nibbling your success their ads and analytics and put it's working doesn't seem to advance right now all right just hang with us a couple seconds so get some support all right all right so we're waiting a couple

minutes the load of the presentation so to start out with how many of you are using unity ads or analytics in some sense right now cOURTESY a few of you out there are today what I'm we talking about is three services really that unity provides the first is unity adds there we go presentations going the second is unity I ap and the third is you need analytics and together these services provide monetization horsepower for your game all right ads provides one component IP provides the other component and together these provide the most important metric to your game which is art thou right and what we've seen in the past couple years is developers have started being more sophisticated about how they blend ads and IP together and the result is a blended ARP down number

that baxa Mieses each the way that as these numbers is using analytics all right so let's start out with unity ads what are the strengths of the new ad network first we have a tight integration with unity editor it's a simple one button click to get ads running in your game second is expertise in game designs we're more than just an ad network where a game platform so when we think about the ways to talk about advertising in your game we like to give concrete examples of the publishers we work with that have done it best that's why today I'm going to highlight a couple of those publishers and talk about the game mechanics they use around advertising rather than just advertising numbers themselves like ecpm fill rate those kinds of numbers and then finally we have a global reach unity is a global company with ad sales

and support and countries all over the world as I mentioned the last saw there's a simple setup we have no SDKs we know you're all tired of SDKs so Brad's an analytics you turn a button you're in the editor it works right out of the box the second is if you're not in the unity editor we still let you put ads and analytics in your native games that's just a simple drop in SDK five lines of code you're up and running I'm happy to announce that since last time we were here in Canada and during GDC we have a hundred and twenty three percent more developers in Canada monetizing using our platform so let's get into the ads themselves the main add component that we have with unity is rewarded video ad and we did a survey of over 2,000 developers to find out where they

were seeing success and what we found was this 75 or 71 percent of players prefer to watch rewarded video ads as their primary way of paying for a game right so this is an accepted thing to do we know that only three to five percent of your players monetized r.i.p and other players realize that there's a trade-off for providing entertainment people are used to seeing ads yeah but one of the reasons warded video works so well is if you think about the history of ads and how things have evolved in the past used to design a game loop design all the fun activities of your game have people collect resources and best expand and then you tacked on some sort of advertising experience in the corner because you thought right before launch oh my gosh I have to make money doing this to keep running my studio and what we saw is things like banner ads

things like interstitial ads where the ad experience is very peripheral to the experience are actually interfering with the experience of the game over time this is evolved so the first was putting rewarded video in your store in order to monetize alongside your IEP but what we've seen with the evolution is doing this better than we have in the past has huge ramifications for the effectiveness of the advertising and we're not talking about ten percent we're talking about a hundred to two hundred percent improvements in ad monetization in your game with little to no effect on the IP monetization so we worked with one developer this is a case study where they went for them less than ten percent of their players interacting with ads and daily basis to over thirty five percent what this means is triple

the amount of revenue from ads so what did they do that was different well the main thing is they create an ad experience which is integrated with the mechanics in their game so rather than have a banner ad sitting in the corner while you're playing the fun part of your game they've integrated ads into their core loop so player plays they progress they're offered a reward as part of the progression there are the upgrade collect resources and continue play in the game this is a pretty abstract example of what I'm talking or just an abstract concept what I'm talking about so let's dig into an example so the first is farm away by future play what they did was they are seeing an average of 22 rewarded video ads per install in the game and fifteen cent ARP dal in the US markets so for those of you who done add monetization the past this is an outstanding result when you normally could expect one to three cent type of art out threats let's

see what they got so this your typical farming game you're playing a farm away literally lets you make it rain by watching an ad in your game so what we see that they've done is they've let you watch an ad to enter a bonus mode in your game right now watching an ad from I think this is a store mate bingo clue bingo and now the player is watching the ad with the expectation that they have a lasting effect for interacting with the ads this creates is a much more positive experience than watching rewarded video ad getting five coins or having an interstitial pop up in between their turns all right so now everything's awesome and they're playing their game with two times the bonus so to focus again on the mechanics here the mechanic is watching a video to inner bonus mode and it designed around it they're also

sort of on the forefront of creating new types of game play called view to play where this game has little to no I eps and people actually pay to play the game by interacting with that so the question I think a lot of people think about immediately when we spend five minutes talking about monetization is all right well that's fine but what does that mean to my engagement right because it doesn't mean anything to monetize if you like lose your retention because you're showing ads in the face of players all time but what we've seen is eighty percent of players are open to engaging with ads from that survey of 2,000 developers over fifty percent saw no difference or increased retention from players that interacted with ads or developers that had games with ads in them and this is because a lot of your most engaged players are hitting pinch

points in your game design and when they do that they want to proceed if they can't proceed in the pinch points too hard they're just going to drop out of your game but if you give them a little push a bonus some extra currency you can see where that actually enhances their ability to have progress in the game and keeps your players coming back and engaged the second part of that is appointment mechanics alright so another slide ten to fifteen percent increase revenue from ads some nice graphs no ads viewed in ads but it's like like I said your most engaged players are more likely to view an ad so you think about the cause and effect here with fifty percent of player you're seeing fifty percent d1 retention from players that viewed an ad and that makes sense right because the people that viewed an ad probably got further in your game we're more engaged more likely to see one but the second point is important which is you're not cutting

into your LTV so looking at users the same users that are viewing your ads trying to find ways to progress are also people that are paying all right so part of that LTV comes from the ad monetization the other part comes from the fact that eventually you're going to have a game design with a pinch point good enough so that the player will have been continuously engaged and decide to monetize their IP all right so our second case studies by game-high makers of tap Titans also makers of beat the boss one and two and we just have a nice quote here they're seeing no loss of retention and what they have is when people come and collect a daily bonus they can watch a video in order to double that bonus right and here we see the combination of an appointment mechanic people coming back to play the game every day they're given an opt-in or opt-out so they can just collect their bonus but if they want to double that bonus they can watch an at and it

creates better monetization for you as a developer so here we have another ad it's going to play all the way through uh so important thing to note is these rewarded video ads are not incentivized installs all right so people play the game they get an incentive to watch the ad but where nobody at any time is is paid for the install that is all performance space in the network and completely opt-in by the players so that you know when you are acquiring users to reward of video ads you are getting a qualified player that has decided that the store that you've told in an advertising advertisement is compelling enough that they want to engage and install and play that game all right so that's the first piece of monetization puzzle ads the second is IP

and this gets back to unity is a platform so let's frame the problem every single store that you want to monetize into the developer has a different way of doing IP it is an absolute nightmare and it's absolute mess so we have Google Apple windows amazon they have their store plugins we're all familiar with integrating with them and the worst part of this is if you screw up this IEP integration you're either going to get one rejected when you try to submit your application of the store which is going to set you back days trying to figure out what's what happened to it and the second part is you actually can get in the store and have your eyepiece be completely broken and so you start wondering why did my IP not make any money on launch what's going on and then you have a big fire drill that's nightmare so uni IP sets out to solve this problem we've designed one unified interface to interact with

all the stores we've completely abstracted the details of how stores work to only to let you only integrate once with you the IEP and get on every platform and get on every store this is a huge problem the developers had we launched this earlier this year it's do extraordinarily well we're getting a lot of great feedback and currently in the next phase of development for unity IP so if you have suggestions I recommend going in the forums putting in your favorite feature requests it's going to continue to evolve and right now we're focused on expanding our reach to new stores so we currently support iOS Mac OS Google Play windows amazon Samsung and Tyson and coming soon our stores in Southeast Asia that developers have never had access to before and again the important point here is that it's all available through one unified interface so you actually

don't have to do anything except repackage your application for google play and put in the amazon store or vice versa lastly i'm going to tell you about unity analytics and this is really the way that you measure and iterate over the two pieces that i just mentioned before so adds an IEP it's a fully multi-platform solution it's built for games so you're going to see all the typical things you're used to seeing diu revenue retention we are the biggest analytics platform for developers that build on top of unity and then finally it's natively integrated flip of a button everything's turned on you go to the dashboard it's fully integrated end-to-end so what are some of the main features of our analytics solution the first is a high level game dashboard here we'll see all the metrics you used

to active players sessions retention revenue you can look at trends because that's one of the most important pieces of an analytics solution it's figuring out whether things are moving the right direction how that last release that you built is doing who is monetizing how many new users are you getting how many is your ma you going up is there a mean you going down so that's high-level dashboard the next piece is the data Explorer we give you a lot of power to dig down into your data segments are built into the system being able to look at custom events that have a second level of variables is built into the system so you can get as sophisticated as you want with this and in the end you own all your data so we let you graph within our dashboard but we also you export the raw data and do whatever you need to do in your own

analytic system and finally we have the funnel analyzer so when you set up that IP system you want to know the effectiveness of how many people saw my store how many people converted how many people started to convert and then ending converted using custom events you can use a funnel analyzer set these all up in our dashboard and be able to get extremely good insights on how well different parts of your game working so in conclusion unity is the only engine that pays you to use it we paid out more money to publishers last year than people paid in licensing revenue to use the Unity engine we did that by providing a full platform that lets you monetize engage in retaining your users and then use analytics to gain insights how to better improve and keep the funnel and keep your loops going so if

you have questions about any of this you can go to uni ads 3d calm or analytics and if you have questions right now just raise your hand and we can chat some clicks say one at the back there we cater get a mic over with the the iap tool are you putting that into the unity tool and then also adding the packages into Apple and Google or is it just living in the unity tool so right now you set up your IPS and unity tool the recommendation is that you name them all the same thing for the different platforms our next phase of development is simplifying the way that you get that data into the different platforms so it's honor immediate roadmap no just want into that so I won't get unity at have a mic okay

so i won't get unity analytics into my game but i didn't build my game in unity is that possible right now you need to be in unity for unity analytics we have some plans later on our roadmap to address games that weren't build with unity but today the integration is turning on the editor and you get many of the events out of the box anything else right there so how easy it is to download this data for further analysis in some external tools like is it possible to download the data yeah so we just really not lyrics data and yeah absolutely so you and all your data we just released in preview mode a feature called raw data export that lets you hit a button download an excel file are and have all the data to process yourself is

any of this available for VR is it's all just mobile right now we are supporting mobile platforms but certainly VR is a big part of future at unity and so I would expect the long-term to have features like that