Fireside Chat: Behind the Retargeting Success of Huuuge Games

our first talk today is a fireside chat with valeria and more they are going to be walking us through the retargeting success of huge games hey great yay welcome yeah sorry for the last minute technical issues but now we're here glad we have you nice all right i will pass it off to you too we're all excited thank you so much for the support here so um great with some suspense but it's nice as well to start like that right

um we can start this the fireside chat so i will start with a very short introduction i'm valeria i work as account manager at remerge remerge is the very first custom build platform for in-app retargeting only and today i have the pleasure to be here with more stone from huge games i would like maybe more you to introduce yourself and to tell us what you have been doing at ug games i'm sure everyone knows huge games anyway in this audience that would be very nice to hear from your point so first uh it's great to be here thank you for having me uh and uh so a little bit about myself i've been in this industry of marketing and gaming in the past five years uh started as a social user acquisition in gaming focused companies um joint huge more than no a little bit around two years ago

started as a social user acquisition manager for our flagship app which is huge casino and for those who are not uh really familiar with you it's a briefly about huge we're a free to play uh game developer and publisher um our mission is to empower billions of people to play together we have 12 offices worldwide and we're constantly growing and in huge and actually in the past eight months i was co-establishing the retargeting team which we find a very strategic team in huge and by strategic i mean that a huge understands the value of retargeting and is willing to invest much efforts and budget uh to this activity and by leading the team i'm in charge of bringing back huge players to play our games by finding them all around multiple channels all across the mobile escape and bringing them back by

offering them rewards and presenting them with new features and game experience and that's that's mostly it great thank you and you were mentioning actually that it's been a journey in the last eight months let's say it is uh building up a retargeting department as well right so actually when did it become uh relevant to do retargeting for eugene based on which considerations on your side so i say uh it's it's more than a point in a day in time it's a point in data i mean uh we realize that you know it's uh something that we see across all gaming that retention a day seven can be around ten to fifteen percent meaning that around ninety percent of new players we just installed uh leave the game in the first seven days since install so at these for us uh has represented the big potential for our business

and we know that uh we can actually offer them uh another experience because they probably haven't experienced all the features that we have to offer and all the game experience so we know that by applying a user-centric approach we can make them maybe part of them loyal huge customers by offering them some different game experience also we've done an analysis we wanted to look at the probability of a player to organically play the game after x days since his last game since he last played the gaming this helped us to define the turn a term and and turn turn means after x days this player is a turn player i mean he's not gonna come back to the game and this helped us also in the retargeting activity and another reason is as we know our games have a significant doubt and while you have so many people that are playing your game it's getting

harder and harder to bring back players who haven't heard of our games and haven't played our games and also uh it's getting more expensive sometimes than really bringing back a player who actually knows you and played your game and social casino we know that they have a long shelf life high ltv users and if we can bring them back to our games and give them a different experience we can definitely benefit from that's great great to hear and i mean like you were mentioning as well how it can be cheaper to actually re-engage a user or prevent that the user turns instead of acquiring new users right uh also probably related to the maturity of the games that you are dealing with we are managing right so at the moment for example for the most mature games that you have what would you say is the split in the investment between user acquisition

and retargeting um so regarding the split okay so we don't only uh do retargeting activity for mature games we also run a retargeting for our sometimes our new app so i mean it depends on um i mean depends on the campaign type so if it's a roast campaign uh so that's what we're measuring at day seven broads uh we also look at other metrics but that's mostly it it's mostly meant for our large user-based games that we know that drive most of our revenues but we also run dow campaigns which are being measured by uh the amount of doubt by the cost per dow and by retention this is also for uh games who are relatively new not the large user base and also games that are based on in-app ads monetization so so that's how we split also between

the apps and between the ua i mean uh i can say that retargeting uh is constantly growing and constantly keeping up and increasing its share among the marketing team and and it's definitely a very respectable share by now because as you said the majority of the games so actually you were also mentioning a little bit the main lines of what is your retargeting strategy right when you talk about rawas for example kpis rather than your dao activities can you tell us maybe a little bit more regarding your retargeting strategy and what is actually the goal of the different segments that you are running for the game yes so so we discussed the campaign types and we also have our audience uh segments and audience types

uh sometimes i mean so it can be a segment of ltv and recency meaning uh player players who have a hundred dollars ltv for example who played 30 days ago um and we want to bring them back to the game but it can be also audiences of players who engaged with specific pictures uh players who for example participated in big sales we know that they're more likely to purchase during uh such sale and we want to present them with a specific other sale that could suit them and also another audience could be clubbers we have club clubs in our games and we want uh to turn up players who didn't join a club uh to join a club and actually get more rewards and play with their friends in clubs and get more socialize in the app so so we have many audience types that's our strategy along with the campaign types and we want to make sure that we deliver the right

message as we said like message is the right promotion or thing that they could find interesting and the right treatment for example players who didn't play for 60 days we know that we should give them some reward or gift to help them get going and start playing the game it can be a protocol gift every day something else to make them like more loyal and keep playing for longer periods um so i mean yes it depends on that then i would say one word about measurement because that's also part of our strategy we have our uplift dashboard our internal update dashboard that helps us to actually measure the incrementality because we know that especially for targeting players that you target could have anyway maybe perform an action because sometimes they are active or recently active players so you really want to measure the incremental value the actual

value of the spend their targeting activities so we have our own group groups of test group and control group and uh that's how we can truly measure uh uh players who've seen our address players who didn't see the ads and know the incrementality value over it and one last thing uh so i would say that the eventual goal of huge across the marketing team is to define where the next dollar would go so it could it could go to retargeting or it could go to ua so that's why we also compare our activity with the new activity um and that's eventually where we want to be great so if i understood it correctly um it's a very data-driven approach what you have in place for huge games and then like you try to address the different segments with a very customized messaging as well

and in terms of measurements of course there is the classical return or not spent rather their engagement but you are trying as well to estimate what is the uplift so you mentioned actually the very hot topic of the last few years very interesting to see that also use games is uh working on this internally i think it's a very key key topic at the moment and also um related to the other question that i had for you today that is um regarding what is the value actually of running more channels multiple channels as well on the same user base at the same time if you can tell us something about sure so i i know i probably i guess that most companies that run retargeting uh use facebook as their major source and facebook is indeed a great partner and uh to run retargeting campaigns but i would say that unlike ua campaigns

where uh you really rely on facebook sophisticated targeting and optimization which i would say that there's no other like that but for targeting we have a predefined list we have our list that we extract from our own database players who actually played the game uh before uh and for predefined lists i would say that dsps become super relevant because we eventually want to find these players and offer them new things um and facebook we can say that the match rate is around 65 sometimes 70 percent but we have all the other 30 and even more that we can reach uh via dsps all across the mobile space um and offer them uh what we want to offer and it can also be more cost effective because we know that facebook being a great platform is usually more expensive we can pay less for the same users and even maybe

target them in in a sometimes a better user experience because if they currently playing another game and another mobile app and then remember show them some ad of our game and so that makes them more likely to come back and play the game then sometimes when users scroll the facebook feed and not currently looking to engage with any game but just you know uh scroll and uh they're not open-minded that they are if they play another game or being in another mobile app so that's but i would say that eventually we want to diversify our risk so uh we run with both but uh we compare them uh and once we have the uplift dashboard that would be even a better comparison i mean we were not currently uh comparing uh partners but we will because then we can like uh divide the audience to uh but this is being shown on remember this has been shown on facebook we'll see the uplift of these two

partners sure so the most important thing is to reach your users also considering most probably that social casino apps i mean is a very competitive field right so you really need to reach your users and to keep them engaged in the game when it's about the choosing a retargeting partner let's say what would you say are the most valuable features or aspects for a strong partnership so i would say the first one is scale when we onboard a new partner we really invest our efforts and our budget to the success of this partnership we want to make sure that uh this partner has enough access to inventory that we can scale the activity together and the partnership could uh long last and uh and and that's that reminds me of a warren buffett he said you know our

favorite holding period is forever and that's what we aim for our partners we say that our partnership with our partners is meant to be forever and that's what we want and when a partner can scale definitely that can [Music] last for a long time another thing is uh is communication with their poc because we know that sometimes beginnings aren't so smooth there are sometimes integration issues or results initial results are not as you expect them to be and you need more time so uh being in touch with a poc who is proficient analytical professional and communicative which is also very important because we need him to be available for us but that's super important for us and we find that the key uh a reason to stay with partners and and the last thing if i should give three reasons uh would be the reputation in the industry and

the added value that they can bring to us so uh so we do also sometimes consult with our friends in the industry about partners and and reputation it can be performance or there can be their uh bid optimization by segment and ai solutions but uh can be also the added value that they bring which is uh advanced analytics uh can be creative innovation creative personalization and things that we can learn from our partners so we're always looking to learn new things and uh that's also a reason to choose a partner great thank you maybe a very last quick question before um having a look at the questions that uh the audience just wrote us what would be your advice for app marketers that want to approach retargeting for gaming yes so so the advice would be to start the journey by

coming out of the data so we want to first understand the game uh from a data point of view we want to understand our players we want to look at metrics like cohorted payers rate arp dial rppu we want to know at what point they usually make a purchase or at what level they get stuck or at what point they live the game and so that's one thing and that would take great communication with the bi team and not only also with product and crm teams but mostly bi team want to be very sync between their targeting bi teams because everything must be backed by data and um another thing which is also i mean i mean when you do it targeting you should really know your game i mean that's i've done ua for the same game which casino but i didn't know the game as well as i know it now i

i did play the game and obviously i knew the features but now i really know all promotions and events and everything that's going on in the game because we have to communicate that to our players and we have to understand what they like better and what makes them like excited so also communication with the crm team at the monetization team of vf is very important because they're in charge of the game promotions and the events and last advice i think already said that so uh look for uh incrementality testing especially for retargeting the uplift dashboard helps us to really understand the incremental value so that would be most okay thank you we have maybe still a couple of minutes for some questions the first one i mean would need a way more than a couple of minutes because uh it's asking about uh the retargeting strategy with ios 14 sure so

uh we got a little time now which is great because it was pretty stunning right because uh and we thought about what we can do so there's various things that we started doing which is so we want to not being rely solely on idfa because uh there are more uh ids and ideas identification which we can find players especially on facebook we can collect emails we can collect facebook ids and we already do so in our game we offer players some benefits in order to leave their emails and connect via facebook ideas and we have more plans uh going forward and also uh looking to increase our consent rate our opt-in rate uh so that's another test we will run soon a pop-up message and to really test and measure the consent rate um

that's mostly it we know that retargeting will get a little hurt from that but we will find solutions definitely sure it will be something to learn how to deal with right so and another second question how important is push notification in comparison to paid retargeting ad um so as we said the crm team that that's also the team that show push notifications and email marketing campaigns but they do it mostly for players who were active during the last seven days um that's mostly the players they reach and we mostly not always mostly reach players who are inactive for seven days or more and that's why we usually don't collide our activities don't like collide each other but it's very important we see that i mean and that's also

free you know we pay one time but every push is free unlike any impression uh so we see that uh it gets players you know pretty high rates to come back to the game daily but in the retargeting activity we are there for those who did not come back uh with the push notifications those who may be disabled push notifications and don't want to see any plans so we're there to uh really target players that push notifications did not help to pre uh engage to the game very last question very last minute as well so do you compare against placebo ads to measure incremental lift it's a little bit the methodology that you apply for your uplift measurement um yeah so what if which methodology do you apply to your uplift measurement in ours it would be a intent to treat

placebo ads um so we actually it's not placebo yet we actually segment our audience to two groups sometimes three and we for one group we are able to show one message for another group able to show but not possible but to show them a different message for different ad and we have a group which we don't touch they will not see any of our ads so when then we actually uh over time we see the uh performance of each group and we see we can compare in our dashboard this is benchmark group those who didn't see anything against those who did see our ad so i mean that's how we use it mostly if i understood correctly yes perfect more i think we would we would need another session to to explain a little bit more about

uplift measurement in case right so i think like uh yeah i think that was all uh we are in the time um thank you so much for being our guest today and for this opportunity to be at this conference sure thank you for having me it was lovely and i hope to see you again soon sure thank you thank you yeah thank you to both of you valeria and more that was great you