Game Discoverability Day: Paid Acquisition for Smartphone Games: A Scrappy, Practical Guide

[Music] today we're talking about paid user acquisition it's a scrappy and practical guide I'm Mike I'm the CEO of iron horse games there's one person who works at iron horse games and it's me I'm a publisher of games on iOS and Android and we've generated 11 million installs across 19 titles in the last year alone most of that's on Google Play and most of that is being driven as a result of paid user acquisition that we're doing across titles I predominantly publish idle games for those who are curious about the genre below are some of the titles that have published in the last year so what I'm going to talk about marketing in short more broadly I'm going to be talking about marketing in three phases on Google Play so open beta launch and live each of them have a different set of rules and strategies that apply to them and I'm gonna walk you through how I approach each each of those different phases apples a little bit more

simplistic and so I'm going to be talking about marketing and the live phase on Apple and I'm going to give some tips and tricks and pointers about effectively marketing with Facebook and unity below you can see two of the titles one has a tag for beta that's title and open beta and the other one doesn't because that titles life so focusing on Google Play primarily today and the reason why is pretty self-explanatory on Google Play organic installs are significantly larger in my experience than Apple's organic installs and this means two things practically when you start thinking about it from a marketing perspective the first is and the most positive is your return on investment can be significantly higher from your user acquisition on Google Play relative to Apple that the not so rosy scenario is that you have more of a safety net on Google Play than you do on Apple as organic installs that are generated from your marketing spend can help save your bacon if you find that

your marketing campaigns aren't net neutral or ROI positive so a quick quick overview about open beta for Google Play so in the past open beta used to be treated as a test market it's really really important that you don't continue to do this you if you need to do bug testing you need to make sure in-app purchases or ads are working do it a larger closed beta on Google Play and get users in to make sure that it's stable the reason why is that the users that you can generate in open beta are significant in terms of both volume but also the value that they drive so wasting those users on a game that either isn't stable or you're not quite sure about monetization and retention or your ads aren't particularly working well is a huge missed opportunity open beta is a really important period for for Ironhorse games so don't waste it and the second one is keywords keywords

are one of those things that everyone talks about quite a bit and they're really important particularly in open beta and it's a critical part of the strategy for open beta so that's strategy and I'm gonna walk through each of these steps in turn is it's the most complicated thing that we're going to talk about today but it has a lot of value to it so the first is choosing and optimizing the keywords that you're gonna use for your game so we'll walk through how you do that then you're going to be marketing your game to increase organic installs from those keywords specifically what you're doing is you're marketing your game to increase rank on keywords which then generate more organic installs and then you're compiling all these reserved results together to make a pitch to Google Play for featuring an early access and for folks who don't know and open beta there is a feature that you can get and it's an early access collection so it's a list of games that the Google Play team is deemed worthy of featuring so you get significantly

increased exposure and installs as a result of it but the important thing is you have to make a case as to why they should feature the game and support you so how many installs gonna get from ASF on a title that had no early access feature 7,000 out of my 13,000 installs that came into the game organically in a month came from search traffic on a title that did have an early access feature 15,000 out of 31,000 organic installs came into the game in a month what's important to note here is the volumes aren't I mean there's nothing to write home about yet but the quality is search and ASO installs are the most valuable users that I've acquired in my game in open beta and so they are every bit as valuable as users that I've acquired via user acquisition and they're significantly more valuable than organic users particularly when you start looking at early access featuring which means you get a lot more traffic so

talking about the steps of how to actually do this the first one is choosing your keywords and this one's pretty basic when you're trying to figure out which keywords to use I typically use a combination of common sense and then also look at what my competitors are doing so from a common sense perspective if you have a tower defense game it's a pretty good chance that you want two of your keywords to be tower and defense tower defense combined and that's a shocking revelation but those are some key words that you should chase after figuring out which keywords are good isn't a whole nother matter entirely and this requires quite a bit of trial and error so you can use sensor tower and I use sensor tower and there are a number of tools out there that are free sensor tower is free up to a certain point but essentially what they do is they give you an approximation of the amount of traffic that you can get from a particular keyword and then they can also show you the difficulty so if it's a nine or above that's going to be really challenging to get a to rank in that keyword I'm typically from a traffic perspective you want to be five

six seven it's usually a pretty good rate there you also want to be choosing three to five different keywords to focus on the reason is a little depressing it's because most of your keywords aren't going to work the you know the reality of it is each games a little bit different and when somebody's searching tower defense they may not choose your game based solely on the icon or some strange thing that you did with the title so you need to hedge your bets and have a couple key words that you're focusing on and because most of them are gonna work out so optimizing your keywords and this one is has required a lot of trial and error on my part and it's um it's something I'm pretty proud to have figured out some small element of so keywords are composed of kind of a key word bank so your bundle ID description short description title and subtitle all form a word bank right and then your keywords are pulled from that word bank and what you want to be focusing here on is not the number of tight at times your

mention eight keyword but the density of that keyword relative to the overall number of words in your description for instance this is my game uncivil war below and the word card is has a density of 3% it's like three percent of all words in that keyword bank is card and the reason for that is I really want people are searching card to find my game app tweek is the tool I use for this this is a free tool and they have a keyword density tool that's really great you can also see which keyword density your competitors or are using to figure things out so this step is split into two phases and I've done both so the first step if you're fortunate enough to be in this position is how you do marketing when you have money the second step which is the reality for a lot of folks who are starting out marketing is how you market when you don't have any money both are pretty interesting for different reasons the first thing you want to do is get an attribution partner in the game and this

is an SDK that tracks where your installs are coming from and helps assign value these are all mostly the same these days adjust kochava Apps flyer they all more or less offer the same types of services the key difference is the level of service that you get from the partner relative to the size of your business so for me when I started I was a very small business I'm used to being ignored when you're a small business I think folks can relate to that that never happened with Apps flyer I'd have very basic questions that would always answer it as if I were a million dollar partner I'm paying them huge amount of money so I I can't endorse them strongly enough I think gap so I was great I used Facebook and unity to start my campaigns there are a couple reasons for this one the traffic's high quality and - it's under your control you don't have to talk to anybody at Facebook or you need to kick these campaigns off you can just do it yourself and with Apps flyer you don't have to put in the unity or Facebook as the case or any of that stuff you can just put apps layer in and then it takes care of the attribution piece for you

typically you're spending 50 to 100 dollars a day so you're not breaking the bank here to acquire these users I'm targeting should really be focused 1 you can only do targeting on Facebook at the start and then 2 should really be focused around the types of users that are in the genre of game that you're working on I focus on tier 1 markets for my games depending on the audience you appeal to you may want to change that up but for me that's US UK Germany France Canada and Australia so how do you market without any money there are two ways to do it and my experience I've done them both the first one is you can get an integration bonus so this can be anywhere from 5 to 20 thousand dollars from an ad partner the way that this works and it's complicated as you go to the ad partner and say I want to put your ads in the game and there are great here's the SDK you say not so fast give me $20,000 and they say ok the the reality of the situation as a conversation is actually very close to that I'm asked for some advertising

credits and typically you can get anywhere from five to twenty thousand dollars and free advertising just for getting their SDK in the game of showing off your ads if you have any kind of background in games they're usually jumping at the chance and they really care about getting new partners to integrate their ads so there's no harm in asking if they say no move on to the next partner and ask them the second way to do this and again this is going to be really complicated is getting a line of credit from marketing partners again the way that this one works is you say hey I want a line of credit and they say okay and then you get a line of credit for either 50 or $100,000 the key with a line of credit is you have to pay that money back so be careful because anything you spend you're gonna have to pay back for them I've had lines of credit extended through five marketing partners with no background or credit checks for a total of like a few million dollars it's as simple as as asking for

it so from this step once you have your marketing going on Facebook and unity you can start monitor your keywords so something really great happened on the Google Play Developer console last year that I think a lot of people missed and you can actually see how many search installs you're getting I mean out of your total organics so if you go to the dev console and user acquisition and look at search you can see the total number of installs look at the red arrow and you should be able to see it so the things that you're looking for here are volume and quality so if your volume isn't looking like the volume that I quoted earlier in an earlier slide there are two things that are wrong so one is you need more user acquisition to be able to chart in a potential or particular keyword or that keyword is not resonating with your game so using the tower-defense example if you have a game that's about tower defense but the icon looks like it's a casual match 3 there's going to be a lot of cognitive dissonance for people searching and they're probably not gonna download your game so you want

that to be a holistic package with the title screenshots and icon reinforcing what the genre of the game is about and if you're having quality issues you need to change keywords different keywords have different qualities so I've seen keywords with very low or Pooh's driving users in the game I've seen keywords with very high arches driving users in the game this is trial and error and really looking at what competitors are doing for a leg up here as well and troubleshooting is either changing keywords increasing your marketing or mixing around the density to increase density on a particular keyword I always target the top 10 or 15 in terms of a keyword it's attainable it's easy it generates organic installs and those organic installs really valuable so once you've got your keyword installs floating in and you have marketing going you're also going to apply for early access so this is kind of the culmination of the open beta process

Google's a business and what they care about is return on investment for their investment so when they're thinking about where they're gonna put their features what they're really choosing is like well does Mike have the game with a highest ARPU this week and is he supporting it as fully as these other partners are so they're making they're making a differentiation between you and other partners and you're competing so you need to make that case and the case really needs to be around the support that you're giving the game from a marketing perspective the growth that you've seen and driven on your own but also the potential right and so far our poo is 50 cents if we had another fifty thousand installs there would be a great business for both of us so make that case don't be shy about talking about the efforts that you made to grow the game to that point Google will listen so moving on to launch step this is probably the most important part of the presentation today is the one you should pay the closest attention to this window last 30 days and it begins the moment that you push from open beta to

production during this time your organic to paid ratios are going to be incredibly inflated the most inflated you've ever seen for the game and we'll ever see for the game so this can be as high as for organic installs for every paid install and this is without a feature so weird forget about features for the moment we're talking about if you buy one install you're generating three to four installs organically in this first 30-day window so for me this is one below where we spent lightly and it was a 1 to 2 ratio for the first 30 days so the launch strategy here is much much simpler and you want to spend money in the first 30 days and you want to spend as much as you possibly can to generate as many organics as you can apples a little bit different so when you spend you move up on charts and it increases visibility on Google when you spend it increases visibility through the lists in the stores so all the lists that you're seeing here or where you're gonna get see your games icon populated

and it can generate a significant amount of installs how many installs so this is averaged across multiple titles acquired 75,000 installs on average generated a hundred and seventy-five thousand installs organically without any feature from Google Play and the cost of those 75,000 installs is obviously variable depending on the strategy that you're using but you can get that for as low as $25,000 if you're really scrappy with your install sources step one and this is the most important step is you need to learn from open beta if you're going to spend 25 or even 75 thousand dollars on paid user acquisition in the launch window you need to know what you're doing and the best way to learn is in open beta so figure out which marketing creative was best for you which channels and targeting's have targeting have the highest ROI and so this is this is really important I think you know when you talk about open beta and think about testing there actually is one thing you

want to be testing and that's for marketing creative and strategy and you want to be rock-solid on that before you move on to this phase you also want to be decently capitalized so don't spend all that money that should make an open beta you also want to make sure that your keywords and in good shape for lunch because those can be significant contributors of traffic as well step two is choosing your marketing partners so for me my two main partners are unity and Facebook I also use Tapjoy an iron source uni and Facebook are self-service and great you need a little bit of help on setup a tap join an iron source but the quality is great so I'm gonna go through unity and Facebook in detail with some tips but first some facts on unity it's not going to exceed your budget or your bid um so this is actually really great if you're doing scrappy marketing because you'll wake up one day and instead of blowing the budget out and having over spent doing user acquisition your traffic I'll just disappear right so your bids won't go up they will just disappear entirely it only uses video creatives so it's important to get as many of those

generators possible I typically have three to four different video ads them running on a per game basis and they don't have to be wildly different right you don't need custom different video ads you can do slight variations and you can get a line of credit from unity they're really great to work with in that regard so some tips these are things that have cost a decent amount of money for me to learn hopefully they're helpful to you so blind bidding around your ARPU then in the launch window you have such an increased volume of organic installs as a result of your marketing that you want to be driving as much paid acquisition as you can so blind bidding is a great way to do that so if you have a 50 cent ARPU from Unity users and you know that from from open beta you may be able to derive let's say 10 installs at that 50 cent bid right you may find that if you bid a little bit lower so blind bid down by 10 cents see what happens maybe it's the same maybe you get 50 installs for that what I've found is that if you increase that bid to 75

cents 80 cents 90 cents you can see multiples of installs so these kind of weird hidden trip lines on unity around bids that can unleash way way larger volumes of traffic than what you would see if you just bid around your pool and you may make that calculation in your head to say you know what it's better for me to lose 10 cents on a user during the launch window if I'm driving 3 or 4 organic installs for every user like you're you're comfortable with that trade-off but the only way to know is really to play around with that bid per geo particularly in the u.s. slight creative variations so one of the things that most people are doing paid user acquisition struggle with is a rise in and CPI the I mean this is natural people are getting exposed to your ads there being less they've become less inclined to download them if they passed on your ad creative the first time through a great way to fight against this isn't to increase your bid its add

new creative even if that creative performs poorly relative to your main video adding new creative artificially triggers unity system to give you an impression bump because from unies perspective what they're saying is well I want to give this ad a good shot they don't know if it's a bad ad or not yet they have to give you enough impressions to figure it out so put up a new video you'll get an impression bump you'll keep your bids the same and you'll get traffic at the same bid without having to increase your your your bids I do this a lot and I do it with slight variations of my video creative if you if you do it too much you're gonna hear from your unity rep and you really should experiment with your videos but this is a great way around constantly raising your bits and finally share your session and revenue information with unity because later on they can come up with some really interesting audience targeting for you that has higher ROI with more or less the same CPI so their day 7ro a

campaigns are great folks aren't using those unities got some really advanced targeting stuff that you should be checking out except to Facebook and so they won't exceed your budget but boy they'll exceed your bid so if anyone here spent on Facebook and you found out that if you go to bed on a Friday and you're getting users for 10 cents you may wake up on a Saturday if you're doing low-cost bidding and those users now cost a dollar and so you have to be very careful especially with low-cost bidding and the amount of budget that you're allocating for your campaign so that you don't find yourself quickly underwater these display and video ads you can get a line of credit the Facebook team has actually been really great to work with from a small developer standpoint um even when I was spending significantly less than I was spending now so some tips here Facebook's got a honeymoon period so you know when you have a new job a new girlfriend or boyfriend everything is wonderful for the first couple months and then you find out what it's really like Facebook's the same way so the

first two months you're gonna see amazing CPI's and then you're miners and Hannam be able to spend four days on Facebook with twenty Center with 20 cents EPS this is amazing that goes away so you have a limited period of time we're gonna get those CPI's and you once you have run out that clock you can't go back so you want to make sure that you were spending carefully on Facebook particularly in open beta because you don't want to run out your honeymoon outside of the launch window another tip and this is one that I think people miss all the time display ads are just fine I mean video ads are really popular playable ads are really popular on the bread and butter of my entire business static display ads most of my advertising on Facebook comes through static display ads they work just fun CTRs are comparable with video ads CPI's or even less and they are the workhorse of my marketing campaigns on Facebook

and some another weird one on Facebook is low-cost bidding so low cost bidding essentially I've mentioned it a couple times but it's where you a lot of Facebook to determine what the CPI is going to be for your campaign so you allow their algorithm to figure it out for you this is great during the honeymoon period and after it is not great your CPI's will escalate quickly so the strategy for dealing with this start with a low cost campaign as soon as your CP eyes go up you put a bid cap on it once you put that bid cap on it your impressions are gonna tank the thing you then do is take that exact same campaign with the exact same targeting and creatives and you start a new campaign with the big cap in place at the start you will see an impression bump similar to what you saw in unity and you can do this over and over and over and over again so it's how you avoid these situations where you have perennial massively large CP is that you are unavoidable you keep writing these impression bump waves as they peter out

and they will peter out because you can't acquire at those CP is do another one and then do it again and over time the art poo from those campaigns are going to decay so sooner or later you're going to need to rotate your creative in your targeting but this has been an effective strategy for me so the wonderful days of launch are done your ratios if one paid three organic or over but it's still great for me I usually see one two two organic installs for every paid install on Google Play the thing I'm doing now is I'm using all the data from launch all the marketing to make the case for a feature I actually used to ask for a feature at launch which is a risk for myself and it's a risk for Google right they don't know how the games gonna perform they know I've spent some amount of money on marketing and had some success but they really have no idea what the game is true potential is if I'm doing the marketing in month one I'm already showing them hey I took the risk this is the opportunity for the business represented to you like you don't have

to take any risk I already proved it to you and the game looks great so I'd really love your support with a new and updated feature um this has been a strategy that I transitioned to four or five months ago and it's been effective each time I tried and it's also really worth trying out new marketing partners there's a lot of challenge to trying out and integrating new marketing partners but it's really worthwhile doing it especially on games have been around for a while recently started marketing with iron source on a few games that I've been marketing actively for the last seven or eight months and it's like the first day I'm marketed the art boots are great CP is are reasonable and so the only way to do that is to try marketing partners I tried five other partners before I found one that works so there's gonna be a lot of churn in that process try a new one every month apples different unfortunately in a bad way so paid to organic ratios on Apple or four to seven paid installs to one organic so not not awesome and I don't do any marketing on

Apple until I've done a tremendous amount of marketing on Google and the reason why is there is no safety net so if you lose money on your campaign you lose money period so with with Apple he's all the targeting and and the ARPU targets that we're working on Google Play and take those over to Apple and it's been pretty effective the key difference between Apple and Google is that chart positions matter so the higher you are in games the more organic installs you're going to see unfortunately in my experience it's not enough to compensate for the cost so two months ago trying to experiment we generate we spent $4,000 a day degenerate and to acquire 4,000 installs per day to get the top 300 in games in a yielded 100 to 200 additional organics per day so the current estimates to get to the top hundred in games is that it's going to require and this is in the u.s. that requires 10,000 installs per day

just to get in the top hundred in games and I'm not sure what organics look like there but I know what the costs associated with ten thousand paid users is per day is quite high so you can infer from that what you will wrap up so for me the most important points take-home keywords matter particularly in open beta especially when you don't really know what the ARPU of your game is gonna be any free installs are really helpful marketing during that launch window has become like a critical part of the backbone of my strategy and a lot of ways it's replaced a huge amount of the traffic I used to rely on from Apple and Google features and then just generally speaking and Google Play organic installs are significantly higher than Apple installs if you're in a unique position or you have a game that has massive art piece and you have an unlimited budget you may find that in the top three or five spots on the game's category this isn't true right Apple has just boundless and endless organic insults unfortunately I haven't

done it so I can't say that that's the case and it is rarefied air to be there that's it I'm happy to answer any questions that you guys have about anything I said [Applause] hi so here's the question first of all great talk thank you very much yeah have you have you test have you tested UAC or admob's what's your experience there so I'll just oh there we go it's back on the question was have I tested UAC UAC is great so the challenge with the UAC is you have to make a pretty meaty commitment from a spend standpoint to

figure out if it works and really it takes about 30 days of spend to figure out whether or not you're gonna see ROI so typically for a UAC test and bidding at 30 to 35 dollars from an eCPM perspective it doesn't come in at that but the CPI is high to start and then I'm spending about $1,000 a day between 500 and $1,000 a day if you drop your bid too low on UAC you stop getting video add views and it's been my experience the video add views or the thing that's actually driving user acquisition behavior and then one other note on USC your art pose really need to be in like the 30 to $40 range and your conversion rate needs to be one to three percent for for UAC really to back out so you need to make sure depth of spend there it is there because I haven't really seen CPI's below like 275 cool

you can ya just yell and I'll repeat your question sure the question was have I seen any shifts in the in the last year or two after Facebook acquired Instagram yeah I have so you can't track this on Google Play but you can track it on Apple so Apple splits Instagram traffic out separately from the rest of your Facebook traffic so you can actually see the return on investment for Instagram users and in my games it was not good so I actually while it increases the volume and impressions you can get from Facebook campaigns and the overall quality was decreasing so I on 99% of my campaigns I don't target Instagram and my my facebook rep yells at me all the time about in says the traffic's great but I just haven't seen it on in the facebook interface you can't split it

out on Google Play but I'm kind of assuming that the quality is similar on Android and iOS yeah no problem great talk thank you very much reset per campaign sure the question was I mentioned the honeymoon period on Facebook ads is a reset per campaign per account per is there anything that resets it basically right so it's there are two things that trigger it it's either one to two months with moderate spent twenty to thirty thousand dollars in spend per month you get about one to two months there if you front-load all that which i've done on a recent campaign that a honeymoon period can be three weeks so it can be really fast so

it's really driven by level of spend as much as time I think that you can reset it with different ad accounts so you might be able to game that system a little bit on the Facebook side be careful with that too because I'm certain it breaks Facebook's Terms of Service cool thanks for a great talk for our game the the average revenue per I Oh s user is like roughly double Android have you have you seen similar things and and what do you do about that yeah so the question was are poos on iOS or 2x what they are on Google Play and so that's usually related to geo mix particularly on Google Play you're seeing a lot of russian and brazilian traffic organically and you can't control that right so that traffic comes in whether you want it or not and it typically doesn't have super-high ARPU relative to what you're seeing the US and Western

European countries if you break it out by Western gos it's actually much closer so when I look at US and Western Europe and then I look at US and Western Europe on iOS it's significantly higher and it's still higher on iOS than it is on Google Play but the organics that I can generate with my marketing spend kind of make up for the fact that's a little bit lower quality hopefully that answers your question awesome yes thank you very much great um I think our time is done is that right I can't see you but I assume you're saying stop talking okay [Applause]