Games industry influencer campaigns: Facts and figures from the trenches

[Music] hey everyone I have a lot of slides so why don't we get started first and foremost I'll tell you a little bit about neva we give you contact for what we do secondly I'll give you some insights at least from our corner of the industry and last but not least I'll rifle through a bunch of facts and figures and hopefully this will give you a bit of information in context as you go off and do your own influencer campaigns but before I begin just so I understand who's in the room who here has ever worked with an influencer okay great and how many people have actually subscribed to a popular gaming influencer okay not bad all right okay so first about new volley we're an influencer marketing agency we're based in Berlin Germany we have satellite offices in Shanghai and Atlanta and what makes us a bit different from other

agencies is we apply a bit of creative and strategy to everything we do with influencers worldwide so we have a multilingual staff we have relationships with influencers their talent agencies mtns in various territories mostly throughout Western Europe and North America these are some of our clients that we've worked with we've done over a hundred brand campaigns a lot of these companies are both mobile and PC console space and on to some insights or observations so first and foremost influencer marketing for mobile is growing what is what is dominant still in the influencer space is a lot of videos about Triple A games and that's traditionally been the case but this year has been a year in which we've seen a lot of changes in the industry and certainly just from our own business we've seen nearly 50% of our spends come from mobile game publishers that we've

seven-digit investments in the space and when we talked to our advertisers and we asked them why why the sudden move into influencers they've cited that there's been increasing price competition saturation in mobile advertising they crave content that truly reflects the immersiveness and excitement of their game and last but not least they sort of recognize that gamers spend vast chunks of vast chunks of their time on social media platforms especially things like YouTube in twitch and so it's of course a very relevant medium for them to be on games are games so sometimes the obvious needs to be stated there's no such thing as really a PC gamer or a mobile gamer generally speaking if you play games you enjoy games and in that way YouTube twitch snapchat Instagram all of these platforms are in fact relevant even if you are mobile games publisher one of the things to note about influencers is that when you look at the top influencers well first of all when we look at all of the channels

that have to do with gaming this is this is data specific to YouTube we found the thirty two point three percent of them have sponsored a mobile game fifty one percent of the top 100 channels have sponsored a mobile game and 55 percent of top 1000 channels have sponsored a mobile game and influencer marketing is evolving so traditionally influencer marketing was all about let's play videos live streams these are still very relevant tools and tactics to use in the influencer marketing playbook but the this place has grown ever more exciting ever more complex and certainly there are a lot of different ways that you can use influencers to promote games things like shout outs and integrations social viral campaigns long-term endorsements performance campaigns event coverage paid media retargeting experiential and many more and the

number of platforms and possibilities are proliferating so YouTube and twitch are still dominant they're still extremely relevant but there are a lot of other ways that you can promote through influencers YouTube gaming Facebook live mixer these are emerging platforms and let's not also forget that Instagram is also a huge huge area for creators especially if you have a game that doesn't necessarily that doesn't necessarily cater to exclusively a hardcore gaming audience but more like lifestyle gamers and then other emerging platforms like IG TV snapchat stream crafts musically which is now branded itself we rebranded itself as tik-tok Pinterest and let's not forget steam steam TV just recently announced that they're going to be in the game as well influencer marketing is coming into its own so you know when we started neva lis back three years ago we dealt with a host of different people within client

companies so oftentimes a PR manager would be responsible for influencer marketing sometimes a community manager sometimes a you a manager that's still very much the case but what we've seen more and more is that there's now a discrete disciplined and influencer marketing manager within a lot of organized and certainly with influencer marketing it works best when it integrates well with other things that you're doing marketing wise so if you're running television you're running UA campaigns taking an integrated approach seeing how influencers play into your 360 marketing activities is of course the best way to get results so practices that work so as you go off and you know consider working with influencers they're just a few takeaways I want to leave with you number one is when you reach out to influencers or when you brief influencers consider the why as well as the what so oftentimes game publishers are very eager to tell influencers about what their game is or what the messaging points are I would implore you to

consider why your game is worthwhile why you made your game what makes your company special and beyond the audience a lot of times marketers become very fixated on audiences our core demographic is 18 to 25 year old nails this is all relevant all relevant information that you would use in plenty of campaigns but consider what type of content would make sense for your game my what cup what type of content would drive inspire or convince somebody to play your game because that's very much what what influencer marketing is all about it's about content experiences sponsored and unn sponsored content I would say both so a lot of times game publishers are of course very eager to get their game in the hands of a lot of of influencers so in the same way that you would allow members of the press to check out your game you would do the same with influencers that's very essential but at the end of the day when you do that you're not sure exactly what

the what the influencer community may say about your game and so I would I would say that sponsored content in the same way that advertising is extremely relevant for the promotion of your game is also a vital tool because with sponsored content you get the implicit endorsement of the influencer you get to control the timing and oftentimes of course you can direct the conversation you can't necessarily put words in the influencers mouth but you can very much brief the influencer and of course give them all of the the relevant and juicy bits about your game and last but not least views and engagement and relationships so often times when when companies are looking to work with influencers they're there more that they're more or less interested in view counts awareness of course is super essential it's the tip of the spear without awareness you don't have anything really but what makes influencer marketing particularly powerful is engagement and relationships so consider the engagement KPIs likes

dislikes comment shares and also really seek to be formulating relationships with influencers be they Micro influencers or large scale influencers that may naturally gravitate towards your game so onto facts and figures so as I mentioned before we we run a lot of campaigns we've run a lot of different types of influencer activations and from there we've been able to glean also all kinds of data and when you run influencer campaigns sometimes it's really hard to assess whether I don't know 1% click-through rate on your link is good or whether a 10% engagement rate is good hopefully this will provide you at least a little bit of context that you can benchmark your own influencer campaign performance as well as understand a little bit about what we're seeing in the industry so first and foremost most the data pertains to YouTube the reason of course is that

it's still the biggest platform for gaming influencers and with YouTube we have access to a lot of robust data tools data tools and samples so the average engagement rate of a video as I mentioned before engagement is super-important perhaps more important than views so what is the average engagement rate of a video at least among the campaign's that we've seen six point three percent who thought it was hot who thought it would have been higher who thought it would mean lower I guess everybody but by default thought it wouldn't lower okay all right well the average buta subscriber ratio of a channel now why does this matter oftentimes when you look at a potential partner to work with well first things first on YouTube what matters more is the average view count not so much the subscribers but you want to look at the average view to subscriber ratio because it tells you a little bit about how engaged an audience is with a particular

youtuber so the average reaches at the grabber ratio channel is 31.7% about a third how much of a video a person watches on average so the average length of a video is 18 minutes and the amount of time consumed is about 5 minutes and 49 seconds so roughly about 1/3 now that that roughly translates to about 6 minutes and when you consider that with all other forms of advertising therefore be it like a banner ad which sort of just flies by in a millisecond or a 30-second ad six minutes is an awfully large amount of time that you can get somebody to really consume and understand your game so sponsored versus organic how many views does a sponsored video generate relative to an organic video about 85% so when you sponsor a video a lot of times it the stigma has

been that it carries sort of a Scarlet Letter but actually when it comes down to it they perform almost on par with organic content that an influencer creates the average click-through rate on a link of the video description does anybody want to take a guess really quick just throw out a number one percent all right section two point two percent and when you compare that to the click-through rates on display advertising or on search actually outperforms and this is really quite remarkable because when you think about something like YouTube it's not necessarily a clickable ad format people kind of kick back like people relax they're gonna take in like a good you know fifteen to twenty minutes of content and so for them to click off is actually quite an extraordinary feat the percent of videos that are dedicated to mobile games twenty six point two percent so still the vast majority of games on YouTube I'm sorry videos on

YouTube are about PC and console what's the percentage of sponsored mobile video games shockingly this is only 2.73 percent super low which depending on how you look at it could be an opportunity if you're looking to sponsor videos the ten most popular genres of mobile games now this is an interesting statistic because it doesn't necessarily reflect the game market you see that strategy turn-based strategy adventure these are all good be popular categories and that's really because YouTube's ability matters when you think about what types of content works well on YouTube it's the type of content that an influencer can have fun with can talk about translates well into a visual medium and so for that reason certain types of games don't necessarily translate into great content top played mobile games no no questions they're really clash royale dominates nearly 25 percent followed by

hearthstone Ark survival evolved clash of clans fortnight pub G one might think the fortnight and pub G numbers would be higher they certainly could be overtime percent of sponsor videos in each channel by territory this gives you an idea of the percentage of videos that are sponsored by territory you can see that at the french are quite happy to sponsor have sponsored content whereas some whether some other countries are just a fraction of the overall number of videos and added value so this is an interesting question how many times or what's the likelihood that an influencer will go on to play your game after you've sponsored sponsored their content responsive them to produce content on your behalf and what we've seen is 36% so that's actually a pretty decent metric consider that you know you essentially have a 1 in third chance of getting a free video to cover your game

video performance over time most of the views that you're going to garner will occur in the first three days so the first 30 days are absolute critical to for success you'll have a pretty good picture of how much or how many views you're going to get just by looking at the first three days and when you look at the longtail you see a massive drop-off usually what about 30 days all of your views have been completed or all of the views that you're going to get are likely to be there the number of times an influencer post per week this gives you an idea of how much inventory is essentially available on a youtubers channel because they don't sponsor content all the time if they were to do that they would essentially be labeled sellouts to some degree most influencers post about one to three times a week so that's your window of opportunity in most cases positive sentiment rate what level of engagement would you need to be in the

top 10 percent of videos or essentially live at the bottom 10 percent of videos so if if an infant were to make a video about your game and it were to get a 93 percent positive engagement would that be good actually that would be poor that would put that would put your video in the top or I'm sorry the bottom 10 percentile in terms of positive engagement but in general people love content just the fact that in general all of the numbers are far above 90% goes to show you that in most cases people like content from influencers macro versus micro influencers you may hear this debate come up all the time what's better the better to work with super small influencers that supposedly have more engaged audiences or really large influencers is there a difference I'll give you a few stats the picture is actually quite mixed so in terms of

engagement rate actually the big guys have the have the best engagement so these are your celebrity influencers like PewDiePie vanoss jacksepticeye etc in terms of click-through rate on links however the micro influencers win but by slim margin so you're more likely to get a click through with the small guys and in terms of eCPM micro influencers are 25% more expensive now your results may vary a lot of times when you work with influencers there was a bit of negotiation that takes place but in general micro influencers and our experience have been a bit more expensive and that's it so we have a couple minutes for questions yeah antastic let's um let's take a roving mic out into the audience if there are any questions we've got a time for it for a couple does anyone have anything to ask there that was fascinating David that with all those numbers thank you

it's run down here please thank you for the insight I'm just wondering what are the best mechanisms to actually be able to see what kind of influence or what kind of uplift you you're you know your product has received as a as a result of an influencer campaign I'm sorry could you repeat the last part sure so one of the mechanisms to be able to actually track what sort of impact that campaign has had what would you think of the most effective ones sure I think it depends entirely on your objectives so for a lot of companies that they want installs so naturally you would track installs either direct from a link or organic installs to see what kind of uplift you've had when the influence of campaigns have run a lot of times a lot of times companies want awareness so it could be that they're using influencers in pre-launch phase the game isn't readily available yet in the same way

that they would buy television ads to to increase brand awareness they would also use influencers so I think it depends entirely on what your objectives are maybe one more one more question before we move on to the next part of this afternoon any more questions for David while we're here there you got one in the middle there and then we'll leave it there thank you thank you hi and so you mentioned earlier that basically not every game is so let's say you tubule yes granny specific genre so you should say developers should avoid trying to engage an influencer marketing of course you're not gonna say that because you want everyone to do it no no no no actually quite the contrary in many cases we tell we tell companies hey look it could be really hard it depends on what you want if you want a youtuber to produce a let's play video or a three-hour twitch stream there are limitations your game has to be inherently deep it has to have

a lot to talk about especially if you're going for these types of long-form content but that's not to say that that influencers are not a tool that you can use to promote a game because as I mentioned before there are shoutouts there integrations or other ways to get your message out there and certainly a lot of influencers would be amenable to doing a 30 second childhood if you sponsor their channel and when you do such a thing of course it's more of a direct call to action because they'll they'll include a message along the lines of you know check out this website click on the link in the description etc etc and so there are mechanisms to promote through influencers but not all games are are conducive to a let's play or a livestream format you