Games marketing for the sophisticated buyer

[Music] uh great thank you for coming uh so today we're going to talk about games marketing for the sophisticated buyer um you guys are all part of the monetized retain and acquir track and what we're here to do is hopefully expose um some some key things to pay attention to when you're looking to uh understand what these users are doing inside of your app um so next slide please oh sorry oh go back all right here we go so it's probably not a surprise that people love mobile gaming uh this is uh e- marketer staff from last year uh Shows mobile phone gaming penetration shows by 2019 77% of

the people will say yes I do play mobile games on my smartphone now uh obviously we're all part of the gaming community and it's not just about making a an amazing game if you're not able to actually understand what these users are doing within this game and what it's going to take to actually you know move them through the funnel and make them a loyal user so what we at appar we sit on a lot of data okay so we we have this um a gaming performance index coming out on July 7th uh and this is a preview slide from that gaming performance index what we saw and what we did was we measured $300 million worth of inapp transactions from all the gaming apps that have the apps SDK enabled in it uh and that included over a th000 apps with over with inapp activity uh inapp purchase activity excuse me across 100 million

plus unique users and we looked at 30 million purchase events and actually what we found was quite surprising we saw that overall the average inapp purchase for all users was 61 cents per user but in the gaming category it was actually only 38 cents uh so that's a very you know surprising stat now uh if you look at the average purchase across uh you know 365 days on the last bar chart you'll see that for you know overall the average is about $868 but for gaming again it was only $617 so what does this tell us it tells us that uh The Gaming Community specifically uh needs to do a little bit better to actually monetize and understand what their users are doing so they actually get them to purchase more U but it's a crowded ecosystem right uh accountability comparability and Trust what does that mean um as

you're look to all of your media sources all your partners that you're working with whether it be Facebook or Twitter or Google um you're going to need a thirdparty unbiased kind of monit monitoring system that essentially is helping you understand what you're getting and making sure that you're getting what you're paying for um you know with absar we have over 19900 ad networks that were're integrated with uh including Google Facebook and Twitter we're official partners of them uh we we also are the only beta partner for Pinterest so uh although initially Pinterest was only focusing on the retail and e-commerce vertical um they basically have made the position that they're also going to open it up to uh gaming companies right so there's actually great opportunities there to discover new users um Snapchat is another uh obviously they they've been ging a lot of momentum and they actually launched their ads API not too long ago uh we're part of that early uh their

early marketing partners and what we're seeing with Snapchat's actually pretty interesting uh with Snapchat you have to kind of give them your all what I mean by that is that it's going to take about $100,000 to actually get into Snapchat to actually run campaigns with them um and there's going to be no targeting which is pretty surprising so what they're saying is trust us we know our users and let us actually uh you know do the optimization for you um now obviously again that takes a lot of trust but you can do that if you're working with a reliable attribution partner like apps so with us since we're integrated with them directly we're able to see what the activities are we have the user level data that's going to make it easy for you to understand uh what these guys are worth from an average revenue per user standpoint also from a a loyalty uh loyalty uh percentage uh for each user that's actually being acquired through Snapchat in the perfect world your app icon would be this this big on a user's

phone um it's not a perfect world and you have to work really really hard to actually get that mind chare um now you know sophisticated buyers they demand demand complete transparency for Media Partners um you know we want you guys to be able to track the ROI and LTV for each user across every media Source uh especially the big three right Facebook Twitter and Google uh with Facebook you know that also includes in stagram so uh within you know the apps integration uh with Facebook uh besides just getting the attribution data you're also able to get click cost and impression data uh which is very key uh if you're able to get obviously the cost data you're able to back out into a CPI or an average revenue per user you're also able to post back events back to Facebook uh for some look like uh audience targeting and matching uh with Twitter we're their official partner as well is with Google uh Google we recently became a cost

partner with them so now we're able to pull in the cost data from Google uh into your apps dashboard to help give you that granular Insight so you're doing less of jumping from dashboard to dashboard you're more so actually using this data to create actionable insights now a sophisticated buyer is going to act on Rich Ina events in real time what's the rich inapp event uh well what's an inapp event an inapp event is anything that URS within your app where there like a purchase for example a richen app event would actually give you more context to that purchase uh maybe uh the currency was uh that the user paid in uh the item that it was um so all these uh inapp events are essentially happening in your app in real time but we always s you suggest that you guys act on setting up your rich in app events um you know setting up your Rich app setting up rich and app events at the beginning is going to pay off down the line you're going to measure detailed user Acquisitions and

here's an example of of exactly how it's going to work um you know we receive the data it's sent back to the posted back to the partners and then that's going to help enable Advanced audience targeting campaigns like lookalike and retargeting uh retargeting obviously is crucial especially after users have gone dormant uh what you're going to want to do is uh look at that user level data run these retargeting campaigns and hopefully re-engage them to come back into the app um so you're going to be looking at things things like your retention report uh retention report is something retention and cohort analysis something that comes out of the box with absar SDK um makes it really easy for you to understand the quality of these users um you know with retention we're going to give you your organic Baseline and then we're going to give you the retention from your other Media Partners to see you know kind of have a comparable again sophisticated buyers are going to make informed media buying decisions

you know this is a very interesting uh slide it's going to show you the ad Network power rankings for gaming uh specifically for iOS apps uh and you kind of see maybe there's no surprise at number one um but if you look at the other partners and kind of see where Google Falls um it gives you an idea of essentially which ad networks are driving High retention and also high velocity for installs um there obviously are some incentivized networks there like Tapjoy and the video incentivized Network like supersonic uh but ultimately you know what we're trying to do with our gaming performance index is give you guys almost a cheat sheet uh and almost a heads up so that you guys can essentially know where to look for your users initially uh by using these rankings and here are the rankings for Android again uh some surprises uh Google moves from five on iOS to number two for um Android chap tap moves up to

the top but ultimately you know Facebook is still uh number one they drive about 40% of all the installs across the world um so you know there obviously someone that you're going to want to start with initially um but there's a lot of quality to be found across these other partners so we have our upcoming data reports uh on July 7th we have the state of inapp spending report coming out and then on July 13th we have our Global performance index um what we really want to highlight here is you know one pay attention to retention two focus on uh setting up your Rich inapp events uh and three you know focus on which ad Network's actually driving that quality so you can actually learn you know you can actually re-engage those similar users with look like targeting I did not put this there but yes let's make attribution great again

uh cool so now we're going to open up for some questions uh we got about 10 minutes or 5 minutes excuse me um does anyone have any questions related to attribution or any of the information they saw up on the slides yeah so we've seen digital driving that what out of digital is helping to drive acquition television so with absar we have a TV attribution product what it does it allows us to ingest your actual TV cable local broadcast plan into the platform and what we'll what you'll do is you'll actually set uh their uh the attribution window uh we recomend recommend about 30 minutes after it's actually uh after the commercial or the spot has ran and then we're going to basically turn all those users who've actually acquired or installed within that particular region within that particular dma we're going to actually convert them to organic and then you're going to have have what we call inside of apps your aggregated

performance report so on that report you're going to have an Apples to Apples comparison because you'll see you know Facebook you know Google Twitter email and then you'll see TV and you'll have a comparable and you'll be able to see all right you know I have a higher loyalty rate from Facebook versus TV but TV users are actually you know triggering a tutorial first or they're triggering more registrations um so that's one source that's not mobile not digital it's it's completely different sour so TV I know you guys have seen the Arnold Source anger commercials um Kate Upton um and it's not that expensive I think that's one thing that people think about I actually used to be a traditional media buyer in New York City many many years ago and and you can get really really great cheap spots you know for a couple hundred bucks a day uh and it will move the needle when it comes to actual UA for your app or your game the same video ad you create from Mobile TV as you could I mean you can use I mean on TV they have 15s and 30s and they

have 60s I would probably focus more on the 15s and 30s we also have an integration with Shazam I know you guys have heard of Shazam originally is like you hold up your phone to uh you know a source of audio and it would detect that audio and they would play they actually have a product that is also integrated with appar that basically allows you to measure do the same thing with your phone hold up a TV spot let's say it's your gaming spot and then the audio from that spot will then trigger an app install um simply by just holding up your device to the uh to your TV set um so again you know there are different there's a lot of different channels um and there's a lot of really cool things that people are trying to do to actually like I said before find new sources of traffic um yes you know Facebook's kind of like the Behemoth but there are pockets of quality uh all around you you just got to know where to look and you got to work with the right people that're going to kind of make these suggestions for you any other questions

yes how do you guys make money how do we make money uh well we don't make a lot of money so maybe you'll want to that's a good thing uh we uh charge Pennies on the install for each non-organic install that we track what do I mean by that okay so there's two types of in of of installs in appsl world there's organic and non-organic organic simply means we don't know the source of it so therefore we're not going to charge you because we don't don't know where it came from that's going to fall into your organic bucket it also means any installs that fall outside of an attribution window um I'm going to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole but just bear with me uh what's an attribution window that's the amount of time that you're giving a user to essentially launch your app um after they've been acquired from a particular media Source on average it's seven days so basically what we're saying is hey for example Tapjoy we're giving all the users from Tapjoy up to seven days to launch their app uh to launch your app uh otherwise if they don't do it within

the 7-Day window it's going to fall into the organic bucket and at Tapjoy is not going to get any credit for it um so what we do for we charge on non-organic so all the users who have come from Tapjoy for example who launch within that 7-Day window will charge anywhere from you know 0.005 cents to three cents depending on where you are in terms of your tier um and that's essentially how we make money we do not charge for clicks to track your clicks your uh Impressions access to our apis access to retention cohort analysis uh to have a customer success person be on your team all that stuff is basically baked into that uh very small cost do you have Anri window for download separate from or so an app a long time exactly what's what's your normal pattern of behavior you download an app you install it and you open it right away so giving someone seven days to open your app is actually quite a long time um and and the question was do we are TR you know do we

differentiate between downloads and and and app opens we only want we only want to charge you when someone opens your app that to us means that they essentially installed if someone simply downloads the app and never launches we would actually not count that as an install at all we only count the install when actually is opened any other questions oh yeah just just a follow up one from that one do you have a minimum um media buy so we are not an ad network uh what we do is we help you measure your ad basically we help we help your ad Network Partners stay true to what they're telling you um how do we do that well there's obviously you're going to integrate the apps s once you integrate the apps SDK um that's going to allow us to basically see all the traffic that comes into your app and then we're going to obviously tell you where it's coming from um so you know we don't you know obviously we don't have a minimum spend you can

actually start with uh you know just sign up with a credit card similar to Google AdWords and you know we can start tracking all of your tra you know all of your campaigns um we also have a product called um on link which is a deep linking product uh deep linking is obviously um pretty important um it gives a lot of context to a click right so if you are for example let's say you're a small gaming studio and you have a list of a thousand emails and say hey I know these thousand emails I know they actually registered for my app and I know for I know for a fact that they have the app um but I have this new level that I want to tell them about so you send this email blast the email blast has great creative it's all about this new level you're really excited about it and what we're going to do there is that we're going to have a link that you will actually build inside of absar that's going to help you track um the performance of that email and what what what that link is going to do also is going to deep link that user into that into that particular new level or into that new feature or whatever it is uh that that email was all about in the first place which actually uh got them excited and caus them to click um so you

know there's a lot of different uh sources of traffic a lot of them aren't always going to be an integrated partner like you know an ad Network sometimes this could be your own endemic you know user base or it's going to be something that is non-traditional like a blog post or uh a social media post on Twitter um apps has the ability to track all that traffic and also let you know beyond the install what actually is occurring uh you know which inapp events are triggering uh what their loyalty rate and you know all these other amazing uh insights are going to help essentially grow your game and and grow your user base yes in the back uh excuse me about the one link uh can the content of the link be customizable yes so you can add there's an unlimited number of parameters that you can add to that link um for example uh you know some of our uh gaming clients have a unique customer ID that

they like to append to the end of that link so it's easier for them to deterministically understand what this us who this user is um but yes you can add there's specific I don't want again I don't want to go too deep but there's a specific just very simple parameters you can add to the end of that link that can make it customizable okay I'm just wondering about the uh name like um because sometimes or most of the time the link content has nothing to do with the game name or other applications so I'm wondering if we can put our name on the link directly you can so you're basically uh asking if you can create a vanity URL deep link uh the answer is yes uh for example um HBO obviously is not a gaming client but HBO they have a certain level of trust that their brand has created so they don't want it to say you know on link.com whatever whatever whatever they want to say hbo.com back/ Game of Thrones episode 2 season 5 episode 2 uh

the answer is yes there's a uh specific set of instruction are you an appar customer by any chance yeah perfect I was like this is a very specific question okay um yeah I would be happy to talk to you about it uh further after um so yes uh in my previous role absar yes I'm head of gaming now in North America but I also headed up the customer success team so I've seen a lot of the issues that you guys face uh especially around fraud um you know fraud is a very hot topic right now um we don't try to be everything to everyone we just focus on attribution and analytics we work with amazing Partners like forensic uh and data visor who do fraud you know that's what they focus on is fraud uh and that's what they're really uh good at you know companies like lean Plum and appboy they're part of the appsfire Eco system so all of our systems talk to each other in a seamless way so it makes it really easy for you to just work with who you want to work with and you know abar headquarters are in telaviv um it is an Israeli company but you know when it comes to what we do we like to think of us ourselves more like Switzerland just kind of want to be like this happy

middle and let you work with who you want to work with uh any other questions yes so over your years of doing this what are game studios still doing stupidly over and over and over not using an attribution provider go going and I'm not saying us I'm just saying in general uh there's there's five of us in the world that do what we do because there's only five of us that are in Facebook mobile measurement program which allows us to get user level data from Facebook um so yeah you know that's the first step is one do your you know do your homework um there's a lot of unbiased uh groups that you can actually join to ask these very particular questions one of them is mobile Dev memo Eric su's group uh he's to run UA for roio uh he's a good friend of mine and you know he has this a a slack Channel that's all for people like us who have these questions and don't want to be don't want a sales answer don't want a sales guide to jump in there and kind of take over the thread

where you can actually get meaningful responses and replies from people who are just like you guys um again but that that's probably the number one mistake is trying to go at it alone and then you're spending all this money and then what ends up happening is your CEO or your CMO is like hey we we're throwing cash at this but we haven't moved in the app store or our ranking has stayed the same um and you don't have any question you know you don't have any answers for because you don't have that user level data um so again you know yes we are you know this is very small Barnacle on this very big whale um but at the end of the day you know you definitely need an attribution provider to be successful especially nowadays as things are becoming more sophisticated and the climate just becoming more competitive [Music]