Gold standards for acquisition and retention

[Music] thanks for all very much for being here for this panel my name is Craig Chappell and the senior editor of Pocket Gamer dog-piss and also our new website influencer update dope is all about b2b solid content creators and influence marketers that's the panel of gold standards of acquisition and retention we've got an illustrious speakers here if you could introduce yourselves please hello everyone my name is Kiki Cobb reliever and I'm leading the business development team for Charles for Amir agent for those who are not familiar with star bulls as Johan said before we are one of the biggest mobile gaming ad networks and we help mobile gaming developers with their user acquisition and on monetization activities hi my name is Nick I'm the co-founder and CEO of mega cool what we

do is that we provide the tool that helps games utilize the user to user marketing so as opposed to ads that's another way to acquire more users hi guys Marcelo ball is here oh I'm the founder CEO of laboring our solution basically helps game developers to aggregate and collect and aggregate all the data coming from ad networks mediations and user acquisition so basically have a full visibility of your metrics hi my name is Kathleen Evers I'm CEO and founder of forevers games based in France and focusing on PC distribution of a lot of any titles and also doing evangelism for a us-based company called gender technologies who's actually developing an interactive streaming tool for developers so yep

that's it thanks very much so the first question has been asked is quite a broad question is user acquisition for mobile developers broken at the moment in terms of and you can correct me if you think I'm wrong that it's been getting more expensive for a long time and so for developers that aren't massive publishers is it just kind of if you want to go through Facebook and Google for example or other ad networks too difficult for them well broken ER is a big statement and even if a journalist yeah and even if I like drama lord I wouldn't say that so yeah it's true that it has become way more expensive and more challenging and yeah we have seen that many developers complaining about high rates not only on our network but general across all the networks and Facebook and Google however I think that currency situation

basically adds that all the developers to began advertisers to be more creative to think out of the box to be more data-driven because if you just throw money for user acquisition and then you don't expect anything from return or you don't know what you are expecting then of course this is not sustainable anymore can I add a comment sir yeah broken is a big statement I think that we live in a very like noisy world they're like some of the previous presentation has mentioned there's like 800 thousand apps so it is necessary to acquire users since you get them somehow just a few years or not few years ago but like five years ago it was maybe possible to launch nap and then get a few installs and get it on get it going from that I think it's just evolution of the market as general it's becoming more

expensive but you need to to measure and know exactly what you want from your CPI or if you know exactly what you want even it's expensive but you make money with that that's you know it's just a matter of tracking and measure and then have-have go to what you want to distract from that specific user acquisition yeah Greg it's certainly bend but not broken so yes I think that you know we have to come up with more creative ideas to get to enlarge those user bases in any case and that's where the new technologies came up with smart ideas like like John with technologies for instance who makes their act actually the streamer and the viewer of that stream active in real-time during

the stream sessions so that's one of the technologies as nowadays are getting really important to to discover and to get time to and to give the developers the time to implement to do the shout out to them to make them aware that those new technologies are existing and really good tools for them because those smart people are developing smart tools for the developers so when it comes to the avenues I was referring to do you see things changing they're things getting cheaper for whatever reason or it is you've got to be creative well from a network perspective yeah like I can talk about what is happening in service in there and yes we see many changes in terms of how advertisers now approach their you a strategy so I would say they know they understand that finding the good quality users it's way

more difficult now because the market is saturated there is a lot of competition there are already well-established companies and games like King and supercell and play rigs so it's very hard to get those users so they come up with new ideas so for example one thing is the experiment a lot and they are willing to try new things they are willing to test make different tests in terms of in terms of creatives trying new ad formats or make more individualized ads or run different tests in you a campaigns and the trend that we see more of the nowadays is like advertisers now are very well aware of how publishers are monitoring their waterful so basically they come to us and say okay I want these specific source because I know it works little well for my game how can I get that premium traffic how can I get a climb on the waterfall what do I need to

do so there's a more interactive communication between the UAE monitors and the partners it's char boosts or unity or Facebook or whatever and yeah they are more open-minded to try new things what are some of the other creative solutions that developers can use perhaps outside but you might consider the normal channels to acquire lots of new users and they would make a call you're doing some pretty interesting things yeah our background is from a game company called dirty bits which had a game I called fun run which was a multiplayer racing game and we didn't spend anything on user acquisition everything was just on organically so Mary Cole is trying to create technology around this user to use the recommendation of after games and help users invite their friends and make it

more engaging so it's about like recording part of the game and then you can showcase that to your friends so there are a lot of other creative ways and from the first company that I started with at the game phone run to just get it started we actually did some other creative things to acquire users which was it was during college we set up this booth in the middle of the college and then we hand out candy to every person that came by and said you can get one if you download the game and by just doing stuff like that we got around a thousand users so it was a good way to just get started and then you can like figure out how you can continue the acquisition all right sorry to someone else wanna sorry I know so you're doing interesting stuff with titles you're mentioning before so if you could say something about yes basically in the user acquisition we have seen some clients

utilizing they play playable words I think it's it's a very interesting a way to show your game and and we see higher conversion on that although you need to be careful because it doesn't really work and and out of the tier 1 countries it's very heavy so be careful you need to really understand where your audience or your users are and try to understand it and see if it makes sense for you but it's it's a good option for user acquisition yeah it's not only about user acquisition it's also about retaining them right that's by the way retention is very important I think it's one of the most important details is not

only to get them but also to keep them I mean what do you do as a developer to keep your audience to keep your games gamers playing actually your game what do you do do you get updates to get new characters new lay overs or whatever I don't know what there's so many things that you can do to keep a game alive even know I don't know three months six months a year after game is released and that is very important as well because when you once you have your user bases established you can always enlarge it through a new update through whatever you can imagine but you have to be creative again and that's where actually sometimes developers go and create their game they're very happy with it and then they're so creative that they are already thinking about their next project but what do you do to keep your first project alive because that's where you started and that's I mean I'm talking I work with a lot of Indies so obviously it's not like if

it's war if it were a great company like yeah you're Blizzard or whatever Square Enix so those guys need to get the retention of the first projects really really in a good shape because otherwise it will it will go down the drain yeah I want to add something here in terms of LTV right this basically they it's very important as I was mentioned here LTV is essential for you so the retention the longer you keep your users making money for you it's the better and it's going to be much simpler to keep them using your game and instead of spending more money to get new users so if you're not able to retain them why do you spend money to get new ones you know yeah good quick addition as well and a question that game developers can ask -

it's not only what you can do to keep the users but also why our users come back to your game so figure out which what the reasons are for them to return and then you can try to use that and improve that experience what are some of the best ways that you find to keep players coming back is it part of it that kind of feeds into acquisition the social and shareability features gives you talking about influences and me talking about sharing gifts is it the way that players can share and then also bring in new players is it putting the onus a bit on the player yeah a good way to get users back is by making your friends asking you to come back to the game so so the more engaging you can make that conversation the better so like showing some gifts of bragging or some you can brag about some great moves you did or an obstacle that you can't

figure out then that's good way to communicate yeah I mean to keep you have to keep your community alive and if you don't keep if you don't have a moderator or something really community management that's a full-time job and it's not mine but it's a real job and full-time it's really a lot of work to keep that community alive through social media but also by creating DLCs for instance you can there's so many ways to retain those people but I strongly believe that community management is it's a very very very influent part on the retention and user acquisition as well as of course is that not just keeping players happy but keeping them talking to each other about things and making sure that just the voices are heard is that what you and you said community management I guess I'm trying to just elaborate a bit more on that and I guess that's about making

sure just their voices are heard making sure that they're actually working with each other on but yes so divorce is to be heard it's very important too because whenever they give you it's important for instance in a Kickstarter project or something whenever they come back and say okay I would love to see this character a bit more like that you have to listen to the community as well and implement those objections or comments or whatever remarks that they may made you have to take care of that too that they are really respected because otherwise you know the community will lose his his interest in the game and so ok you look at dairy they don't listen to me in any case so what's why should I bother staying in his community and that is that's going from words that's worth on mouth things so everything goes like like a little yeah like a little waterfall you also need to understand when your customers are leaving your

game right you need to detect is the tree the seven-day 30 and then with that only measuring and and analyzing your data you are going to understand what's going on right you can think that part of my game is not working in this moment when they achieve this exact position in the game right so that a little change in that specific part of the game will make a lot of difference to keep them using your game later so it's a matter of measuring and going into the data analysis all the time so that will give you a lot of insights about what you do next just to add any a nice example going back to what we said about community and about listening to users feedback I think a very good example of that is fluffy fairy with I

don't - I for me it's one of them let's say most user oriented companies they really listen on user feedback so the user can say I want this feature or I want this and that and they do it and that's why it's one of the games with really high retention rate but we've also very strong community presence we are on Instagram you can share life stories you can share things on Facebook so basically this is not only high retention but it's free users because it's a positive loop that already happy existing users bring you more users if you don't know about fairies games I think they've had like 50 million downloads in just a few years definitely checking that out I was thinking about so you got the user acquisition process and then you actually get you get someone to play your game but does it have to be some sort of trying to think of the word

they've got to connect properly so you can't basically on Twitter I see some very suspicious ads of these Freedy open-world games that are then advertising a Forex strategy title so has there got to be some similarity between the ads and what the players gonna see straightaway in the game yeah of course I think it's like very straight forward if you saw an hour and it's it might be like very flashy and very attractive and then the user downloads the game but then the gameplay doesn't really it's not correlated with what he has seen in there in the ad then of course he will leave them the game right and yeah it's um it will lead to a very low retention rate but I think this is something that we see it happening because of the saturation of the market if you think of some games that they are already five six years old it's kind of they run out

of ideas they don't know how to reach out more user so they know it's not gonna work well but they just do it and they hope that they will find the whales or more users other way but yeah it's also something that we highly don't recommend our advertisers to do its ads should be relevant yeah I think it's almost the same as movie trailers if you like show everything and then they spoil the movie then they go to the movie and see it then it's not that exciting so that will be the same case for a game and also seeing that showing of actual gameplay in these ads are leads to better commerce rate and better retention yeah it's it's hard to to to keep a game or to sustain a game with trying to to mistake or to to get users using a fake ad right with reviews in

the app stores nowadays people just tell the truth so will you see a beautiful way then you download it's a bad game your the number of reviews are going down very fast so you get some clicks you get some stalls but at the same time your number of reviews gonna go down faster so yeah this doesn't make any sense yeah yeah as you said Nick Nick it was know when a trailer of a PC game does not reflect really the yes I happened to me lots of times and the trailer was so impressive they have been working on the trailer for like months and then then you get the play and then I said what this is nothing to do with it I mean so yeah there has been there needs to be a real correlation between the actual gameplay and a trailer same thing as for ads on mobile reviews are I think the first thing that

I look into personally is the number of reviews and I read some good ones and bad ones but globally if the reviews are good then I might go and install the game might be on Steam or my be on on google play whatever platform you can you can prefer to play on but it's globally true on all platforms I think what do you think are the most effective ad types that developers can be using a lot a lot to me might apply balls at the moment but is that the most effective way right now well if it really did I don't like to start like that but in terms of our format it really depends on the game standards so we have been working a lot the last more than a year in our network with playable ads and the truth is that we have seen great results and specific game genres and there's to be more specific playable ads work really really well for puzzle games

mastery idol games and casino slots so more casual games exactly more casual games that the playable ad can really depict the gameplay so the user can really understand okay how this is gonna look like the user has the first interaction with them with a game like he does not a very small test so he knows what we expect and then conversion is very high retention is very high however if you think about more mid core and hardcore games it's very hard in just a playable ad - so the gameplay so in that sense video ads work the best across all game genres and it's true it's true that it's very more it's very different for an FPS game or or an RPG compared to a casual game to get together a real quick impression of what you can expect from the game and totally that's that's true and it's very dad that perhaps is one of the reasons as well why it's so difficult to have those

core mid core games on mobile as well yeah sorry to go back to data again but yes in my job so no it's not again it it depends on the genre depends on the type we have up to 15 dimensions in our analysis so it's depends on the OS or the region you are so we have customers that they monetize a lot with banners yet right so it's it's if your game is a game that's running a simple thing you don't need to spend a lot maybe just a small binary you are able to get something again it's you test experiment measure and optimize that's basically it right so I'm gonna up to some questions

if anyone has anything they'd like to ask either about acquisition or retention not even a question from Mike so yeah it was mentioned about like some nifty organic acquisition tricks for example like sharing important moments in the game amongst friends and communities like any other tips and that regard that relatively easy to implement but I've got quite big impacts yeah so I think what's important to acquire users is that you use a lot of different channels that can be ads but also try to I mean every game has some kind of or else yeah even if it's only one out of a million user that recommends its to their friends or his friends then it's

still some kind of or else yeah so you want to make sure that it's easy for players to share moments from the game or to just invite them so they can play together so I think the the main tip is just to make it available like a lot of different places within the game too to invite friends because you don't know when they want to invite friends it might be after a gameplay or it might be from the main menu so you just had to make sure that you yeah make it easy for users to invite friends we have another question over here hold on awesome thank you Mike this is one ick again do you see what kind of difference in retention another you know robust measures do you see what difference in quality basically do you see between organic installs and you a based install so that's a really good question we actually see that the

retention on the 14th day is about 60% higher compared to normal organic users when the user has been invited by a friend and the revenue is about 2 times higher as well so we think that's because when you invite a friend you know that that friend is likely to play the game you don't want to spam your friends with games you don't like so it's a good way it's like filter out and and and find the right users [Music]