King and App Annie – The importance of data for successful mobile marketing and strategy

[Music] hello everyone is the mic on everything's good cool so thank you for joining today's session so basically just a start with a quick introductions my name is tattoo I work for as an account manager in a penny and today we're joined by Barry's from King from performance marketing team so yeah let's kind of start with the introductions I guess so as a starting point could you just give us a bit of introduction how did you get into the mobile marketing space and mobile gaming to begin with yeah sure well my adventure started 10 years ago I started working Proctor and Gamble I worked there for four years in brand marketing it took me four years to

understand that what I'm doing there was something that I don't like to do so we were giving all the decisions based on just gut feeling and focus groups for those of you who don't know about focus group if you just gather six people in one room and assume that they tell you the truth and they tell you the representation of two big community that you're targeting it more apt case so and then all our decisions like we were taking it we were giving some marketing decisions there are two television commercials however at the end we were not getting any results so you're doing something but you don't know what you're doing and nobody is telling you whether it helped or we didn't help and at the end of four years I said that it's not something I enjoyed it could be good for somebody else but not for me so that's when I decided to quit and I started my own company in that's where I realized the performance marketing is the perfect thing it's like a heaven for me and you have the data tons of data you give your decisions based on data and the same day you can get the results and then giving it more thought I said the mobile gaming with all the engage users and the

amazing environment for that enables more competition inside and much more data points is the best place that where I can do perform striking it's still the case by like so that's how I started becomes marketing and mobile gaming great great and about two years ago he had a you know big transition peak games into king did that prove to be challenging or was like a natural well three years ago I think what we achieved in peak games was something amazing and it was great we built a lot of structures and kind of written the way how to the performance migraine but eventually at the end it was it was a structure that we built and it started to become more stable and I liked challenge and I want to get just bigger challenge and what does could be a bigger challenge than kangaroo saga which is now a six years old game is still having the highest revenue United States and still played by Messi number of people and whole portfolio around its managing this was the biggest challenge I wanted to take and work together with

the great teams of remarketing and cross-promotion and TV and brand marketing at the same time so like a pet challenge and which is turned out to be great and it's still being great stuff that's great great and just to touch on the industry you're obviously very passionate about an industry and your career has led you to work at peak of King and so how much has changed from the from the early days and you know how different it is today sure so a lot has changed something changed and come back so back three years ago what we were doing was optimising based on retention and we thought that it was something sophisticated back then then dog has been introduced but it wasn't enough then the arrived forecast has become much more sophisticated we started to use more events and everything now the machine learning goals entered in Sloan and the all the forecasts and building structures and optimizations are done at a much more granular level and then the

networks like Facebook and Google used to be one of the biggest ones then ad networks started to take much more waiting our install percentage there was a time where fish introduced event optimizations which to not be much massive impact on our business Google introduced racy went down significantly though in terms of spent then they make Turk it turned up again creatives were just something that everybody was focusing on doing the best most that's great to ever let me introduce the simple gameplay which the creative guy didn't like at the beginning but then it's a performance like we need to find the crater with the best performers so it changed the market significantly and there was a time where play bus was messy then they went down now it's becoming a trend again so it keeps changing like I think it's changing every kind of six months go back to what we believe and just test it again whether it's the right thing to do or not and whoever is better in adapting to new market understand invest across

platforms marketing structures will stay in the market and I think the others book people yeah it's definitely very dynamic industry so obviously you know King has been a paying customer for a while now but just to touch on like what role does data play in your decision-making and you know how important it is for you well I think it's I can't come to say that it's everything like we don't give any decision based on beta if you want to give a decision and we don't have the relevant data for it you just throw a hypothesis do an a/b test and just get today then we give the decision based on it so seriously we do not give any decision without any data at all and how challenging do you think it would be to operate without they turn well it's for me it'll be going back to brand marketing year so I wouldn't like it so of course it'll be tough we won't have any initial learning from the market we'll have to test each and every thing we at least have internal data but not marketing size it to be just creating

and finding out like conquering the world from scratch and if you don't have internal data it would just mean that you're giving this is based on our gut feeling very sophisticated marketing procedures and everything will not be used so everything will be in the same level and yeah I would have liked that and would you would you be able to give us like maybe one example of how King is leveraging data in the decision making sure so I'll give an example a month to perform smacking site what we do day to day is of course we launch a lot of campaigns right but what we tend to do is just maintain them by optimizing them on a regular basis so most of the companies out there which are getting the revenue from in-app purchase focused on our Y optimizations based so how we use data is first-rate all right so in order to create all right every company has their own method all ways of calculating the forecast all right we have our own methodology so we use all the data we can from the first

action that the user takes in the game until like they completely like the video to understand how they behave and to just try to calculate like time when they as early as possible this is how we decide our meeting based on and then the count portfolio management they're all based on data of course in order in terms of countries we track to market insights like whether there's a new training company a new carrier decrease or increase in price and everything then go to our portfolio strategy we try to make sure that every game has its own market and some games could be better in some countries some it could be worse in other countries and then creative that needs a lot of data-driven decisions as well all our creative is not based on data like we don't we almost never focus on to in France creatives yeah of course we have a branding structure because candy Christ I don't know why a lot of people so we have to stick to some

structures but apart from that all our future creative productions are based on what we have tested in the past what work weather what is not working better also our computers what they're seeing better results in terms of what kind of creation etc we also try to consider the industry as well start from FMCG telecommunication try to get an understanding of all kind of user habits and what they tend to like more recently so again in craters as well everything is based on purely date and very data-driven yeah Kosar just a touch on the on the connect spend on the data side we recently had a really nice blogpost with King from done with the ich I from the experimental team and how he kind of works in how this team is working to drive the creativity within reading King and how do you guys actually how does the performance marketing work with the experimental team within the other thing sure so let me give brief interact Asian

team so this thing is look at me to product him they're trying to find out new areas where we can focus for the future product developers right so there is as you'll know a new trend of mixed genres so it's not only puzzle anymore it's just a combination of puzzle and resource management or meet current puzzle and a lot of other mix so this team us trying to find out new experiments and what kind of new genres our users more interested into and they build a model using a penis cross app usage data to understand if a person is using puzzle what else what kind of other games are dating and how we leverage that in performance marketing is basically I can summarize it in two ways one way is by using cross happen usage data we try to understand what other apps are our users playing so that in ad networks we can directly target these apps and assume that the initial result will be better than other apps because we'll have higher retention a high conversion etc the second way is

one weekend like with channels like Facebook to create interest targeting when we target these like the users who are interested in the publishers which have a higher cross app usage with our games which tend to perform better than just any kind of broad title so we have seen significant impact by that and we have tried to you know work together with the experimentation team to understand what further we can do by using this data that's great to hear and and obviously how could we skip this probably the biggest event from King in 2018 was the launch of the candy crush friend saga how do you guys prepare for such a big release and how much data do you guys crunch on to you know prepare this release well it was a massive preparation for us I can't comment and say that it has been the biggest why the scale preparation that we have done in the past so it was messy because the scale we want to reach on our region

was great and huge and at the same time we want to keep our portfolio running in a successful way as well so what we do differently than other companies that we have can Chrysler which is great and our ambition has never been to kill it and to bring a better game that will perform better our mission has always been to perform as a Hawking and make sure that we might go to company and having said that the preparation is includes all the side effects as well like we need to consider which game will be focused in a market in platform and network and publishing and etc so we have a list of bits at country level platform level network level publisher level not only for candy crush trance what we have to get prep get ready for other types as well like are we going to decrease all the titles when I said title games other games bits are gonna keep increasing them we had some campaigns focusing on

positive targeting we had to do some negative targeting to you know prevent some other titles this is how we calculated to get ready for the country and publisher and network mix at the same time we had a great preparation on site as well I think we produce almost thousand creatives just before the lunch so we had we can ensure that we have the best creatives to go out it performed really great and likely we're in a position where we have the one of the most successful lives in the recent history yeah and yeah I think that Ellie Craig learn about really great until now yeah definitely correct number one positions in many markets and so where the launch comes out you obviously prepare with the soft launch so what are what are those KPIs that you guys are monitoring at the soft launch stage and do those KPIs change after the launch and do you move on to metrics so the initial KPI we want and

our product team is aiming to achieve is retention so we want the game to be good enough so that our users will stick to it they love it they will play if you don't have a good to the national game it a good retention we don't watch it basically the second thing is the years is not like 2018 it hasn't been a year where you can just grow by white relic as five years ago so we have to do marketing like the game has to be marketable and in order to calculate marketable key we basically check two things one is the monetization of the game where there demonstrations enough for us to feed our computers or at least we come to Vegas now the second thing is the create performance where there are creative conversion rates that we have been producing even before the soft lodge is competitive and this is what is top notch if you take all the three criterias of course we have some thresholds that are calculated based on the previous performances and experiences in 50 call retention and monetization and they create immersion boxes let me go to our launch base in the hardline face and it's like to match

the sphere tracking is almost the same it's not different but of course - so when during the soft launch you first target at golden cohort which tend to perform slightly better in terms of the creative performance and might be monetization as well and in hard Lodge we have more longer-term targets which we try to achieve and make sure that the game is microphone of course we have a longer cohort that we can have more reliable results and - like a miracle most of the payback period for the in-app purchase games right now is more than six months only which one you upset and this needs a lot of data points and a long term maturity to understand the numbers this is I guess the only change that we track between hard lines and soft lunch cool and well obviously it's King and everyone is expecting that with any new game they come out you'll be successful straight away but how much how much more

it is nowadays to be successful and hit those high numbers than it was five years ago at say oh it's pretty more difficult actually so I want to answer that in two different aspects one is the download list so item downloads it as a game which is can crash is not mitchum it used to be one of the mass games but now you have hyper casuals which also started to get interest from base and all gender so I can say that they're even more mass and with these games with higher creative conversion rates significantly I think for a game like I can't cross France that is much more difficult to be number one you have to do much more sophisticated preparation and ensure that we have enough payback trees we have enough financial step for that ensure that your monetization graph that's how you can make the top of downloads however for us the download is not that important for us the main

important list is the grocery list because that's how we make my work and in order to make it top to the grossing list is even more difficult one because though all games are there and which generates are really small like the product teams are optimizing them so frequently that they're doing a great job they're not enabling to use churn and we keep doing performance marketing for the old games as well so it's difficult to take them down so you have to do something better and better to go up that is it impossible I don't think so I mean we can see that growth stars make it to top 10 which is very sublime so it's still possible but you need to do something different than what your products are being and another example is matching the mansion like they didn't do it difference in the product but they found a great world of nowhere which nobody believed that conversion rates and they're doing pretty great in the grossing with so just you touched on hyper casual but just touch on industry in general obviously like we saw big

trends in 2018 such as obviously better overall Crabb games becoming really popular in the hyper casual is definitely being one of the top performers in terms of downloads and so what's what's your outlook what do you think is gonna happen between nineteen and moving on swing 2019 I think the biggest question is whether hyper chaos will keep growing or shrink for me but companies who are focusing on hyper cases right now I believe they will grow but I I'm not sure whether they'll keep their games that hyper cacher anymore because we already started that the new game lives in quotes more levels these levels are not optimized as well but still I believe they will keep leveraging the higher quality great conversion rates from the hyper casual visual visuals but they will introduce more tools such as level based optimization and the similar tools to increase the lifetime values to be more competent in the market so I think there will be an application and schedule somewhere in between that so

and a lot of companies announced that they will start to give a user level ad revenue data which will give you much more data points to companies like would and they will be able to increase their sophistication and increase with the increased lifetime value I think we'll be competing in what we target as well because at the moment the publishers we are getting installs from are almost mutually exclusive then what the hyper cage of companies are targeting yet so they will just intervene and mix genres and Tring into each other it will be a massive completion on the other side the crater site is changing significantly I think the interactive ads will start to get more and more imminent and machine learning I believe is one of the things that we'll be focusing on a lot in terms of how we do you a and yeah I mean will there be another fortnight that's a very difficult question but maybe like a lot of people are working on that and nobody was expecting the

fortnight to be one of the biggest grossing titles I mean everybody was expecting to be big but you'll see definitely and and from a penny side really obviously trying to deliver different products but what's what's what's the missing data metric that you would like to see your missing product they would like to see from companies like a penny that will help you share that so thanks for having a penny by the way without it it would be really very difficult for us to do my thing I think the biggest side is since the hyper casual market is leading just kind of the ad revenue games like the rest companies out there working a great number of revenues and we are stick to the grossing list where we see the in-app purchases so I think the biggest request from us will be just having kind of a forecast or what kind of a drive in each other in the market and having a grocery list based on to some of engineering approach to serving it together and as you know King Gordon started to show us like the hyper casual

started to include in-app purchase as well it's just it won't be as an in-app purchase totally separate it mm I can it'll be just a combinational coat don't start optimizing by the combination of mode so it would be good to get a perspective of how the market is you walk in that side as well yeah definitely well thank you very much for the conversation it was pleasure talking to you [Applause] hello thank you you mentioned a king you do a lot of measuring your creative performance what is the important metric that you use to know which creative is best so we before everything we tend to do relevant creatives right you're not

doing any relevant craters but still one automatics we are using is retention as a side metric however the main mating is still a conversion ratio or idea or whatever you call it basically install / impression so since a lot of ad networks tend to do different kind of end cards we almost drop the CTR out of the calculation because the click numbers change based on who is doing well so that's a separate collocation that we are trying to ensure that we have the right CTR numbers however the main ratio we are looking is installed impression richer and as don't get scooped and as long as that crater do not give a significant lower retention we tend to focus on that grid there is a question whether the craters impact monetization or not and everybody has different opinions about that our own calculations and our analysis show that the ratio where it impacts the monetization is that specific doctor around 60,000 installed which is something that we can operate like we have to optimize every day so we tend to think that it's not really impacting motivation but it

really impacts to retention so that we have a we need to keep an eye on everything hi there thanks for that um my question is data drives everything that drives all the decisions you make if you don't have a you a/b test but there are some channels that will expose more data than others I guess some of them require long optimization cycles and don't necessarily expose a lot in terms of your breakdowns of your data how do you guys navigate around that I guess people UAC is an example how'd you guys never get around that to use your internal bi or some other way so we tend not to work with channels and data with us and we have to get all the publisher names and

everything while all the data should be visible so for us to be able to optimize however Google is a separate case they're big like you cannot reject them of course we don't like Lacey it's a black box that we cannot use our sophistication and be better and we despite the fact that they're doing pretty good so we have to work with them but if we keep Google aside all the other networks we are working with have the data with us and the data we can get from Facebook is much more wider and than all the networks that what it changed in our life is we are able to give more data to our machine learning system that's why we can get better results from Facebook but they don't stop us to get similar results for many networks as well because the additional data we are getting is basically the demographic information which is of course that has an impact on the monetization but the impact is not more than ten percent so what we are losing in terms of skills they're not really messy does that answer the question yeah sure so that the impact with the data or

the app a class survey isn't too problematic FIFA like for the likes of Google you see so that the lack of data for Google you see in this case is not necessarily impacting the performance too much is still able to I assume I mean I believe that we could do better if the data was there for us to play with but it's not we have been in touch with Google product in for a while right now trying to you know miss them to share data with us it will be possible in recent feature and I'm afraid there are other networks who might turn back on that as well we still have tools to optimize that like the events that we are using for Google us is changing the Kiryas like their tuition we know if you're using is changing so we can change field stuff and this is still how we are optimizing things but to be honest I can say that the level of sophistication optimisation we do with Google is less than the others unfortunately thank you that

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