Level Up: AI Powered Mobile Gaming Growth with Google's Katie Funk & Belinda Langner

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hi everyone good morning I'm Belinda langner I am the director of product management for our Google app campaigns and I'm here with Katie Funk our Global product Solutions uh lead of gaming and it's so exciting to be here today um and it's so great to see everyone here I've been working on games and apps since 2014 and every year I love being up here sharing with you all some of the cool things that we've been doing and hearing from all of you about what's going on because of all the all the industries that I work with and all the different kinds of apps I work with gaming apps and all of you all are the drivers of some of the fastest Innovation and moving at different speeds and a higher sophistication level than a lot of other Industries and so we're here today to talk to with you guys about some of the trends and the opportunities that we're seeing with AI and gaming and how we're thinking about continuing to improve our

products and deliver these new products that help you capitalize on the future so you guys have heard a lot about AI already uh you probably read about it a lot too every day uh the last couple of months and the last year has been transformational here certainly um and it's a transformational technology that will really positively impact many many Industries including gaming and Google has been uniquely positioned to really leverage AI given our leadership in in the space Google has been a leader in artificial intelligence for over a decade uh we announced seven years ago that Google would be an AI first company and we've certainly been committed to that on the product side our Transformer research project and our field defining paper in 2017 on uh Transformers has been the basis of a lot of the generative AI projects that you see today and you can think of the Transformer as sort of the grandparent if you will of a lot of technologies

that you see today and that really built the foundation for a lot of the the cool things that we're reading about every day in the news um in fact a lot of times when you see a capital T in an acronym on something related to uh AI it's often standing for a Transformer and so today the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months and that is far outpacing Moors law and so we're so proud of the contributions that we made so far and that we're going to continue to make in this space and Google has continued to infuse AI across the entire gaming life cycle um from play to distribute your games to acquiring users with app campaigns to admob with monetizing your app to YouTube for Content distribution to Firebase for development and measurement and to Google Cloud for hosting those games and for any of the marketers in the room we really want to make sure that you can use Google AI as a multiplier for your marketing and really grow your games it can help you meet

customers no matter where they are no matter what and how unpredictable those behaviors are and how they continue to evolve and like I mentioned gaming are constantly changing and so are what you have to look for and how you find users has to constantly change as well and AI can augment your creativity your insights to create new value and greater impact and it can really help you hit a lot more of the complex goals that you have to achieve in today's ecosystem and before I jump into what we can do and where we're headed with AI let's take a look at how far we've come so far in fact many of you recall in this room that Google app campaigns uh led the way with AI in our launch and so you have all been on this journey with us already we've lived and breathed AI for a very very long time before when I first started in in apps and in gaming um user acquisition was very very manual you sort of had to set up campaigns manually you spent a lot of time doing it and it was hours of work and today

you simply provide us your creative assets your business goals and we promote your app across Google's largest properties all from a single campaign and this is a really great prime example of how Google AI is working as a multiplier helping you reach and engage all the users um more efficiently and of course like I said the industry continues to evolve and so user engagement and preferences have also evolved and since we l uh launch app campaigns uh but we're continue to evolve with you your feedback here has been critical and using the power of AI and Technology we continue to reach users where they are yes awesome thanks so much Belinda it is wonderful to be back in estable good morning everyone almost good afternoon um so now that Belinda has really set the stage in terms of where we've come from with AI let's spend some time looking into the applications of how we can use it in action especially uh as it relates to inapp

advertising so creatives as I think most of you are are well aware one of the most important lovers for performance in app campaigns um and when displaying creative to potential new users it's really critically important of course to make sure that they have a really positive and engaging experience with your game um so powered by AI let's look at a couple different ways that we can help you do that um so the first is flip video ads um so this is a creative Innovation where we automatically reorient the video uh to whatever orientation the user has on their phone so that they don't have kind of a a misaligned experience they're not trying to turn their phone a million different directions we will just go ahead and automatically do that for you to create a really positive user experience um and one thing to note is that this is especially relevant for YouTube shorts which um we've seen phenomenal success in gaming with it's really resonating with gaming content and users um and then secondly if you don't have video assets on hand we can help do some of

that hard work for you um or if you'd like to expand your creative library and make sure that you're maximizing the video assets that you do have uh so we have autogenerated video ads and we'll use several different static images and and other metadata to go ahead and create that video for you and make no mistake you absolutely do want video in your app campaigns um we actually noticed a 16% uplift in campaigns that have a video versus those who don't so there's a really material performance difference there and you want to make sure that you're maximizing all of that so taking a step back to look a little bit more broadly at the entire ecosystem I can see a lot of you putting your phones up um we've really seen incredible AI Innovation across Google um particularly within the mobile gaming advertising ecosystem so if we look all the way back to the launch of the app stores way back in 2008 and 2012 uh the bidding methodologies and you know how marketers were actually um

look optimizing their campaigns excuse me was really not aligned to core kpis it was based off of things like CPM bidding and it was the best that we had at the time but it really there was a discrepancy between um what you were bidding for and what your true business goals and kpis were so we've seen uh a clear acceleration in the in the sophistication of bidding mechanisms since then um which has been really exciting to see um and that really began with the Advent of TCP Pi bidding in 2015 and then continuing with the development of Target cost per action as well as Target return on ad spend so it's really exciting to see that kind of continuing Innovation and we're going to talk a little bit more about TR specifically in a little bit because we now have this available for all monetization types which is really exciting so with Advent of some of these more sophisticated bidding models we're seeing technology and Advertiser goals change so with the ability to bid towards value um we're now able to drive

installs in line with the monetization type for your game and your true business goals as I was mentioning a little bit earlier so this is inclusive of inapp purchases inapp ads as well as hybrid monetization so talking a little bit more about um lifetime value and user value so a key piece of this is really being able to optimize for goals um that matter to you the marketer um and this is why we've continued to evolve the range of OB objectives that we have available in app campaigns starting with installs and actions and then as I mentioned before evolving towards uh Ras so just this year uh we introduced new optimization goals we have uh Target um Ras for ad Revenue as well as hybrid monetization optimization which is I know a little bit of a mouthful we can also just say tr- Ros for hybrid um so now you can run an app campaign and using Google AI optimize for a combination of both inapp purchases and inapp ads in a single Le campaign so

it's a much more streamlined experience and eliminates the need to use proxy events so looking a little bit more holistically at our entire Suite of Android T bidding Solutions we offer four key solutions to help you drive Val valuable users into your game um so we have standard T roaz um the original which hopefully many of you know and and also love um and uh this is designed to enable Target roaz bidding for games that are exclusively utilizing inapp purchases as a form of user monetization so next we have TR for ad Revenue um where we utilize ad Revenue optimizations which allows you to optimize to inapp ads and drive value through user interaction um and then for The Best of Both Worlds we have hybrid I'll move a little bit over so you can see over here um and as I mentioned earlier this incorporates multiple monetization strategies so if your game is using a combination of both we've really seen the acceleration or an acceleration in the adoption of that monetization uh

method over the past couple of years um and then finally we have tras for AC app campaigns for engagement for retargeting specifically um and so that provides retargeting capabilities for laps users that you want to reach again while still optimizing for a row as Target so as a practical example um to illustrate the success of advanced bidding methods our friends at Voodoo among many others were able to see a really significant uplift as a result of utilizing tr- R for ad Revenue um one other thing to note and part of the reason why it's so important to align your bidding methodology with the type of monetization in your game is that our models are actually trained specifically on that data so you're absolutely going to see better performance um when you make sure that you're selecting the right type um but they were able to see an increase in Ras by 58% which is really really incredible to see and now back to Belinda to talk a little bit more about privacy

yeah so we're going to talk a little bit more about privacy as I mentioned earlier the gaming industry has obviously evolved a lot and privacy is another topic where I feel like we didn't talk about it as much initially and now it's a topic in every single conversation that I have and a lot of that is because how we measure and Target ads has been going through a profound change C uh consumer expectations around privacy have been changing uh and continue to increase and the regulatory environment as many of you guys know with dma enforcement uh happening has continue to evolve the industry is moving away um from a lot of the identifiers that we're used to and more towards privacy friendly Solutions and I know this is a significant transition but these are the opportunities that Google AI is able to come in and help fill gaps and do a lot of the heavy lifting and create durable solutions that last and so using Google AI we can optimize for the goals that you have Based on first-party data and privacy preserving signals such as scan and on iOS um and privacy sandbox when

it comes out on Android for example last year we introduced on device conversion measure uh on device conversion measurement for iOS campaigns using consented first-party data um and specifically email and phones numbers and advertisers who saw this actually saw an 12% median increase in the uh in the user installs on Google's owned and own operty uh properties and so it's really exciting to see that a lot of these Technologies are St work and not only they're working they're actually providing a lot of uplift and we're continuing to innovate in this space I think there's so much more that we can do here and I think you'll uh we look forward to sharing more of some of the things that we're talking about and um and building out now great um so just to bring it home with some key takeaways from what we discussed today so as BL Belinda mentioned earlier in the presentation AI really is the next big shift I think we can keep tally of how many times you're

going to hear AI throughout the day today um but it really does open up new opportunities for incredible creativity incredible Innovation and there's no other um industry that is better poised to capture and capitalize on this than gaming so really really excited to continue to see Innovation there um and then Google leading the way and building AI driven solutions that power sustainable growth for your game so as we talked about a little bit earlier AI is is certainly the Hot Topic of the moment but this is something that we've been investing in for many years at this point and we'll continue to um and we're really focused on um AI powered solutions that can help you drive success for your game in the long term and then finally um i' I've personally been working in gaming for I think about 12 years now and so uh there's no year that's the same as the other but I think especially in the past few years we've seen um you know really incredible changes um continue so app advertising has evolved it's going to continue to evolve and so aligning your acquisition strategy to your business goals has

never been easier and it's never been more important um so please make sure that that you're going ahead and doing that so with that I will go ahead and say thank you again it is wonderful to be back in Istanbul thank you um so much to deconstructor of fun and of course I will give another shout out to semi who's incredible um for for hosting this event and please feel free to uh come up to us after the talk or or ask any questions that you'd like but it's lovely to be here and thank you so much for your time