Monetisation Beyond Ads - Tips and Tricks on How to use Unity Monetisation Products

you good afternoon everyone my name is Christian I am a client partner at unity I work on the user acquisition side and both farm and I are based out of London it's so good to be here in Jordan because I'm actually from Lebanon and seeing this movement seeing this happening here is really really really nice so I joined the industry a little more than seven eight months ago and I've been hearing a lot of user acquisition is very expensive user acquisition is very hard you should only advertise with Google and Facebook maybe but I wanted to demystify three myths with you guys today and the first one being that paid traffic is worse than organic traffic

this is not true anymore so if we look at some sources of organic installs what do we have we have store featuring App Store optimization which is the optimization of your title your description your images your description within the App Store and then you have external featuring such as PR reviews and word-of-mouth now the app store is a very crowded place and yes this is one way to stand out but it's not the only one so funny enough the average age of the apps on the top 10 list of highest-grossing apps is 5 years and what does that mean it means that if we look back at the last 5 years the same 10 apps that have been sitting at the top haven't really changed so how can you guys as developers fight that with paid marketing so paid marketing tactics can

be split in two ways awareness and performance so performance could be your typical CPM campaign influencer marketing social blogs now those tactics are very hard to scale and they're very hard to measure on the other hand there is performance and this is where user acquisition lies and what's so important about performance is that kpi's are all that matters whether it's to track and install to track in action or to track a click so now let's look at some examples of awareness tactics on the left side we have broad stars who pre launched their game with a few YouTube influencers and gamers and the whole point of this campaign was to get viewers to pre-register to the launch of their game now if we look at the right-hand side obviously we have another social tactic

where bejeweled work with a series of influencers to have them post pictures of themselves playing the game now of course these tactics are very hard to measure although they did drive some awareness they didn't quiet track the install and this is where performance tactics or user acquisition comes in handy because you get to show a taste of your game right before the user downloads the games whether it's through playable ads whether it's through video ads you show your game if the user is interested there is a very clear call to action which is download for free you track the install and you're good to go what's so powerful about this is that the user knows what to expect before downloading the game so he will be more engaged he will be a better quality user once he plays your game so to wrap up

the first myth yes it can be difficult to access reliable sources of organic traffic and consistent sources of organic traffic paid user acquisition allows you to showcase the gaming experience before the install whether its awareness or performance and paid an organic we believe should go hand-in-hand and only together then they can help you achieve your goals myth number two user acquisition is just expensive of course it can be if not done right so the eCPM or the effective cost per 1000 and or the effective cost per mil is what determines the competitiveness of your campaign or of your ad and the eCPM equals the CPI which is the bid times the conversion rate start to install conversion times 1,000 the conversion rate is very volatile it depends on the type of your game it depends on the

quality of your creatives it depends on how often you change your creatives and then the CPI you have full control of now of course the broader the audience that you target the more scale you can get at a cheaper price but as your campaigns mature and you start to learn what the quality of your users is you will start to segment those users and put them into different cohorts where in some cohorts you will have the ones that are have great quality and the other cohorts will have someone that for example doesn't perform well so it depends the eCPM can go up and down now if we look only at this cohort of users where they really convert well and where the quality is amazing you're not the only one there everyone is fighting for those users and this is where things can

be very very expensive game jorah is an important factor as well so if we look at this table here we have three different jars hyper casual hardcore and casual they all have almost the same CPM which means that they are fighting for the same user however one has a bit of 0.57 cents and another one has a bid of fourteen dollars and we see that everything that changes here is the conversion rate the conversion conversion rate is what helps this developer for example compete with this developer but it's not because someone has a bit of 14 dollars that it means that it's expensive no it all comes down to the lifetime value and to the revenue on adspend or robust for example for the second one clearly it doesn't make sense to Verte eyes there's a return on adspend that is below 50% so yes the advertiser is losing money

absolutely doesn't make sense to advertise the first one is making a 75% return on investment so not only they are running scalable user acquisition but they can reinvest that money into the game and make it even better and monetize even better now even if we look at the last one who's breaking even in user acquisition it's considered a success because they are bringing more and more active daily users within their game which on the long run will translate into money so myth number two it's expensive is all relative to the value and the return so of course the narrower the targeting for quality users the more expensive expensive it gets the LTV on Roiz should be the driving factors for what you're willing to pay for an install and paid you a is scalable with efforts you can reinvest that money into your game and make it even better user acquisition is too

difficult today both dashboards or most user acquisition platforms offer an easy to use user interface if I can put it this way so for example with unity if you want to advertise your app you go to the App Store you copy and paste the link of your app and the dashboard you're good to go if you have your creatives ready and if you have your tracking links your tracking links set up you can be running within a few minutes but the hard part or the part that requires more attention is the actual optimization so at Unity we focus on three KPIs scale retention and grow us and we offer a solution for each one of those scale we offer this through our standard CPI campaigns retention and

blow us through our audience pinpointer product which is a machine learned back product which the optimization for you so how does this audience pinpointer actually work let's say a common practice would be to place the same bids across all users and this is how user acquisition starts when you just started but then as you start learning and you start seeing different quality you will start segmenting those users into different cohorts whether it's based on their devices on the OS or on the source level or on the publisher level but with audience pinpointer we take it one step further and we believe that that each user has a different value and we want to pay the absolute right price for every single user how does that happen when there's an ad request the algorithm is going to look at thousands and thousands of ad

requests so what will the machine learning model do it will predict the value of each one of those users we just send a net which you just sent an ad request to and it will decide on the bid based on the predicted value of that user and bid dynamically on that user so for a bad quality user we can bid 0.01 cent but for a good quality user it depends on what your max bid is or how much you're willing to pay it can go up to it depends let's say ten dollars and the more installs we get the more data we gather the more accurate the predictions become and this is when the magic happens and this is where the campaigns start optimizing for you and you have to look at the magic happen so to sum up myth number three creating campaigns themselves is not difficult it can be almost intuitive there has to be a learning curve before campaign optimization there has you have to put some time and effort into it and then

there are advanced advanced solutions to provide algorithm backed optimizations and they actually work really well so in summary paid an organic traffic are important and can build on one another LTV and Roma's should be the driving factor and are your key metrics experiment and utilize machine learning the world is moving fast and it's doing wonders I'm just gonna leave the floor to my colleague Parminder who's a client partner on the monetization side if you have any questions please keep them here and we'll have a Q&A towards the end thank you very much [Applause] thanks Trina I really really appreciate that hi guys my name's Parminder I'm a part of the client partner team for the manage accounts in amia so yeah

Christine just spoke about user acquisition or what we call is a choir and I'm just gonna quickly touch base on engage and then I move over to monetization this is the whole lifecycle of what we're looking at at Unity when it comes to the ad side so on the a gate on B engage side so I'm sure most of you may have heard that we just recently acquired Delta DNA Delta DNA is a powerful segmentation sole player management tool which can help you calculate LTV Rho s etc we also actually just acquired a company called chili connect which is also based in Edinburgh which is a lie pops tool we're working on game tune which was recently announced at unite Copenhagen which some of our publishers are using in a way to manage tutorials or game or how quickly

a user goes through a tutorial or goes through their game so it's really really really amazing and we are currently developing loads of other cool stuff as well or working on other acquisitions which will be in a pipeline soon actually there was a acquisition that was just announced this morning obvious which was just released onto our platform so yeah I'll talk to our monetization now current state of or the current ads structure if you look at a lot of the ads with oh sorry the games in the top 100 right now 98% of those titles are driven by ads hyper casual currently if you look at all the hyper casual titles they're all mostly driven by ads we've got mid core which varies and then hardcore there's a good 80/20 split there actually if you guys were a part of the conversation this morning by Tammy TM he also mentioned

how within the the Arab region there's a lot of it's it's a mainly I ap base 8% and in only 20% ads based what we find out unity is that games with higher I ap economy usually choose unity for exclusivity and for examples there I've we've got mini clip supercell space a we have these companies who work with us exclusively to focus more on IEP economy unity ads by scale we currently reach 1.7 billion devices on a monthly basis ten point five billion ads served each month 8.8 billion minutes spent in unity apps each day these are similar formats that we support mobile so weapons interstitial and rewarded AR ads which

we've been developing I guess over the last year really exciting how we've got some great brand contact so if there's anyone here who is looking for a brand content when coming to AR please speak to either myself or Christian and we just actually released a new build of our SDK for banners so a lot of the hyper carry of studios we were working with assigned to use Spanish with us this was meant to be an ad I wanted to show you guys but it's not playing so I'm gonna have to skip this however one thing I really want to bring into focus here is if you have a game which is primarily focusing on i-80 when you add those when you add advertising within it there really needs to be a good level of implementation here meaningful rewards so you want a meaningful reward for a video that's watchful 30 seconds you want seamless integration into the game games core loop and you don't want to

dissolve your your game economy analyzing add metrics a lot of a lot of the smaller indie developers we tend to speak to are always massively concerned about the CPM they are gonna receive by showing ads within era their apps but they don't but they don't really focus on user rate or engagement rate and that's something we continuously tell our publishers it's really important to focus on user rate and engagement rate when you first start monetizing within your apps because you want the user to stay in the app as long as possible the longer they stay the more ads they'll watch the more revenue would generate what I wanted to focus on as well is exclusivity over mediation now I actually I actually come from a mediation background before I started working for unity so there are definite benefits for working alongside a mediation if you are a hyper casual studio or etc however with the clients

who work exclusively with us this is the benefits that they receive when working with unity exclusively there's no SDK if the games are built in unity quick question how many people in here actually build on unity I like that that's amazing how many actually people in here use unity ads okay so a smaller percentage so yeah it's ability of the game meant to be no crashes not no crushes access to data for games and ads optimization one day or one gdpr flow one am like myself or christian and like i said before we've done some great deals with the likes of Zynga Miniclip - in terms of mediation gives you a limited opportunity to earn more revenue requires a lot of manual management and when you're first developing a game and developing an app you don't really want to be spending all that time on on mediation systems you want to be spending time on developing the game

and it can also create technical hurdles SDKs adapters etc lastly what I wanted to pick up on is something that a lot of developers who are focusing on his data protection and at unity were kind of at the forefront when when it comes to this even when I used to work in mediation one of the companies are we would always refer to was unity in terms of how it would protect users or protection for users so gdpr within europe copper within the US and now they're china age gate which i'm not sure if many of you're aware it's going to come up soon so it's something to definitely look at thank you very much if you guys have any questions you can please feel free to ask me and christian now any questions thank you very much guys we got plenty

of time so um obviously things have changed a little bit with you mentioned that the format's now are now extending into kind of not just offering the rewarded video that which was where I got involved when the early days before it was called out units yet and now start to look at other formats what's been the impact of having those other formats are we seeing a greater range of people thinking about how to design their game around the way the monetization works yeah generally a lot of developers are looking at how they should design their game in terms of the new formats that are being released it's actually really surprising for how many questions we get aux about AR and how how companies should start linking I can't remember the name of the game there's a zombie airship game which turned into an AR game and you have the abyss so that company kind of stemmed the way and there are a lot of companies right now especially within Europe which

are looking at implementing a ARDS on the banner side there's it's mainly the hyper casuals there's a lot of revenue for because there's a lot of players within hyper casual say they want to add another revenue stream not really looking at game design with hyper casual it's just more revenue I think it's an interesting thing particularly when you look at like the way AR type ads of working I think looking at the way that we build the framework of the space of the game and the placement of an ad within that space I think petite particular interesting I was working with a couple of people working on in world game ads for recently and I think there's definitely something in this space about rethinking what what we do in terms of presenting brand presenting interactions with brands and I think particularly with like you said the publication bit that they've really focused in on actually their games where your fatigue level is almost irrelevant because you're going to throw the game away anyway and so we want to present

people so what I'm going with that is are use they used to be a threshold but how many ads people would naturally be comfortable seeing and it was always a trick trial now how much you should show or not show instead become easier has it become harder I mean what how does that work I think so it's I think it's become hard not hot as fingers become easier within mid core and with hardcore games because now what you're just focusing on and there's so many different games to take for as for reference is where the ads should be within the game core loop to make sure that the plays experience is not ruined at all however touching back on hyper casual or the casual titles there's not much feedback there were there's no one really there's not a real format or I suppose a template as you would say to kind of follow however with mid core and hard core titles which we would do really well

with really well at unity there is a template there there are formats there are ways and it's always focusing on the game design the user experience hence why a lot of a lot of the bigger publishers like mini clips supercell tend to only use unity because the unity add format also is very clean and gets probably one of the least complaints on on app stores so that's been the truth for quite a long time and I think there are a few kind of highly professional ad networks out there there where that kind of relationship is it's perfectly solid but there have been there's a lot obviously I think I think it's apps fly guys to talk about a rise in fraud and obviously this is a connected piece so you know obviously there's not everything you can't do everything about for all but I mean just know what your take is on that kind of fraud piece and what tools and techniques that the audience can take into account to minimize that yeah I think when when

testing your apps it's really important to to understand where fraud mechanics may be played in within your apps I don't have the highest knowledge in terms of where where well because we have a whole dedicated fraud team that we work with that unity and it's actually over the because I've only been at unity for the last six months and it's surprising that it's the first time I've worked in ads over four years that I've probably only had one email through the whole period of working there we've had we've had any response to fruit it's it's kind of not really there it is there at unity but it's a very very minimized thing compared to some some of our competitors it's not isn't that you know I'll come back to you in a second but I think that's really about the philosophy that we've always had I say always I'm not worried anymore but the philosophy has always been the place Indian chad's is about

making sure that it's a professional delivery I think it's where the focus on rewarded as has been so powerful historically because it meant we were focusing on the design questions around the developer so let me switch over and our answer question can you like give me a link or some place where I can watch and it automated the reality ad because I haven't seen them on my games and if you can tell us more technically just briefly about the augmented reality app since it works on multiple platforms like a our core AR kit and before yeah which one does it use I'm gonna have to come back to you in that question so please come up to me one when we finish this talk and I'll and we'll go into more detail there's something out we're still learning out of at Unity in terms of the AR ads we have implementation actually we're working with some smaller studios to start implementing a our ads

within within games and that's kind of on the full rollout so please come up to me later maybe you can be on one of our tests if you're looking at a our ads I know I remember there was lots of experiments going on in the research labs around the use of ads in VR and I think the movement into a or is it real interesting there's a lot of experimenting in that space right now they're kind of two different methods in terms of how that kind of AR /vr kind of AD mechanism can work the first one was obviously having objects in space you can interact with it's particularly interesting around location-based games although there are very few networks really leveraging that yet and but equally the in world game ad style I was mentioning earlier has become quite an interesting format but the trouble with it at the moment is there's not enough support but this is the trouble we would call it supply of ads but actually from the ad industry point of view it's demand which means there's not enough

ads out there coming to games right now to have enough surety of it so it's we're in a really interesting time when it comes to virtual reality in AR I think we're probably about three five years early well maybe use that fair but we're definitely in a space that is definitely evolving around there I was in office a different question because I no question where I haven't hadn't poked on you and I've got like five minutes to fill ball still one thing you I think is interesting about this whole model about the different formats and other stuff is how much effect it has on the likelihood of somebody installing a game as a result of it being placed well inside a game I'm wondering if there's any any analytics or any insight that can make it easier for for a game to make it more attractive for people to install and therefore getting more demand or monetization because they're making it more attractive for the people to follow am i making sense I think this is one of the reasons why we acquired Delta DNA a

few weeks ago is to be able to give this data to the developer so they can actually convert their users and a better and more efficient way you should try if you have a game Delta DNA has a few free features you should definitely try it it for example will tell you how can you sell this purchase better or how can you show this add in a better placement and it actually works so it's definitely worth a try I would like to ask I have implemented unity ads before okay yeah I have implemented unity ads before in my application and I have published it so I test it and some devices and the ads stopped showing after four to five requests successful successful requests

so I changed to other ads on a company or whatever and they show every time so is that a problem in the region or in my implementation or what thank you actually that's a that's a really really good question over the period and could you when was that when was a time frame how long ago okay well since I've joined unity especially within the Middle East region our fill has really really increased we've started to partner with more direct demand teams within within the MENA region actually also within Asia also so that should definitely impact your the number of ads that are showing or do your fill rate however yeah that may have been an impact but I have I am not yet experienced that within the MENA region and I manage the MENA region I haven't experienced that especially when

the likes of Miniclip and etc are showing a number of ads within this region from their games also yeah it's may be an idea to implement and try again and just knowing the successful and they could have been an implantation error they're just as I actually spoke to a gentleman here before but it's all all in trial and error and speaking to us and letting us know that you're facing these issues and then we can work together to resolve them I'm just wondering if there's a kind of lesson from the acquisition side from this as well in terms of when you're targeting when one of the advantages of going direct is that you know you're not going to get duplicates it's often to the same users you're going to have some intelligence going on there with all of the mediation opportunity you don't have that so they're sort of practical guides of for the for the person trying to acquire users that should come out this as well to clarify

so you're asking if the user we're targeting within the unity network will be a retargeting through another network it's a good question we're actually integrating a few exchanges within unity so now you have the chance to target for example Moe pubs inventory right from the Unity dashboard and we only do this because we know the value of our own users and we try to take that and we target those same users on Mopa so we're actually yes targeting the same user try twice but it's kind of increasing the chances of getting the install for me it's almost the other way around it's like when I see the same ad 15 times which I do because that the person who doing the UA at that point has targeted

across the board and is using mediation and trying to test the optimization and I'm the one who comes up every time because I'm the target client for all of those data models that means I see the same ad 15 times and I've already rejected it so how do you deal with that so we actually released a new model then our algorithm a week ago where the conversion and the targeting is much more precise so we tried to work around that and not only we've seen that within a week that the gross revenue has increased by forty percent but we've seen that the quality of users forty percent of the roof it's one of the best things that happened to unity in a while so [Music] not only we're seeing or revenue but we're seeing better quality users which is amazing for the developers I think it really that that's a trend we're seeing it so the better use of machine learning the better use of design to implement the better smarter use of the tools to be able to target your user acquisition

cohorts to be able to do you know kind of a smart bidding for you know the audience is earnest and the detail that we're looking at that's increasing our possibilities now it makes it scary for people who are Indies to try and do it but the nice thing is that you've got people are these guys who are there to help advise you and you can make really good decisions pretty easily if you just take some good advice and on that note always a question of him I'll just confirm is it more important to attract new users rather than maintaining the current users they're both as important and it goes back to the game mechanics and how your game is built and how you engage your user inside the game there's a slight alternate way our dogs bat which is that if you can get more people that's great

but if you can get more people doing more things more often for longer you've just got four times to here so asset technically reselling or retargeting an existing user can be way more commercially viable but you have to build a lot of content so it's a balance between how expensive it is for you to build content and experiences against how it is to acquire the user so you want to build content that is usable by as many people as possible to reduce the cost of retention as much as you want to optimize the ad mechanisms of the placement of the button and of colors and the schemes and all this other stuff to ensure that you get the right brand value in the right data on performance so fair thank you think I did this reliving Goines thank you very much we're gonna be our next speaker thank you guys [Applause]

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