Next Games - 비디오 광고 수익 극대화를 위한 Top Tip!

alright so video ads are the the talk of the day for sure this is a talk that I did at GDC was requested to do here again a little bit of information i work for next games we're talking about specifically compass pointe west we released this in March of 2015 a couple of sets that have grab people's attention these are our stats from August 75% of our players watch and add every day and six cents per player from ad revenue every day so these apparently are some pretty good much benchmarks we've heard so people have wanted to know how we did it so first off we did a lot of innovation but we also made sure to learn from the current state of the market so we learned to integrate with

core loops mature not to overload the inventory and to work with multiple partners I definitely want to encourage everybody who's looking at video ads to do all three of these things just a little bit of details on integrating with core loops that means don't don't don't just put it in your shop for some extra soft currency and call it a day I have seen this over and over and over and over again and I've never heard anybody saying we're making a lot of money off of this make sure you're giving the player a purchase were the item that goes into soft currency for sure but also make sure you're not just giving them something I've heard advice Oh something exclusive that you can only get with add great make sure it is something that they want and also put your ad front and center adventure capitalist is a really good example of this treat it not as something in your shop but a shop button unto itself add watchers are a completely different section on a completely different segments than people who pay and people

who don't there are some so you have to treat them as their own and that means they get a button all of their own venture capitalists cross the road both did this and I'm sure you've heard about their ad revenues also don't overload your inventory this is the thing that your designers need to understand your designers need to understand the business of ads and that means you actually want people to click on the adds and look at the games you're advertising which means you can't just go around and give 10 ads in a row because if someone's watching 10 ads in a row they're not going to be clicking on them it doesn't necessarily work out for the ad providers and the ad providers have no reason to give your game more money they give lower a CPMs for everybody who gives empty clicks they do that because they should so it's important that you're giving very very valuable ads sparingly to players at the exact right time as opposed to just letting them watch as many as they want because you get a cent from it otherwise that's all

you get the other thing to point out and we learned this from clue who did this really really well work with multiple ad partners this also works out in everybody's benefit for the same reasons you're giving less empty ads if there's a more variety of ads if you're only using one partner they're gonna start seeing repeat ads even if you're only showing two or three depending on the inventory going on in the day which doesn't necessarily work out for the ad provider so you want to make sure that you use as many of them as you can so that you can also perhaps some partner is working and buying a whole lot of ads in France you want to be working with that one and as opposed to one that just having the one that might have missed that promotion so it's a lot more work but it is worth it and that is how one of the ways we got here is making sure we optimize and work with as many ad partners as we can so things that we did differently we implemented in a non proven genre now this is a little less relevant this now as everybody is doing it but we first started it was a bit of

a risk we treated ads as an awesome feature as opposed to a side-lying feature and we made them an important piece of our economy so everyone at next games was actually really really worried when we put ads in compass Pointe West for the simple reason we are a builder battler first no one had done really adds and at that point in a builder badler clash didn't do ad so of course we still have this cargo cult design mentality a lot in the industry if somebody is really good at something and they're not doing something you want to try you get really really really nervous a lot that well why wasn't clash doing it if it was going to make money but we looked at the actual business we knew that clash ads were probably a lot more expensive because of all the money they were making then say a candy crush ad and in our game showing clash ads would be a whole lot more lucrative if we did it right so by looking at the business and not just looking at the previous

successes of other companies then we saw that there was actually an opportunity to go into the Builder battlers genre and shell ads properly the other thing we did is we made this a dedicated ad experience this is just a quick little rundown of how it goes we gather soft currency depending on how much of their map you've expanded we already had that feature in the game and then we added our traveling show feature which you know it we now not a lot of players look listen to sound and everything like that but we still made sure that they're dedicated sounds and everything for this we put as much production value as we could into the traveling show as we would a brand new feature it's very tempting very very very tempting to go and just add it as another piece of an interface that you already have we went differently and we made a complete interface specifically for this and at the end we gave them our card decks which are our primary premium purchase these are the things that we sell people

and we and these are the things that are an important part of the game so this actually allowed us to give them a very small sort of portion of the premium experience they're giving you 15 15 seconds of their time but they're also giving you money treat them like payers and that's what we did we gave them something worth paying for I'll be at a smaller version but still just as emotionally rewarding and so another thing that we did is make sure that you actually over valuate for the money that the money that you're getting we're making six cents but if you actually break it down in our game each of those ad decks packs is worth 30 sets and that's because you know and we players that are watching them are not usually giving us very much money at all so that's money we wouldn't get that's 37 cents that didn't this so for us to actually get that sixth sense it's way worth it and it's important very important that you overvalue for price because this is a

way to get monetization out of non paying users and giving them an opportunity to take part in the premium economy so you want to give them something substantial so this essentially ended up normally in free-to-play will give them often a teaser you let them know what the premium experience is like we don't necessarily do that in compass pointe west we use the ads to do that and we put them front and center so by doing that then they go okay this is what it's like to spend a little bit of money like 30 cents worth of money and we use the ads to replace that and the other thing that you want to do is if you have anything in your game that allows you to speed through our ad packs have lots and lots and lots of speed ups because that allows more engagement if people aren't going to spend on that then you want them to actually give a little bit of money to feel what that feels like but also to keep them playing a little bit more so it was touched on in the ad colony deck how you can use this to actually really really boost

reengagement while still getting some monetization out of it so now obviously we did not come to this at next games by just guessing and throwing it into the wind because everybody was so nervous that it wasn't going to work then we had to do a lot of a/b testing just to see how things were going which led to some interesting results so we had one where we were showing 1 add 1 we were showing 5 ads and one when we was showing three ads which was the control group of what we had before so what we found is that actually the less ads we showed the more I IP conversion we did have so if you're worried about cannibalization by using really really valuable valuable ad placement it is true there will be some cannibalization but one thing to keep in mind is that there are other things involved in an eye aps with the platforms that actually if we looked at the overall net revenue generated the control group actually won out so we're

so that made us think okay if there is some kind of like what will happen if we don't show any ads at all people didn't know that you could get things from ads in the game and so what we found is that the one with ad said twenty percent more repeat purchases 15 hunt here conversion rate and fifty percent higher higher art thou on IAPs which means that the ads were actually increasing the value proposition of the game if we were looking specifically at the people who spent they were also some of our heaviest ad Watchers as well but they were spending and they were repeating spending as well so what ads do is that they allow players to know hey this game is actually worth more money than one that doesn't have ads in it because there's an opportunity for me to take part of some generosity and contribute and pay only when I really feel like okay now is the time to get something really really heavy so but this is the thing is that that fifty percent higher art bell that is the one that is really

important to note every game I think right now should have ads in it of some point after looking at this for the specific reason it increases the value proposition of your game itself so if you got anything to take away from this if you want to take pictures of any slides this is the one to do it lower amounts of valuable rewards on voluntary ads used consistently by a large majority of players in the early purchase price range was the key to our ad revenue success so ah actually I was told not to speed through it and I did so I've got plenty of time for questions if anybody has any questions about the design process and how we made the decisions that we did or how things were going now yes hey hey hey Mitch did you guys only a/b test the number of ads are

also the contents of the rewards that you were giving for the ads um yeah we only tested the number the ads just to keep it at the value because because it's a randomized we did make the assumption that the perception value will be pretty much invisible unless we made it really really really drastic so it's something we it is one we talked about doing but we've determined that because it was so Gacha heavy and we had such a large variety in the decks that it would be very difficult for the players to receive and make a decision that the av-test could measure right and just a quick follow-up and how did you come to the giving away 30 cent value was that just kind of you know the lowest center point that you think would feel valuable or did you um we sort of played with what felt right in the debts and it's so like we of you know I measured that after about about where would be we didn't but and we were trying to get get it to the right point

but we knew what the rates were gonna be coming in we were going to be and so it was sort of like okay and I was sort of looking at the value of other games and I'd seen most of them have been around anywhere from from ten cents to a dollar but the ones with the dollar wasn't doing so great the ones with the ten cents weren't doing well either so wanted tried to get something in the middle it was more of a gut thing at that point but it's the decks felt right in the game and then but we did make a point to know I know that 3030 set number because we wanted to over evaluate and that was a goal of ours uh and so it's just a matter of how much hello oh hey I have the mic now okay um at what part of the development cycle did you do this a be testing and and who were the users that were you were testing with um we did this in soft launch this was one of our various earliest soft launch updates in fact this we had an entire update in soft launch dedicated specifically to getting

this right so that that's when we did it we did it with and because it with soft launch we were paying specifically for the users so it's very expensive for us to try in segments and then get and then get a little more more well sort of details so we did run actually the test after soft launch with the no ads after we had seemed like the whole full development build of the game so we could get a good value perception sort of out of it but the first ones that we did with those were done in soft launch immediately after the launch of the launch of the the feature yeah oh oh hi a question about the and the ad so do you see any difference in the ad usage between the freshly acquired users and some older users um yeah a little bit is is a it's a slow linear curve like we

don't have any tutorials or anything to show angwin so you can actually find the ads before you really know what the decks to do so we find that they because of that the the earlier users don't necessarily get into it but once the but once it's after day one then it starts going up the players we did create you know you know this to be an appointment mechanic that you come back you want to be excited that they're at there's ads coming back so the longer we have found yes the longer players play and the longer that many days they've been retained the more ads that they watch hi a quick question are the fingers cross or net do you uh it is its net for ya net fourth fifth sixth sense for user yeah cool hey buddy hey can you mean

yeah a quick question based on you were saying you fire off the amount of ads across all users that correct I guess the same forum yeah is there any thoughts on optimizing based on the segment or player behavior or non spenders versus spenders all um yes there is it's a little trickier to measure in ads because we're still making sure we're optimizing the ec p.m. so if we do something like say oK you've been you're a spender and you've played for 30 days and you're one of our big ad Watchers and there's a whole bunch of them or you're not a spender if we'd like it for example like that that could skew a lot of the things while we're figuring out the CPM sort of stuff so it's something we want to do obviously but it's in the pipeline a little bit further further down the road it is something we've talked about because we definitely want up to you know if we can safely do it without lowering the CPMs we would love to show if you're not a

spender but you're really dedicated to the game giving those players more ads but because they are so valuable to we don't want to give away some competitive advantage to non spenders who might be getting more decks and things like that so we would have to create different decks in those such an eight situations and stuff like that all right I'm Way over time now so anybody wants to talk with me i'll have like a little bit ten minutes before i have to go back to the office and fix some other a bee deaths