Panel: Leading Tactics in User Acquisition in 2020

[Music] hello everyone I hope you're enjoying the conference so far so today I gathered this lovely and quite big group of you a masters to discuss a very pressing issue how to navigate through the very clustered cluttered ua ecosystem and make true that are driven decisions to optimize campaigns scale UA and win over the competition so my name is Irina by the way I've been in the ad tech industry for almost ten years now and now I'm very excited to be with BJ which is a multi-channel data aggregation and campaign management

platform that helps to automate UA so let's begin so guys can you please introduce yourselves and tell us what was the last you a task that you completed before coming here I'm the head of performance marketing at mobile growth cyber games and my background I've been there for just under a year I've previously worked at Central Point Barcelona and not a bit in Croatia and my loss you a task was I guess soft watching one of our titles driving you a to the day one rotation hey guys my name is Madeline cherish and I've been in the industry for like seven years so far I'm currently heading the you a team at super scale and previously I was at pixel Federation which Slovak developer company and my last asking you

I was delegating the reporting to the UA managers hello everyone I'm the black sheep out here ashes and but partnerships manager at UPS flyer and it's been three years inside that a you a toss I'm so happy I'm not doing that out here hi everyone I'm Stefan I work at and super solid I'm user acquisition manager they also in short of ASO and my I've been working there for three years starting my car anyway here and last I was doing before coming here was rethinking our creative strategy for our latest title okay so Michael from the Netherlands I'm working a social point for roughly a year now managing two games there before I was in a scooter sharing application in Barcelona as well I'm being in the app industry for six years roughly and

the last thing I did in terms of new way was setting some automated reports for my colleagues I have my own hi my name is Alan hi year ago I joined Ubisoft as a user acquisition expert in industry I think I more than eight years and it was a long way between Russia Israel and now London and the last task I think was just checking the reports before the conferences of course so now that we got to know you a little bit can you maybe tell us what was the channel that you scaled the most in 2018 Eileen we'll start with you okay for us I think the most surprising one yeah was a snapchat I'm managing it myself and our team and we have a very we had a very interesting case we have one portfolio of game that is narrative' games for woman and we

usually saw it's about 25 30 plus audience but eventually we found out that snapchat audience and us that wasn't for us biggest market he's converting very good 21 plus so for us was it was a big scale actually great anyone else I'm an our side would be cross since Allah would say especially on the programmatic sides and have a lot of good form across all of the games so we were managing to able to scale them to or a second third biggest biggest partner across all then all the company so I was it up yeah for us snapchat as well actually I'll perform to Google UAC for some games the last channel I scale was snapchat we're not doing you a at scale currently with cyber but none of it that's what we scaled first so again shout outs not actually absolutes it's

in such a unique position that we can actually look into everybody else what they're doing and greet all of them I think snap has been one of the biggest gain is when we compared to 2018 data to 19 but apart from that the big for consolidation when you say like self recording networks there's also an emergence between other GSP networks expression on the video side and playable side which has come up with lower CPI's and higher growth rate so I think that's one of the biggest surprises if we can look so it's not just the big four like snap Google and Facebook and Twitter it's also the other emergence of networks as well so wait who are the runner-ups then like do you remember its I would say like there is if you look at the iOS I think Apple so chance has made some big gains and the cross install is one of them when you look at both Android and iOS it

depends upon the regions we have some surprise players as a couple of emulators have come up good in a top joy and up love and they have always been good there but also like Moloko ads they're like a surprise that have come up a couple of times cool so because we are almost starting running the tick tock do you have any experiences that you can share maybe yeah I mean tic TOCs an amazing platform to be honest and we have made some like this tremendous growth that we are saying I think if you're talking about 2019 I think design probably by next month or so we might have like much more concrete data about the strikes that tick tock has taken so if you're the same question if you ask me next month or my end of the queue one I would say tick-tock will be number one one of the surprise packages especially with the CPM rates and as well as the you know

the quality that they're coming it's not just the quantity but also the quality has been really good okay so I'm hearing a lot of different networks especially from from you so guys maybe you can tell us a bit what's on your you a stack and I'm talking about attribution advertising channels BI tools what do you do for reporting everything so yeah first like contribution we use ad just in terms of sorry way in terms of so for us we've recently launched a new game so we started with like the plastic Facebook and Google and also starting using snapchat and learning from it in terms of data and insights we use Google bigquery and we pair it with a looker for data visualization developers have like the bigger picture in some of them

correlation and reporting using the job for everyone and also I would include in the air so in the u.s. tasks to include ASO we use a tool called up tweak because like we believe that you can get an F lift from your UA if you get a so right because the more you increase your conversion from here so the more likely you will increase the conversion from new way and get there around you can get an uplift in your ASO I know some people are able to get like for two people they get from new way they can get three people free from ASO so it can be great k-factor also for you in terms of growth so this is basically how we consider you a Eileen yeah sorry it's just so my colleagues so respect so yeah we are using outside for tracking are we also using singular for all the costs collection and we are very lucky we have

a good internal analytics that are just Ubisoft one with a very nice prediction system and also alert system so I think all our UI managers get in the Morning Report where is it's highlighted like green and red who are as good or bad so in this case they don't need to search for the data but just you know the emerge one to quickly change something in these campaigns yeah for Facebook we are for Facebook campaigns and Google as well I think we're using the delgo that's it Matei yes basically super-scared is like data analysis and business intelligence company so we're trying to rely on like internal Big Data team we are working very closely them so we are gathering like all the data from all that sources for like taps fire PUA channels and stores as well and then

plugging in into our own like reporting system rows sheets LTV predictions and we also built one targeting in-house option that is actually available on smartly or at convocation and we're using it tomorrow so basically trying to do everything in-house Michael you have something to add so social point we're using apps Flyers all for attribution we are using RBI is the same as what you guys have which is lucre which works in the same way as you were saying it tells you basically in terms of colors what's above your target what not so you it's easy to adjust bits if needed tells you to increase or were to decrease budgets so it's quite automated already and we're in the process of having this automated as well so we can basically if a certain value is higher or lower and a certain

threshold that we put ourselves they can automate it automatically increase or decrease the bids okay so I've been hearing a little bit about automation here from your answers so can you maybe talk a bit more about that like what exactly do you automate how does it help you to improve campaigns and what are still like the struggles with it so as I said the most automated part of our tools is bi actually everything is work without us and then we just did naming convention automation tool as well because to collect everything inside tableau you really need naming convention to be very stupid and also now we're working on bid optimization but it's in process I hope we will have it in 2020 great Michael so yeah we're just saying like we're using your looker

for that so the better optimization we're doing now right there so now we already have a like prediction like what's the max viable CPI that we can pay for certain campaigns certain country certain so publisher even it goes quite deep and in terms of creatives we're doing something similar so we have like naming convention now every creative that we're currently putting out has certain elements inside the name so for example if it's a to 2d animation or 3d animation if it's gameplay if it's fake gameplay if it's action related or whatever and we add these tags inside every creative that we're putting out and all the networks and we can then and Luke or say okay what is the kind of creative that works about what elements do they have which ones have the is IBM which one of the highest click-through rate etc and therefore we can can optimize our creative strategy and what else is automated well we're testing now the Facebook UAC automatic

applet so this is also pretty black box again like Google so yeah I think automation is very important especially like on video ad networks these days you spend a lot of time black listing white listing your sub sources and changing your CPI bits and you're you a team can be block down doing this on a daily basis so I think it's important to use the right set of tools to do that at the same time to make sure that those tools are still optimizing the most efficient way so it doesn't replace your you a team they still need like validation but having the right balance of using your QA managers and optimized tools is a key ingredient to getting your UA right well yeah I obviously agree with you in terms of automation I think there's one more thing that we are seeing as more and more companies or you know especially on the gaming side I think they're trying

to look what data is then the not you know looking at raw data or looking at other types of data I think that's that's one aspect about what they can do with that data I think we everybody spoke about you a but there's one more channel which most of the people are taking across using the data is also on the retargeting side of things and there are more tech stack elements that's been built across so if of course attribution comes in the first pace and not just because I'm from attribution but but then they're also seeing that most of guys have a bi tools like you're saying but then they're building about campaign optimization tools because of course you're not just working with one of them you're working with major a different part of it and how you can send the data back to them and then the new element which has come across is engagement partners know if anybody of you're working on it but you know it's about how to customize it how to ensure there's like a welcoming you know picture to the users who have come in so

you can target them much more specific have have any for you work with an engagement partner would come across okay it's just probably me with somebody else yeah we engagement is one aspect of course they use that as a reengagement tool but it's also like you know push partners be like you know praising airships and everybody else they're using them and there's also for it's basically for if you have some set of users you want to retain them and how can you retain by them by like getting them to come back to the app again because that's also helps you to improve your LTV that's on the other major aspect why they're building this upon what are the tech stocks that they have besides the the classic reporting that it's automated we also build like that of a validator because every time we started like working with with the company we need to check all the data if

that it matches all the sources like attribution stores Facebook and stuff so we build an automated tool to validate that and how does this automation affect like internal processes the team structure time management inside the team [Music] you can fire half your team right I think it amaizing the team well so like going back to my point about the efficient optimization if you have your u8 managers bak doubt doing that on a daily weekly weekly basis they can't really be focused too much on the rest of the stuff that makes the marketing machine work so that's both on the creative side the ASO side and also understanding the product and doing significant research in the market I've worked with quite a few UA teams and a lot of the guys I work with may not know the the rest of the marketplace well and I think this is one of the jobs of the

UI team too as a sellers of the game to be able to go to the product and say hey this is what you should be doing to make the game more appealable so I think it's important to for the UI guys have the right kind of balance of optimizing versus you know other hands-on work with products this way like we have we are one of our data scientists working on reaching a proxy event which is a combination of like several even people and players are performing within 24 their first 24 hours of playing the game and with that he is able to tell like a clustering the user automatically they will be high LTV users and the world TV users and then with that either creating a custom audience extracting it directly or better having the proxy in address directly and having it updating dynamically so when then you optimize to water event on Facebook for example

the targeting still on point and the thing is that then I can extract list of events and again yeah we can tell the product team which kind of behavior people are performing and how to optimize the game towards that yeah like eight years ago when I said it to work almost I think 90% of my time was in Excel trying to optimize things now everybody in our team I think have time to do much more with all this optimization to do more testing to think more about creative strategy to search for new regions to stop start you a and that's what the in general automation devolves us will be much less working on statistics and more about like common strategies in term when I think the SIA I feel like going back rolling back two years when I

was doing you a optimation for me was like I automate so much that I fire myself because you want to ensure that you know all the data and everything is the right place I mean we have a cohort API I think that was a good thing that you brought across is like I think getting getting the right cohorts is like a big thing for most of the UA - right now they want to get that right set of cohorts right set of audiences so they can target them correctly I think nice and code appear to be check right now so people use that to get back to the users or try to create like and you know similar audiences or have like a better exclusion list I think that's all some of the automation sense which is most of the you images are using but we are seeing from the outset okay so where are you guys seeing this trend heading in 2005 and what will be like the but what are your personal goals - I mean not

only in terms of automation or the day-to-day management but also on the bigger picture on the creative side of your work on the strategy side I can start here yes as I mentioned before if be like eight years ago most like I was working in Russia and you a manager was considered is very mathematical person who working with numbers only and doesn't care about anything else so now I feel my job more about creativity I think now creatives taking more important part because users already saw and what I'm seeing actually in Facebook or whatever other platform if the same creatives about different games and it's becoming more and more boring and less and less working so especially we are inside Ubisoft trying to work on this more analyzing get some inspiring ideas and yeah I think this is

one of the trends that is growing it's not about optimization but it's about the changing of the workflow meanwhile it's only one idea have a lean so it's like you a guys they don't just data guys they may have ian in the past but their marketing people right so they have to have a good focus on what what makes product sell so I think now with optimization tools we can focus more on creative iteration and more the UI teams I've worked with have learned how to produce more creative in tests with a more scientific approach to creative rather than just have one greater than runs for six months to a year even when I was back at social point before Michael was there we we still had created form also legends of dragon city that was top performing though it's two years old so obviously doesn't work so well anymore and yeah like more focus on the right kind of things can be done with authorization in place yeah and I think to add on to this like what I was saying

before why what we're doing with adding these tax in the creatives you can actually see what works you can break a creative town and this was something that was not possible before you know you always test a be testing like a new creative versus a control group what was true what Ferren saying like some creatives are the best performing ones are two three years old and why you don't know you don't know what kind of elements because every creative has is a bit at least in our case have a little bit of gameplay a little bit of character it's a little bit of 2d or 3d but what specific thing triggers that high CTR or high rpm so this is something that what by breaking that down you can go a lot deeper into into the creative itself and I think also with labels I mean I guess all of us have experienced experience with that so for playable as well like you can create so many to like you can break it down as well and change stuff inside a play or you can even measure it exactly like

where people drop out word I click when they click so all this this whole cycle breaks creatives down and I think that's what we're going to where we can really optimize creators in a much deeper way than we could I've only done two years ago and I think also like with automation this is I mean every obvious but automating Commission for automation itself it has its at worth it it's like you get to the ground of like what ironing you a and like what makes a game worse scale with the way and it's profitable growth so you need always to ask yourself what I'm paying for it or service or what I'm spending time to implement is gonna be worth the time because like as I mentioned like for creatives they're still creativity it's hard to automate creativity right so and maybe the next big challenge because yeah everything organic hard data is able to you're able to automate all most

of it from the reporting to algorithm but it come when it comes to creative it's like how you used to take that to nurture your creativity and to make it scale even better so back to the creatives we spend a lot of time like with the creative analysis and we're trying to be like to and you can export from one creative like seven versions just we know one click and like not totally different creative but different headlines different color palettes different buttons for examples or we use time effective from our like creative designers so I would like a side question it's lovely to be like no not thing but how much do you think like a bit optimization to creative optimization is important especially when there are like new avenues coming like tech talks and everything I think do you think it's important to look at these new channels plus the creative

that has worked in other channels or to feel like there's a constant need to spit out new creatives I think creative perch I'm always actually quite different back in the day we'd use the same creative but obviously on social media compared to a video network incentivize us is not incentivizes a big difference but even we found with Facebook and snapchat the credits can be very different because the audience is largely different and the experience is going to be different and that's what we'll see with tick tock the kind of the stuff you get on tick tock is very different to the content you get on Facebook and snapchat so things that will work on tick tock I expect will be very different creatives so the credit iteration has to be pure channel if you're gonna scale you a correctly so that's kind of my belief and probably too old I don't get tick-tock to the content there I just I don't know why why people are doing it but obviously like for the creative analyst that's why we are pulling like the whole the data from all channels on the creative level

so we know like what's working and where in Ubisoft I think most of our games are very narrow like small audiences targeting so for us it's always a big challenge because it should be the right creatives on right beat on the right audience so creatives even could be different on different audiences and also I couldn't have I think to stricted things about CPI or beads but like more about ROI and also I have a question to other guys if we are looking on creatives in terms of ROI on the IPM and exit er it's a combination right so definitely IPM and how the creative resonates but also like the ultimate goal is ROI on creating level I think from data standpoint from attribution I think what we are seeing from more and more um addresses on the impression level they're looking at more

IPM I think that would be for some reason two years ago or something there was more focus on like CPI's and CPAs but now it's they rolled it back to like again I think optimizing on impression level makes much more sense than probably on a CPA level it's kind of a view eight managers have finally moved on from the fact that looking at their CP ice like back in the day we used to be like God so we paid three dollars and that's it it's a it's not the right way to go you need to be able to understand that the rest of the matrix world and that's why people are looking more in the conversions and more away itself it's the ROI range is so hugely between network-to-network like you could pay $5 plus on Facebook and then on other networks paying 20 cents so it makes a huge difference and that's why the creative and the conversion rates massively vary between

channel and you have to just keep an eye on all of that stuff okay I've been signals that they're about to kick us off the stage so I want to open to questions from the audience if someone has and will do it really really quickly I swear I'm working on a hyper casual games so in terms of you a manager's working on the common strategies what sort of tools do you use for research and crafting these common strategies when it comes to you a interpretive tools for creatures for example now you can use like the very useful Facebook ID library it's likely in interface but you can like get an idea of like what people are doing what are your completion doing and see like the trends that you select for example

if you look at the clerics guide for home escapes you see that their ads are quite different to the look and feel of the actual game and also like if you have this description like with up Annie you have their tool like to check like also at the ad network level so that's the same happening that was what I was the one that was gonna mention yeah it's basically the same as the library on Facebook but it just it's on a network level so you can see all the creators what kind of networks they certain partners are using for certain oasis so it can give you a claims like okay if you want to open markets or you want to you want to self launch something you can see ok a similar game is as a lot of traffic from ex-partner in this kind of country so it can help you with defining your strategy and in the market you want to go to except of the tools that guys I mentioned I'm using Russian KGB Network

Russians everywhere and they know everything so yes she really does at this conference by the way yeah other than a penny since the tower I recommend just but I tend to just play all the games in the market especially the top charts they constantly have evolving top 50 charts in the UK us on the game side of like 90 95 percent hyper casual and someone's I'm more about it's just you get so many of them in each one of those apps so I kind of tend to play tend to buy a lot of different games to see how the ads have been integrated and walking about so showing up there so obviously it's not you have to play a lot of it to work out the market but at least you see a lot of the popular ad so that way okay one last

question anyone No okay so thank you very very much and thank you guys for joining me here on stage it was a very great discussion [Applause] you [Music]