Panel: Mixing it up - Latest Techniques for Innovating in User Acquisition & Retention PGCD#2

I would like to get things started it's half past the hour and yeah timings great and so first up we have a panel which is mixing it up latest techniques for innovating in user acquisition and retention and we've got a great range of panelists on there including apps fly opera event Agora the IO and tilting point which I'll let all of them introduce themselves but first yeah as you can see on the screen we've got a male colleague and good friend Craig Chapel who is now since it's how early some of you might know is our former editor of Pocket Gamer doc bears and Craig will be moderating the whole thing so I'll let him do all of his introductions but it's good to see you Craig we'll be in this digital world yes we're hello everyone thanks the intro appreciate it I'm excited to be here as Sophia just said yeah so we're

gonna do our panel today on mixing it up the latest techniques for innovating in user acquisition and retention so yeah I'm mobile strategist for amia at mobile intelligence firm since the tower and I Sofia said I used to be the editor of Pocket Gamer dot B so I've done a few PG seasoned my time you know how all this works but you're also an expert in this field so we're great motivated to have and to open up our growth track this afternoon or afternoon where we are but second half a day one yes yeah but everything's alright I will bring in the panelists I'll let you do your work as the moderator and introduce all of them and get things going but yeah it's great to have you brilliant see you again albeit not in person no worries so yeah I mean I I just did the intros myself but I please welcome to you all the panelists we've got some excellent and experts

here today so if you could all wear introduce yourselves perhaps start with Clara and then we'll go through the powers happy - hey I'm Clara Clara Copeland the director of sales for Apps flyer and looking or overseeing the the Central European market I've been in the industry now for close to 10 years actually started off my career in San Francisco in ad tech back in the days working on the monetization side for fiber so back then got people to optimize their their ad revenue and via mediation and then moved to Berlin about four years ago joining Apps flyer building out the the Berlin office and yeah excited to be here that's great that's it yep hey everybody I'm Sid Sharma I'm the director of developer relations and partner engineering at

Agora I've been in developer relations for almost five years now so you know talking to developers across different verticals from you know gaming but social and enterprise developers as well so different targets target audiences for developers and really understanding what's important to them and and it really particularly focuses on the developer journey in terms of you know developer acquisition developer retention and developer experience as well you know the three key components of what you know we do on a day to day basis so great to be here and excited to be a part of the panel FX it's I rocket yeah hi i'm rockford yep i am the director of growth marketing at tilting point where i basically oversee user acquisition strategy for our portfolio of games and oversee the sort of like testing a platform and policy for

admitting new games into our portfolios prior to that I was on the network side working at at action doing you know campaign optimization account management things like that so I've been in the mobile industry now for about six years now and yeah excited to talk about some new trends in the EU and retention and last but not least we have Eric hey I'm Eric Bryant I'm with a company called opera vent on the CEO and co-founder it's kind of an influencer marketing technology company and I've been in the industry for a little while I was early on at fungal and apps fire as well as working on the Nam signed at Sega and EA thanks everyone so we're gonna break this talk up into two parts so the first part with the last you're gonna talk about user acquisition and then we'll go into retention in the meantime if anyone has any questions please use the Q&A I'll be keeping an eye so perhaps um we can

bring up during the during the panel but if not we'll all raise those questions at the end when we have time for questions so the first question just has a broad general question I guess you know what are the latest trends in the user acquisition space that developers should be aware of are going to be key to their marketing efforts we start off with Clark yeah sure so I think in terms of trends I think what we've been seeing an app steyr specifically when we're looking at you know the the networks that users that that marketers are buying on it's that people are shifting budgets a little bit of way from from Google and Facebook more towards a few and new players right we're looking at Apple search ads also players like take talk that have recently come into the market and have been showing some promising results so I think generally

there's there's a trend towards just trying out new sources diversifying your traffic portfolio to really optimize your campaigns and really figure out the right mix for for your individual business okay to kind of build on that too yeah obviously like channel diversity is becoming huge with you know Facebook and Google becoming a lot more expensive just in the recent months but I think it's hardly a new trend but I mean like obviously creative optimization is going to be huge especially on those platforms that are getting more and more expensive you know if the CPM is in general are going up the more installs that you can squeeze out of those media buys the better regardless of channel but I think you know a big trend is just going to be able to just kind of flick really systematically optimize your creatives make sure that you know you all your creatives are to your audience and in really driving you know the most efficient sort of like

I PMS that you can drive on your campaign regardless of whatever channel here you're advertising him and Erica sits anything yeah I think we can get into it more later but we are seeing kind of creativeness a lot around you a on like influencers or getting people to you kind of promotes promote their apps or games and it's not aiming there we're kind of seeing money go away from the duopoly of Google and Facebook and going to other places like tik-tok or just like whether it's twitch or you know influencers on YouTube or influencers on Twitch all right cool so we mention there a few times about the main channels Facebook and Google and they're moving and then developers moving away to other channels such as tic toc or snapchat or App Store search ads but you know people really

still or should people still be focused on Facebook and Google and then how do you really fit the other channels in like are they all they really work putting your money in and would you advise a lot of questions here and what you advise just putting your money into those if you're a small developer are you really still going to look at Facebook and Google unlike a chairman and that's I would say most of the time for most developers Facebook Google and Apple search ads will be sufficient you know like until you start getting into like hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and spend you can get by on those channels pretty effectively and at a pretty decent row us I think that's probably not going to change for for a little while there are obviously some other platforms that are showing promise like a tilting point we're seeing a lot of promise in snapchat they've really come a long way in terms of like they're targeting tools and

lookalike tools over the past year or so and you know I'll be they have a much smaller audience than say you'll be able to find on Facebook and Google we're getting a lot of the really kind of premium row us and like LTVs that that we come to expect from the duopoly so I think that's you know really really promising channel if you're really looking to diversify outside of the duopoly or even Apple search ads but and I think you know upcoming you know tick-tock is obviously gonna be huge everybody's trying to figure it out right now it's super interesting just because of how many users are on the platform how young the user base is and everything but for tilting point at least so far their their ads platform has been a little bit too finicky to be reliable I don't think they're they're whole ad product is quite there yet but I think it would be you know impossible to say that like it would be foolish to say that they're not going to become a huge player in UA and year right I mean like they've just got so much potential that's so much AI and

machine learning behind their product and I think like once they really really figure out how to how to do you a and and target target their audience is a little bit more sophisticated Li then that's going to be a huge huge potential player that'll probably even be able to rival Facebook and Google in just a short amount of time yeah it's interesting we take talking they got uh over two billion downloads now just on the App Store on Google Play and believe they just hired and you see specifically for tik toks so yeah definitely gonna be big moves by them but I don't know if anyone else wanted to add anything to that question so Clara lawyer no I I think Rockford already already said it quite well I mean look and in in general ride I think it would be premature to say that Google and Facebook aren't aren't like the strong players for a long time because it all comes down to targeting capabilities and they just have incredible data and incredible

capabilities and in the end it come it all comes down to finding the right balance and and understanding where you can get you know quality versus quantity and and who provides you with the best combination of the two and and there's a variety of players that can offer you you both right and you just have to kind of experiment with it but I think if you're a small developer and you probably want to play it safe and you just want to yeah you just want to have a safe bet on getting good users then you're probably gonna start off with Facebook and Google and they're they're getting more expensive but but you just know what you're getting not saying that that other players can't can't deliver the same results but it's just gonna take a little bit more time and and in the beginning we just see a lot of people starting off with those two partners and and yeah adding an apple search ads into the mix and then slowly diversifying their portfolio because

it's also a question of resources in the end because you have to manage all of that as well so that's what we're saying on our end not much different to add on here but you know the thoughts around tick-tock a lot of gaming company sir are trying to figure out how to crack tik-tok because it's a little bit of a different platform and so that's one of the reasons why we're working with some influencers to create some creatives for that platform but yeah it's it's when you're starting out Facebook and Google are the easiest or self-serve you know get up and running very quickly you've got some great targeting options but you know once they start getting expensive or once this you know creatives aren't working as well or or you just want to get more creative there's you know there's different options to reach out to but it's there's just so much that Facebook and Google can offer that it's kind of difficult to experiment when you're small so when you're testing your

ads to see what's most effective but what is it you should actually be looking for are you looking for ads that should drive the most users or ads that drive the most quality users and then how do you track that yeah I'll take that one because that's essentially what we what we do as an attribution company I think number one I think it comes down to strategy right if you're attractive if you're trying to get a high volume then you're obviously just looking looking for for a network that can drive a ton of installs but I think not only recently right over the past few years we've seen a massive shift in in terms of looking not only in in install numbers but actually looking at quality metrics right retention you're looking at loyal users you're you're obviously also looking at your return on your investment right who's actually bringing me users that are valuable now whatever that means to to

you that can be just users that are frequently visiting your app it can be users who are generating a lot of money it can be a combination of both but in general you want to make sure you measure every install that's coming in and you then look at the user over over the lifetime of to really understand the the quality of users every single campaign is delivering to you so you can optimize that and continue to buy by users that you that you really want to acquire real quick I'll chime in because with influencers is actually there's kind of a fine line here where an influencer can push an app and if they're paid for performance then they may just do like a contest or something just to get a bunch of installs but if if it's not relevance to maybe their content there may just be a lot of installs but with people just kind of not even getting past the tutorials so

it's really important when dealing with influencers that you you know what you're getting yourself into if if you're paying that influencer for every one that gets to level 10 and that's a little bit better but I think that with influencers especially it should be there should be more of a focus on Ruez because we've seen with other companies that they've just been burned by influencers that just get them a sheer amount of installs and it doesn't really turn turn into much yeah and that's actually an adding to that point Eric I think something that we also measure and that's a critical component is uninstall' rates because you really want to understand okay not only how many installs that someone or an influencer or a network deliver but how many of those users actually are sticking around or are uninstalling my app not only as kind of a quality metric but but then you can also use that to then retarget specific users right that might have been valuable but uninstalled your app

so it gives you an understanding of quality but it also gives you an opportunity to really go back and and get those users back into your app if they were valuable to you in the first place sir sorry well I think I'm gonna take kind of an opposite stand honestly I think you know most of the time for obviously this is gonna be a different situation for say like influencers where there's a little bit more kind of play there but I feel like most of the time you know the the job of the creatives is just to get users to convert and the job of the coin you know quality really is the job of like the targeting in the ad set right so I mean like the better that you can kind of like target your users and tailor your ads to your audience the the better I mean like every audience is going to have a different reaction to a different type of AD and at the end of the day you're trying to you know squeeze as many users out of certain value buckets right I mean if you can

get you know a bunch of users to convert at a much higher rate in your high quality bucket then you can in your low quality boquete that's going to be an overall net when and it's gonna be the same in your lower quality buckets as well but but I'm I don't know I feel like it's maybe an unpopular opinion that you know like ads don't really drive quality users in the same way that like targeting does but the speaking you know just from personal experience like I've I've never really thought about the ad that I clicked on when I made a purchase in a mobile game you know it was it was about like how the game you know resonated with me and how much I enjoyed it and everything and that seldom has much to do with the creative if it was appealing in a Drew me in and he got me to install than I did its job and then from there if the if the game was made for me and is a good fit for what I was interested in and then I'm going to become a higher value user for that game I was quickly gonna say I agree it does

depend on the creative only in certain circumstances when those creatives don't show anything around the game which are very popular but I do agree with Rockford on on his points so narrowing in a bit more on influencer marketing is it isn't really worthwhile doing at the moment considering you can you can just go into a Facebook and Google or perhaps another channel and and then what's kind of the most cost effective way to try those use users to your mobile game through that so yeah influencer marketing can be very tricky and very challenging and I think it is worth testing out but before you get too deep you need to kind of understand what you're getting into and and what I mean by that is what are the KPIs are the KPIs kind of like we described does it just sheer amount of installs is it people that get to level 10 is it row as and

the influencers don't like being paid for performance so what we do it I'll prevent is we kind of are the middleman and we know what's kind of what results that we can get so we will pay the influencers usually not by performance but we sometimes can take you know performance costs from advertisers so it is worth trying out in different fashions and one shouldn't go to like a ninja or you know or a huge person on YouTube if they don't know exactly what they're getting into because it can be very costly and I gave an example of doctor disrespect when he did a World of Tanks on his channel and didn't drive many installs at all it just wasn't a good fit for his audience so if you know the audience's that the influencer it could be good also we work with mostly smaller to medium sized influencers which have higher engagement and that can be much more worth it and the last

point I will say is that influencer marketing because it's been such a challenge that's why we developed the product where it doesn't rely on the influencer to generate installs or to post they actually create the content offline and and we cut that into an ad that can be then used on Facebook or Google those ad networks we talked about so we're utilizing like these influencers and these people um and how authentic they are but just not relying on them to post a correct app so I think right or or to get people um you know to get people to level 10 or to get you know drive real ass but I think that there are some ways that influencers can be effective yeah and just to chime in here actually we've seen at Agora we've seen a lot of you know our customers looking into influencer marketing more and more especially with the micro influencers when you're talking about a niche market right whether you're talking about RPG games or shooting games whatever it is

right it doesn't even have to be gaming but really when you're talking about the micro influence or the influencer that you're you're looking to convert users into active users right it's really about the campaign that you run around it from from what we've seen the most effective type of influencer marketing from our customer base is really coming from like you know the the engagement that you offer with influencer so for example some of our customers are running campaigns with these micro influencers to actually jump on the game and be able to play along with you know some of the some of the you know active active gamers so I think there's a lot of different ways you can use that influencer community to not only convert your users and get them to install the game but become active users and look forward to you know a certain event or you know a certain milestone that they reach and they can interact with that micro influencer that they look you know look up to or want to want to converse with so I think there's a lot of hidden

gems around influencer marketing as a whole and it's gonna be more and more interesting to see especially with tik-tok and and other social apps how can we engage these you know users with these influencers even further okay great thanks we actually have a couple audience questions and then we'll start getting onto retention so one question is I don't know if you if you can all see you this but what ad creative themes and in brackets new versus Pro fail etc bring the hi bring the highest quality users with higher attention and high return on adspend if anyone can answer that from from my experience and also what I've heard from other gaming clients for casual games that new versus Pro are the fail are very effective and we're trying to replicate that with like actual influencers or actual people who are

playing but those ones can be very effective from from what I've heard yeah that mirrors my experience to the pro or the progress new generally gets pretty high engagement rates and and drives a high amount of quality users but look again to my point earlier it kind of depends on who you're targeting like if you're targeting a low value bucket you're still gonna get low value users but as long as you're you know acquiring them at the right rate then all is good I think one quick thing I forgot to add on was that the fail is a very interesting thought because I and many other people watch influencers or watch people because of their fails like I mean there's like failarmy there's all these websites and then you know I watch doctor disrespect not because he's like cool but just because I like to see him rage and I think that you know there's there's a very good market for people to see that games can be challenging if you make every single game ads seem easy and you know seem straightforward too

straightforward you know that can only last for so long I think these fail type of videos are pretty helpful and we've actually done a couple of those and they seem to be pretty effective okay thank you and the other question we had was what is a good click-through rate on an ad these days so I'm sure this is pretty quite a wide-ranging question but this depends entirely on the channel like 100% on the channel you know like a lot of reward given your channel so I'll have like excellent click-through rates whereas you know banners might not have good click-through rates at all and so on but I would say if you're if you're running a Facebook campaign just like a your normal run-of-the-mill Facebook campaign if you can get one and a half percent click-through rates that's pretty good okay great thanks all right I wanted to ask Rakatan is that when

calculating you a spends what KPI is should develop these be looking at and what does tilting point typically do and also once about you know should you be focused on day 30 day 60 and the you know I am and I've heard you know day 365 so when we're trying to figure out are you a spoon I mean the most important thing ears like LTV and payback periods I mean without those things it's you're kind of running blind right so understanding like when one does a cohort max out in value and that kind of determines what you should be focusing on whether it's day 30 day 60 whatever like most like very casual games they're like a hyper casual games you know most of those LTV curves flatten out after a couple of weeks right so like a day 90 LTV really doesn't matter as much for those kind of games whereas like an L like an SL g4x kind of game might have an LTV curve that's even two years long right so so it really depends but I think like the

most important thing is to just understand like alright what is the max value that I'm going to get out generally out of a typical cohort and and how long do I have to make that money back basically but I mean outside of just you know Ltd and payback window you know understanding retention profile of the game the CPI and IPM kind of really help us understand the reach and the scale that that game can support because those are gonna kind of inform like how much can we actually buy against this game and remain profitable so but in regard of in regards to focusing on like day 30 or day 90 whatever I think you know it's it's it's obviously important to keep a really close eye on your early return so like your day three is in day sevens day 14s just to make sure that you're staying on the right track but but it's really really important to know like for your games specifically when do cohorts stop returning value and that that is different for every single game and something you're gonna have to understand for your games specifically

but I think if you're keeping a close eye on day one through day 30 and staying on a track that is going to get you to rolls positivity whatever your OS or LTV curve flattens out then you're you're gonna be in good shape okay great thanks so one move on for attention I know there's another question and we'll loop that's that at the end so now that you've got these players for user acquisition and kind of building on what we were just talking about so you've got pre user acquisition all organically keeping them is obviously the next big challenge so does the you a process need to feed into the onboarding so for example you know are you setting player expectations from an ads or not someone console we'll see I'm happy to take it and I mean I'm not a marketer but what we've seen is going back to the whole

uninstall topic right you you want to make sure that you do set expectations with the ad I think everybody right if your ad is misleading and you're downloading and you're downloading a game or or any app that has nothing to do with what was promised it's a very poor user experience and and the likelihood of you then dropping out of the game is very very high so so you do want to make sure that somehow there is an alignment between your your ad and and your actual product and then I think of course then your product needs to deliver and then you need to make sure that you know you you you have that figured out and then I think as the next step and the product is something you can't as a you know as a marketer then you can really influence right but then I think if you're looking at retention then of course you have a few ways of then we engaging those users and making

sure they they stick with with the with the app and and and there's a few smart ways of going about it right you can start off with push notifications etc just to make sure the you get them at the right time and of course you want to make sure the messaging is is optimized as well or you can you know make sure that you you optimize on the conversions when it comes to your your iips etc so there's a lot of ways to to go about it then to make sure the the players actually stick around but I think primarily you want to make sure they the the onboarding process itself is seamless and smooth and you yeah you deliver on your promises the I think Clara hit it directly on the nail so yeah I think you know really just associating the ad to the onboarding experience is very important right show show the users why they downloaded your app right what what

caught their interest in the ad some of the best tactics that I've seen in the gaming industry is really just you know showing you using the starter level as the onboarding sequence right like showing the player how to move around and you know work through the game and understand the controls of the game to get them more familiar so when they dive right into the first level or whatever it is that the actual gameplay itself you know they're already in coma advanced user right so I think really associating that add to the to the gameplay is one of the best type of tactics because you know you're showing them directly what what you're about to get into and again don't give them any false promises right so I think that's the biggest thing is keeping that trust and keeping the expectations level set we know we'll make sure that you won't lose tons of users in the first you know 24 hours or so one quick point I'll make to you is that when working with influencers its

retention is also a major point and as I explained before it can be very difficult so you can give in you've got to think of the long tail when you think of influencers and not just have them promote it and kind of stop you got to have them say hey come join my Alliance and then you can have them like having an alliance with their fans or you know maybe you give them codes the next month to give out or something like that these will help keep the players in or just bring them back okay great I think you all know we've all seen those ads where it's like a big 3d battle of something's going on looks like a console game to go in it's a Sephora strategy so one of the things what is talked about here was you know as a way of retaining players is the social aspects so that kind of a question for Patterson Rock foods can you game be successful in the long term without any social aspects

yeah this topic is very near and dear to me because you know what the I think at Agora that's really what we're trying to do provide real-time engagement especially you know for the gaming area as well as social social apps in general but I I want to go on a limb and say if you're a multiplayer game and you don't have social interaction you're probably not gonna stick around too long and the reason why I'm saying this is I think as we move more and more past this kovat pandemic as well as just you know as the world becomes more virtual right we're spending more and more times on the screen we're losing really touch of reality right now how many interactions have you had in the past month in person right very I hope few do very little and you guys are all social distancing but that really shows that where the world is headed I think as a RvR develop even further as people spend more and more time on their screen they want that social component of their real you know real world really kind of ported to the

virtual world and you're able to have those social interactions and talk with your friends or your virtual friends online and while you're playing sorry and while you're playing the game so I think you know and I know it's a strong opinion but I think if you're a multiplayer game and you don't have social interactions enabled in your app already I think you're already behind the curve yeah and to build on that I mean like that's all 100% true we see it reflected in a lot of the games in tilting points portfolio like is it possible to have long-term success without it yeah absolutely but it like Sid was saying if you're a multiplayer game and you don't have social aspects you're you're toast I mean that's what people like about multiplayer games but I mean just in general even if it's not a multiplayer game having an ability to join like a a club or a guild within even like a casual game where you can help other people out loan them resources whatever

it just really drives a sense of community that really makes players more sticky and you know this has been true for a while for a lot of our games the games with the strongest communities tend to perform better but especially in like a postcode reality people are looking for that community and one of the best ways to kind of give that community to somebody is with in the games that they already love so I think it's definitely if you have an opportunity to stick a social aspect into your game and it fits with the style of game absolutely absolutely go for it a question I have for Clara is that how can you use the data that you have on engagement and retention in your game and then feed that back into your user acquisition efforts sorry where's a mute yeah so so generally right all the data that we're measuring you can funnel back in real

time to your partners and they can then use that to optimize on their end so I think that is the first thing right whether it's about building a lookalike audiences etc right the more data your partners have the the better they can target and get you similar users and then at the same time coming back to the retargeting topic you can of course then also use the data of your users to build segments and then target them with specific messaging or offerings to keep them in your app or also to get users back into the app that might have uninstalled you have the ability course like when it comes to retargeting people always are worried about the additional spend they say hey it's quite pricey and how do wait like how do we even know if a user that's being be targeted is actually then performing better than a user like wouldn't the user who hasn't seen seen the ad

actively the exact same way how do we know and that's essentially then where incremental ad testing comes in right where you want to split your your retargeting like segments into groups sent them to to individual partners have a control group and really see how the control group is behaving compared to the the users that are seeing ads and then to see okay was there an incremental lift and what is it and is it worth it for me to invest additional budget in order to to keep these users because they might be generating revenue for me further down the line so so I think those are the things that people are now looking into and in incrementality right now definitely is a huge huge topic and I think in gaming specifically be targeting is something that not a lot of people are tapping into just yet so it's it's gonna be interesting to see how that how that's

being adopted further down the line okay and I guess one last question for me and then we've got a couple audience questions so what are some of the benchmarks that developers should be looking for so for example what retention rates should you be looking for for a successful mobile game that's a very broad question so I guess in your answers like maybe narrow it down to the genre I guess perhaps rock fitness yeah sure so I mean the the longer the better obviously I would say if you can keep a week one retention in like it's 30% you're doing tremendously you know but what type of it is that like a typical casual game I think you know like I mean not trying to get too specific because I mean like again it really really is John or specific but I mean you know I've seen numbers for like hyper casual games aiming for 50% you know day seven and

stuff like that's but I mean like typically if you can keep above 30% you're doing pretty good at day seven that is and then longer-term it really just kind of depends a whole slew of factors for your games even within just like casual games or within specific genre it's like a de 30 or a day 60 can be wildly different can you know just relative to how much content does your game have and and things like that so like you know if you're if your game only has say a month worth of content and you know you're keeping a pretty good day 30 retention then great but I mean obviously you're not going to have a stellar day 90 retention it's your if you've only got you know one month of content within the game so but I think if you can you know like keep that day seven healthy it'll at least give you a clear indicator that you're on the right track and that you should keep kind of you know keep keep working on the idea anyone else want to add anything to that but the Norris alright we got a few

audience questions and that's had frog Birds it kind of builds on what you were just saying so do push notifications help increase retention in casual games as they do in work games yes 100% so I mean I think about this all the time and one of the things that I think tilting point does really well is it's just like live ops and player engagement but I mean you know most people have a hundred apps on their phone it's it's really easy to just forget about the game that you installed last week if it's just out of sight it's super easy to put it out of mind so push notifications regardless of genre regardless of what you're doing as long as you're keeping it relevant and you're not just you know every single push notification is like hey we're still here it says it's a solid strategy for really any game any type of game that you're running I want to chime in here I think yeah I think Rockford hit it on the nail as well I think and another aspect to look

at it is you know I think that social component going back to that topic your friends can act like you know real life social push notifications right your friend pings you saying hey let's jump on word with friends for example let's jump on bunch for example that that's another method that that is not the traditional push notification but we like to look at it as the real-life push notification as your friends are trying to ping you to play the game right so I think push notifications do a great job but that social component as well can can definitely help bring your users back to the app and increase those retention rates yeah just to build on that personal anecdote I had not played on chest comm for probably over a year year and a half and once the lockdown started my friend just challenged me the notification popped up on my app and boom I'm back in just like that after a year and a half so I mean like it's very real especially with the the social component or multiplayer games chess

tocome notifications are very effective so another question we got is there any trip to any tips and tricks for increasing day 1 retention yeah I mean I think again this isn't like that early day one that that first week is where push notifications are really kind of like the most effective I think so yeah I mean like reminding people of their daily reward for the game or you know that their powerup had been completed or whatever it may be but I mean like just remind people that you know there's stuff going on in the background in your game and then you should come back and very engage with it so but I outside of that you know I think day one is probably a little early to try retargeting campaigns or anything like that but I think push notifications are going to be your best bet there I'm not sure if we have casual specialists

here but before I'm wrong the question is what is the typical and best Rojas for ad heavy games like quite the casual if anyone's able to answer that but I think we're all generally when I was at Sega we had some not hyper casual but pretty casual games they were ad heavy but we just didn't do any UA for it so I don't I can't speak upon that sorry okay okay and then we got I think we had just a couple other questions trying to work out which ones we've actually answered because I haven't been dismissing with it are there other it's going back to use right position are there any user acquisition techniques or areas of research you can suggest for new indie developers

um I think you know just like it audience building and audience research like you know as an indie developer you know the kind of person that you want to be playing your game or that will you know your game will resonate with the most so figuring out where those people are and how to target them in the most efficient way is probably gonna be the most impactful thing you can do I mean there's obviously a slew of other other things but I say if you focus on just one thing you know understanding how lookalike audiences work on Facebook understanding you know how like bidding strategy on the video networks work and so on it is just going to be huge because you know just being like the biggest the biggest and hardest thing to do anyway is being able to acquire players at a cost that's lower than their LTV right and if you know your audience and know where you can find them and if you know you can find them in three different places and one of

them is gonna be the most expensive one who's gonna be the cheapest that's gonna be your best chance at red really scaling and remaining profitable okay thank you I guess we're pretty good time I'm sorry Clara are we gonna add yeah I just wanted to say I mean without promoting our own brand but especially if you're an indie developer we have it's called our mama brand it's essentially just a free content that we provide where we pair up with with the the best experts in the field across all different verticals right whether it's gaming or any other app vertical and there's a lot of interesting like just it's just a knowledge base essentially with yeah about around hue a techniques and and and other interesting facts and there's like a mama mama boards where people explain individual strategies so so I'd highly recommend checking that out and just just to to get some additional

insights because people do tend to share a lot and it's it's really cool stuff we'll do one more one more question so Duke banners static ads gifts which says gifs html5 ads still work and if so do they drive good retention and return on adspend so I guess it's kind of between that and maybe video playable is the question so I think again it kind of just depends what you mean by still work right I mean like obviously you can get users using all of these creatives in my experience video is still King and it works the best but you know static ads and banners of course have their place I think anything but I do think that like anything with movement so if you are running gifts html5 something that's going to grab your attention better than just a static image on the page statics

are just so much easier to tune out so if you've got something that pops or something that moves anything to draw the eye is is going to give you a leg up just to clarify something before Clara so-and-so I just wanted a bit more clarification on what matters oh mama it's it's an abbreviation for mobile and attribution marketing analytics so it's just our own brand in terms of educational content you can find it on apps fire calm and just look for mama the mama library essentially or if you google mama library ass flyer it will come up and you'll have all the content there wondering if that was a legit question or an app slayer [Laughter]

alright thank you for that thanks everyone being on the panel I guess Sophia here [Music] thanks Craig thank you to all of the panelists yeah a really interesting and fascinating discussion so yeah thank you all for being with us yeah thanks so much everyone we appreciate I think appreciate it thanks guys thank you much you