Panel: Tactics for Low CPI and High User Quality

[Music] thanks guys for taking out the time start off with quick introductions to give you guys a sense of who we are on the panel so I can start my name is Chirag I'm leading gaming and entertainment relationships at sensor tower great mobile data analytics platform we're based out of San Francisco so great to be moderating this panel why don't we start off with the honest give us a little bit about yourself a little bit more about next games my name is James I'm heading the UA next games Helsinki based studio we are mainly known for working debt-based titles no-man's-land and our world and we're now working towards a new stranger

things game in partnership with Netflix my name's Sam from snapchat head up our performance team for advertising solutions internationally hit stay really just to meet with some of the up-and-coming gaming companies to show them an alternative to the duopoly and show you how there are alternate sources out there to have success hi my name is Mohammad sitar I'm the CEO and founder of infinity games we we develop minimalist and relaxing games for mobile platforms hi I'm Chris I'm the co-founder of blooms a poor fifteen-year-old independent game studio largely based in Southeast Asia cool cool thanks guys I mean this panel is about tactics in the you a space how to generate high-quality users so I want to just start off with how do you guys measure ROI at your internal companies what sorts of metrics do you guys care about having and I always try to type of

games which is more like mid core to core it's not always easy to do this and they want to have like a bunch of other metrics we combine more holistic campaign approach to optimize yeah and then often we obviously work with a lot of customers across a lot of different verticals I think what the interesting things we're seeing is this massive shift away from volume based bidding so trying to just get CPMs and CPI traffic and really seeing this tectonic shift into Rona's I think realizes still a very broad term and it means as many of a different thing to a different company I think one of the interesting ones at the moment is the hyper casual space which I know quite a few of you in the audience are from and seeing this shift into actually passing back ad revenue data into media platforms like ourselves and starting to optimize not only to

just a cheap CPI where you know you can deliver ads to but actually starting shifting towards those users that you can serve your ad inventory to in the most monetizable and effective way so I think it's a very broad question with a very broad answer but I really think we are just seeing the shift across the industry now from great volume actually where's the value coming from and I think value is what every business has to have that conversation with to work out and then work with media platforms like ourselves or whoever to make sure that you're delivering the right results feel business ultimately to be profitable yeah I agree with you what we what we see is that on a per casual games they tend to target everyone like and from everyone by targeting everyone a specific percentage of people should like the game install the game and have fun with it but their targeting is very very broad and what we are doing and what we are trying to target a specific audiences similar to

the best of our audiences in our games so the people who buy our games the people who spend more money on our games what we do is try to find these audiences and find similar audiences tuned to these ones and that's what's driving as a the highest rowers right now and our focus right now is rose previously we were basically mixing organic impact from from installs with the paid user acquisition sometimes we had negative robots but in the end overall our our arrow I was positive but this this new shift allow us to to target the specific people who are willing to buy our products in this case our our games so the question was what metric are we are we really concerned with for us it's all about retention right if you can get your attention numbers up everything else kind of follows by far when you're when you've got and we do deeper

projects we don't do hyper casual games usually we have a couple but most of what we do our larger sort of mid core games strategy games that kind of thing something that people's going to put some real time into and it's way easier to have somebody who's already invested in your project to sell him something as opposed to trying to get somebody who has never given you money before and get money out of them and so those retention numbers the longer you can get those retention numbers it's not just about you have more users it's about you have users that are going to continue contributing money to your project and so for us we're very very interested in long term retention numbers for us that's by far the biggest metric that's that's great to hear I want to kind of tag on to what Mohammed said about organic side I think a lot of people don't focus on the organic front you love to kind of get a sense from your guys's perspective how valuable is ASO and the organic side to your user acquisition business in our case or we used to do organics more on Android because whenever we used to generate an install that was paid on

Android it seemed like Google was our friend and they generated an extra install just for us organically but what I see is that this is this trend in terms of organics is decreasing because Google is also running ads within their their in their platform and makes us focus strictly on robots you have to spend money in in vine users and those users that you buy they have to convert into enter into positive revenue for you into profit so the less we rely on organics the best we used to rely a lot on organics on our free games but now that we are shifting more into premium games as well we are not much into into enjoying these organic traffic I'll make a point that I think I think you have to be very clear about what kind of game you're talking about you know earlier this this morning somebody was showing me their new game and it was you know literally just do you know these super super hyper casual games and

on games like that trying to to get organic traffic based off keywords but what's a keyword for I mean like how do you how do you draw somebody to your product with that what would that keyword even be right as opposed to if you've got a deeper project you know a game that you know that has a lot more to it that somebody can actually be interested in maybe you have a go kart racing game or something like that that actually has a theme that people might be interested in or a game design type like a like a card based game or something like that that that somebody might actually be searching for I'm not sure that a lot of people are searching for your I don't I've never in my life searched for that game so in that sense how do you expect to buy keywords for that it doesn't make any sense people don't search for that they get that from other places so as if you're doing super hyper casual stuff like you say it's going to make more sense to just go out and buy users because nobody's looking

for that but if you've got a project that has some real appeal to some group of people then that suddenly starts to make a lot more sense does that make sense yeah I would say when organics is extremely important I agree that it's really important like to understand which metric we are talking about so it's not generic organic generation but is the organic apple if that comes from paid you a butthole so in general about all the marketing activities and we try to emphasize a lot in organics and by this we mean mainly store page conversion optimization so no not so much about keywords even though it is important but let's say this takes about like five or ten percent of our time station is extremely important for the organic apple a photo so for bait as we all know like the most paid activity now is like auction-based an auction you don't play alone right so it's better to

focus on the things that you can optimize and depend entirely on you versus the things that you compete with others that you can always lose there's always gonna be even when we're spending three high patches for example some periods there's always gonna be somebody a bit higher or we hire budgets than us so that's why we try a lot about like the spec page commercial yeah and I think on our end is always about trying to again you should have not wakes up on basket it should be a fine balance of paid organic and that I think even when you look at paid people get so hung up on performance and actually what we're seeing a lot of new apps which to be honest and stuff like a mindful apps or wealth and helping these are such a new vertical in the industry as a whole actually hone to do something what brand awareness and branding is actually also coming increasingly important in a number of kind of the economies and I think if you look at the gaming space in particular there's a really interesting one because again there's so many verticals or sub verticals within the

gaming sector itself is so hard to give like a broad overarching theme to it but I really think we're again the ones who are gonna win is finding that right balance of paid organic and then within their pay channels brand performance and then even within the performance channels what's driving that upper funnel and then further down the funnel activities because again putting all your eggs in one basket is never gonna make you successful important organic it's really important but I wouldn't advise less in general to build a business case or a product based on your gun of the expected organic traffic so I think the product needs to be working metrics that are measurable and for which you can do something so unfortunately let's say these are mainly the paid associated metrics right and then organics is something that will come as long as we're doing everything else right including the game being like

the product to be fun and that's that's great that's great to hear creatives I mean you're starting to see a lot of interesting creative types you know there was a huge explosion on playable using rewarded videos where does creatives stack in your you a strategies how important is creative and optimization or creators especially I think I saw I think a broad level what we're seeing across the board is I think every media platform says this so not gonna pretend that this is our golden rule and only ours but creative is becoming increasingly increasingly more important if you think about the generation or people's user experience on phones now mobile experience it's no longer forgivable and that's really what it boils down to if you aren't gaining people's attention on doing something which is initially captivation to them you're going to lose nothing snapchat for us when we launched our first kind of round of ads everyone was thinking we're crazy our ads are 3 to 10 seconds

and they're like can you get a message across in 3 to 10 seconds the fact of the matter is this has now become the norm within the industry increasingly more and more of our competitors are introducing story ad type formats and this is because you can get your message across in a short amount of space it's just key to be leading with things like you here a message what exactly are people signing up to I'm being very upfront with your creative and I think where often I encourage our advertisers to focus on is actually building out a creative resource internally because it's incredibly powerful and effective to do this and I think all of the media platforms are making it easier more than ever to create ads is not just ourselves we've got a fantastic tool sorry for the plug of it snapchat publisher it's an amazing tool to create ads within ten seconds but all the media platforms are making it easy for you to create these high quality visual ads and to be honest I'd really just don't think there's an excuse now to have a bad ad like it's that those

days are gone and it's because it's what users expect and if you're going against that grind you can do all the bidding you can do all the targeting you want but you're not going to win in those auctions I'd like to pull back a little bit about this question and I want to talk about it from a user perspective right one of the one of the issues that we had at one point was we had some creatives that were very successful in bringing us users yep but our retention numbers were really low right what we had what we realized was the most important thing about your creative is not is this a good creative does it bring us a lot of people it's does it bring us exactly the right people right and and the big thing that you need to be looking at when you're putting your creatives together is who exactly am i targeting that's going to come to my product they're gonna like it they're gonna stay they're gonna enjoy it right and and I've seen a lot of people that are that their head they haven't made that Lodge and it's when

you say it out loud it sounds really obvious right but a lot of people don't make that logical jump and they're just like how do I get the most people to see my game but you paying for that right and if you're paying for them to come and then they're getting something that they're not wanting that's a that's really a bad value proposition for you right so the issue is not can I make the best creative or the flashiest creative or the most interesting creative not that all that's bad right but it's does this creative perfectly explain to the user what it is they're going to get right and in some cases and I come from a smaller indie dev background and you know as a studio that makes smaller indie stuff sometimes you need to make sure that it's clear that the thing that they're getting is going to be simple or indie or rough or you know if you're offering a you know and I hate to say it like this but if you're offering a be game yeah and you're making creatives that are selling an AAA game they're they're not gonna be fooled

right they're gonna come and they're gonna get your B game and they're gonna say well this is not what you sold me right and they're gonna leave right but if you're advertising something that you know maybe it doesn't have the best graphics in the world but it's got really interesting gameplay and you sell it on that and people come with the right expectations then you can get really good results out of this and I think too many people missed that logical step if that makes sense that's great point I couldn't agree more and I think a good example of that is the amount of advertisers that first conversation we have for them is are you actually looking to target and what makes a unique for that individual and it's funny because a lot of them don't think that way and it's it is like you said you think it's common sense but I think often that's where a lot of people go wrong is they sometimes maybe are thinking too broad I'm on the mix and I completely agree with you it's about again understanding how that message going to land for the different even segments within your if it's different kind of users for different experiences and I hate to dwell on this too much but

I have one more point that this begins very early in the process right all the way at the point where you're deciding what game you're gonna make right when when you're figuring out what is it I'm about to build you should be asking those questions about well who's gonna play it and how do i target that person and is there a place that I can target that person and it's not always buying Google Ads it's not always buying Facebook ads there's a lot of different ways you can target a user those are the ones that we go to because that's simple and easy and we know how to do it but there are other there are other channels that you can go get users from which are not necessarily all free you know there are other ways you could pay for users and you should be having that discussion with your team all the way at the point where you're figuring out what are we about to build and a lot of people miss that step and they build a whole project and they get it up to two beta state and then they're like okay how are we going to sell this and that's a very late point in the project to have that conversation is a very important metric

especially for the way the platforms are optimizing automating the campaign's but one thing that I believe is creating frustration in general is that the way the industry is evolving and the way the profile of a gamer is evolving it is not as easy as it was before to have a very specific persona let's say product or per game so when you have like multiple let's say let's take our our titles like our world or even like Pokemon go with a similar similar title different personas and type of gamers that are being attracted and are retaining and monetizing with these types of games so in order to create a creative that is gonna be appealing to all of them at the same time that's like extremely hardly even like impossible to do so then the

solution to that is to try to optimize the campaigns and or die narrow down the audiences without making them tomorrow with very specific creatives for these particular audience then the frustration comes when the network's let's play say Facebook snapchat Google they don't promote like don't give more volume to the creatives with a higher click-through rate and when you are optimizing everything based on our rosters I think is the absolute let's say advice I would give a lot of internal analysis especially attention to data plugged into creatives to be able to find exactly which ones which graves you should be insisting even wait to get pairwise that you want that's great that's great I mean Sam being here from snapchat I mean this is an interesting thing you're seeing you know traditionally a lot of the ad spend is going to still the large

networks you're thinking Facebook's you a C's we're to like the newer and network stack in their snapchat tik-tok where do you guys put those into your own user acquisition strategies I'm a biased on this one yeah I think for me again the fact of the matter is the duopoly is real if you look at where the majority of marketing dollars is going regardless of what's a - you look at being kind of more traditional brands why are the way through to digital structures and kind of theop economy it's still within kind of the two big the mammoths I think for us really trying to launch our platform into the market it's been really interesting meeting with loads of different UA teams loads of different media companies across the globe who to be honest first and foremost they're not necessarily even aware that we have an advertising platform the amount of times I meet someone and we've been live now for about three years and I meet someone in they're like oh you have ads on snapchat and I'm like yeah we've had them a while might seem pretty odd in a good job but

the fact of the matter is all of these platforms are really kind of looking to open their doors and make it easier and more accessible and I think for you as marketers it's really key if you'd stay on top of it I think it's increasingly harder because there's so many networks out there but if you want to be achieving great success across the board it's like I said you can't have reliance on two companies you can't have all of your eggs in two baskets because what happens if one of those words disappear overnight and I think for us what we're seeing is working with a lot of these advertisers hand-holding them getting used to building ads for a different network because we are different we have started to see is actually we're competing and actually becoming sometimes people second or first largest you a channel so if for us it's obviously a very broad question how to do it but my key advice years is not just saying snapchat it's all other platforms out there I heard a couple of

gaming companies discussing Pinterest today like this loads of different platforms out there is on usua manages to trial test and see what works for your business because your audience may not be spending most their time now on where most your ads are being served as you were saying there are there are different ways to lower your costs it may not be only true and true Facebook ads and the thing is that when you have more platforms and more audience available you can decrease your CPI's because you can target people that otherwise would not be possible there are people who use Facebook on a daily basis but people there are other people who just use snapchat or tik-tok and going into these trending platforms might be the best way to lower your costs and to reach audiences that were not possible to reach in any other ways I want to add something from an indie perspective and again I do stuff really cheap I run a little indie studio we do indie marketing a lot of times we don't have you know it's not that I don't want

to be on Facebook and buying a bunch of Facebook I can't afford the kind of ad budgets that king.com can write so we have to look at other ways of doing it and one thing that you can look at doing is going and looking at other and again I apologize for the in deenis of this but some Indies may enjoy it going and looking at other titles that are of similar I guess quality to what you're doing right and say look here's a game that's kind of in the same it's fighting in the same world that we're fighting in and go look at where they got press look at where they got YouTube videos look at who's streaming them right and a lot of times what you'll see is those are quite small channels right there's a bunch of YouTube video makers that are making game making videos for games that are similar to the game that I'm making right now and they've got small audiences to two hundred to a thousand people right not huge popular PewDiePie style people but but they're out there and they're extremely targeted right and those are people that are interested they're committed to that and it's for

the cost of a couple steam keys right I can go send these guys some emails and say look hey we want to do a video of our game we all have one of our developers come talk to you right oh you want a live stream our game we can have somebody come to your live stream and sit in your chat and talk to you about our game these are things that you can do it doesn't cost anything cost a little bit of time but these are things that you can do that are directly going to bring you users right and I think one of the problems is we go directly to that where do I go by users space in our head and there's a lot of other ways to go out and get users by putting in some elbow grease or putting in some time we've had really good results going to you know small-scale streamers people who have maybe 200 to 300 people watching them at any given time and saying look we're gonna have a couple of our developers show up in your live stream talk to you about it play a multiplayer game with you while you're playing and they eat that up right and and it cost us what a couple steam keys it's nothing so I mean there's there's a lot of stuff I have another and that has had really good Rock with

Reddit actually reddit ads by the way our dirt cheap and you can focus right down to if you have a community that that makes sense for your game if you're making a game about I don't go carts again right there there's go kart Redditt and if you if you know how to do reddit ads well and don't sell to them too hard and go look on Google there's lots of articles about how to do it properly you can go directly to people who love go-karts love stuff about go-karts and get that add directly those people at a fraction of the cost of buying those keywords from the duopoly as you say I would say I see the development of these platforms like snapchat is an extremely positive development for the for the industry mainly because I think that in this type of platforms like Facebook Google snapchat Twitter each other we're able each one of the places that we as marketers we can touch upon and have more meaningful connection with with the users and even though now like

these days especially with automation coming up he's not that apparent as in the past but I do think that user acquisition is a marketing function and I do not believe in the fully let's say removing these like user acquisition function towards do things that specific marketing traditional marketing techniques will make a difference in the future and this can be applied much in a much more meaningful and measurable way in platforms like social watts scrape away one thing having speaking with gaming companies seems to be coming up a lot where you're seeing ad networks like up lovin transitioning into gaming companies with their own line studios you also seek snap chat with snap snap jab games how do you how does that make you guys feel do it is there nervousness to spend with those social networks do you consider them now competitors I mean line Studios owns to have in owns

line studios but they are just a single ad network they are plenty more at networks with higher volumes and they would also need to buy users from those ad networks to reach the top charts so they are doing that I'm not sure why other ad companies are not doing the same I don't know I don't know the answer for that but it's working well for them I think they are with many titles on the top charts and probably with the knowledge that they they got from from app loving and it works the thing is is it making anything bad for us as that we are segmenting our audience to a very narrow public probably not so I think it doesn't affect me if I have my own audience and I have mine if I target Miami using look-alikes or using snapchat look-alike tool which is very similar to Facebook I won't be

fighting with them directly so that's not something that that worries me I sleep good well with that anyone else want to add to that yeah I would say that like everything is in the end is performance-based right so as long as the performances there is the same I say about when I'm asked about the fraud everything is performance-based so as long as performance and transparency is there fundamentally were in favor of the pie becoming black I do see the challenge for more like for the other side I'd like to bring us all in the wayback machine to 2005 in the days of premium downloadable casual content on sites like I win and big fish games and game loft in real networks anyone anyone here remember that but did anyone here work in those days back back in those ok all three of you back in those days though there were more than two places to sell

games it was awesome right and in those times when there were more than two places to sell games those companies had to fight for why would you buy a game from Big Fish games instead of real games because they're offering the same content and so their answer to that was well we'll have exclusive content well how do you get exclusive content you get exclusive content by actually paying for it and again I know none of you remember these days but there used to be a day when publishers paid developers to make games I know it's unreal to believe but actually happened and back then there was actual real development money available to developers to make games I know astonishing so looking at this question that you're asking this is exciting for me because as we get you know as the industry has moved towards hey we're gonna make all of our money out of ads having the ad companies the people who are most invested in having content actually want to own content come on they're not gonna run their own game studios and build all their stuff in their own game studios they're gonna externalize that and as they externalize

that there's going to be chances for us developers to have somebody actually pay us to make games again which compared to the absolute show that is development right now sounds absolutely wonderful to me because if anyone here has actually tried to get anyone to pay to develop a game in the last five years you know it's damn near impossible so thing doesn't sound like a negative to me that's great that's great I want to ask you a question about IPs you know you're starting to see companies like Disney going away from gaming and going more on the licensing side you're seeing with a lot of media companies usually utilizing their IPs and licensing it I mean Yanis you know next games traditionally very IP driven how does the IP affect your decision-making on the US side a piece from the like from a marketing point of view out say he is a great marketing tool of course there is no question about it helps in everything from the discoverability searchability store page conversion to lower CBI's

platform relations like everything right but I know the way I see this is an addition so it's an extra advantage or weapon we have and it cannot commensurate or substitute a liking developing a product has to be there like fun balanced position have to be there and then you have the appian you can really is not that is going to save you from doing any other of the rests but of course it's a great tool I think for me on the IP it's what the IP actually is the thing is sometimes gives you a head start in some ways because for instance it for gaming you know certain demographic is interested in a certain IP it means you can target them from off the offset and I think how you work with the IP owner and getting some of that data upfront really can make it more powerful so to me it's how you use the information that you gain from the

IP to then target more effectively on the relevant platforms I think would probably be the best way kurz let's face it there be certain IPS which wouldn't be as primed and ready for my audience but there probably is going to be IPS which again is puff air for us so it's to me it just gives you the head start and know where to start with targeting I have nothing to add that's all just just one point it's a great point but um I think it's also works the other way around so like the way we are using like what we believe actually we are working with a piece is like for building up on the IP so we rely only on the on the user page or the fan page of the IP to become our gamers but we're going to create new Bey new gamers and our product no-man's-land where you can see it went both ways so definitely all the Walking Dead fans they found the game within the universe the hotma sphere that the theme and everything applies perfectly so it's actually it's a it's a

business game it's a user case of an IP based game but at the same time we know like there are a lot of people that they started becoming fans of the appian start watching the series because of our like things to our game show and I think this is like really crucial because we're not yet there unless we're talking about a massive IP where the most engaged users are the all the gates users you need to build a successful and profitable business case are we thin the user like the fanpage of the IP it's not yet maybe like let's say in 10 years this will be the case when the gaming is spreading even more but for the moment should people both ways cool I mean we're running a little bit short on time I got one last question for you guys it's a new year 2020 what are you guys excited about the advertising landscape I think I think for us more probably a

very very macro level is for us we start in our ad platform less than five years ago very brand focused the last two years we started to home into this concept of direct response and performance advertising last year we did an incredible amount of efforts of building the tools building the stack the infrastructure and really going to market with our first kind of narrative of how to see success on our platform this is the year that I really hope we open our doors to work with some of the amazing partners here today I'm really just showing people that there are alternative platforms out there and I think we have led the way and bringing new ad formats to the industry and I hope we continue to do that but ultimately I really hope we start to lead the way and client success across multiple sectors but obviously gave me being a big one for us yeah the exciting parts on my site I think it's it's these new platforms as well snapchat tik-tok

it opens us new opportunities to explore our our creatives and testing these these new audiences what what we are going to try is basically trying to understand if these platforms can also learn from our existing audiences and if we are able to use their their platforms Epicurean standards of technology and then that's that's what I believe it has to happen sooner or later with tik-tok with snapchat it's already happening but what makes me happy is have is knowing that there are more and more platforms and we are not relying only on the big Google and big Facebook and we have more more opportunities in other in other networks I'm actually gonna go against all of this the thing that excites me most about 2020 is that streaming is coming

to naught and streaming is incorrect subscription service is coming to games and I think for developers this means that maybe there's a chance to make games what we don't have to nickel and dime people to watch for it adds to get them to play games and we can actually make games that have a valid way for people to pay into them that doesn't involve constantly browsing them with ads that's exciting to me and it changes the way everything we just talked about in this conversation works all of this gets readjusted when that happens and I pray that it actually does stick I mean a subscription is growing and that's why we are also shifting into into building premium games because then they can be better explored with with with a subscription and they get more interesting to be explored with subscription but the ads are here to stay and and the normal economy will keep on going and the subscription might grow and we are for instance on on play

paths all of our games are on play paths we are not on Apple arcade didn't want us but if there's any one from Apple I'm here just contact me I've heard you guys pay lump sum amount so yeah those good ol times from 2004 would be will be again here existent but if subscription grows it's it's very interesting for developers then we need to understand who is going to dominate again is it Apple and Google again are we relying on these two these two big guys because they already dominate too much cool perfect we have a few minutes for questions and you will have questions Hey so I've got a question for a sense of tower I not I'm afraid to up

your name so I'm gonna say it all good so anyways how do you define hyper casual there's a top chart oh sorry there's something like a hyper casual top charts how do you guys decide what is hyper cacher on what's not because it's actually not existing category yeah no that's a great question I mean internally a sensor tower the way we tag hyper casuals is the type the game is so if you're seeing games that are won with an R a lot of you know engagement from the user it's very streamlined very high-level that's what we would consider hyper casuals but we leave it up to the developer when developers honestly to tag the games themselves so we kind of go with broad yes even in census our correct all righty well thank you God Oh what are you guys using to measure robots Oh tools so for us when we are kind of

starting a journey with an advertiser we always make sure all we try to make sure that they're integrated with one of the many measurement partners out there so the objectives Flyers catch elvers of this world for me these guys are great because they keep media providers like us honest and it's an even playing field ultimately they'll be measuring the performers not just of one media provider but actually benchmarking us against each other so for us for me my biggest recommendation is if you have the funds and able to integrate with one of the MMPs and I do know a couple of them have actually started launching some free actual models as well to help smaller Indies get started on measuring from day one we are using tangent I think it works well for us and in terms of costs the relation between cost and the impact it

has for us this is is great but there are many solutions around had just steps fire kochava TV you mentioned we used like all of them because we work with a bunch of different publishers so we use whatever publisher excellence us to use very largely interchangeable I'm going to be more successful because you use one instead of another this is not a is not an important decision in your success it's a combination of the tribution and cost aggregation it's important to build internally the visualization that works for you thank you guys appreciate you guys all staying in thank you [Applause] you [Music]