Product Madness’ Piyush Mishra On Smart Questions For Smaller Studios

[Music] this is the pocketgamer.biz podcast I am at Ma this is the podcast Studio where I have game marketers all day long all of them just for you in these Mini episodes snackable enjoyable and what could be more enjoyable I've got P MRA who is now director of growth at product Madness we've had you on the podcast before when you were not so here you are a rock star so what's what's different at at product Madness now you're up a level is it is it also sort of like full funnel the whole thing or is it very much still the same responsibilities I mean first of all thank you for the invitation uh it's really pleasure to you know have this conversation with you we're doing it quite often so it's really fun yes we are thing that has changed overall is

basically I was looking at uh you know mostly on the attech and the Strategic side uh now I'm looking at overall budget uh you know how do we sort of get our media mix uh sorted uh also sort of working with analytics team working with Ds working with pmm product marketing team and stuff like that so it's a lot more uh you know strategic role but also with complete control of the media mix as well so in that sense so yeah it's really it's really fun so you're a convert to media mix or you still are you still the SC man no I still I still I still take a deep dive into that I mean obviously that's where you know I still believe that fundamentally attribution is the main hook uh you know you need to understand your data for you to be able to say that what works and what doesn't uh to be honest so I believe it's very very important for all the you managers to fundamentally understand these nuances including whatever is going to happen with the Privacy sandbox but yeah I mean you know it's good to uh take a step back look at the larger picture as well because it is it is a very important input that's why I'm hearing you it's very much no matter

what you're doing that knowledge carries through it influences what's going to be fed around in the product Loop you know what did you bring in how did they behave how did they engage or stay I mean it all fits together so it all does come back to that does it does you at the end of the day I mean just to give an example like for example if you don't know what are conversion values how conversion values missing conversion was it going to affect your uh data that you're looking at the 48 Hours R something like that then eventually it fects how you're trying to plan your media mix right So eventually like all of these things uh you know sort of uh take effect and it really helps you to understand when you're trying to figure out okay what channel is working what channel is not working what are you looking at what metrics because you are sort of limited right now you're no longer in the world of actually having uh you know the beauty of data that we used to have 10 years ago you know when I entered the industry uh so you know it has fundamentally changed and you know I still believe firmly believe that the more you know about attribution the more you know about how data fundamentally

works the better you are at because at the end of the day these are the only lels you have you no longer have uh the you know the luxury of looking at the bigger picture I mean just for the basics like understanding the difference been paid in organic on iOS is a big big task right now you know so the fundamentals are changing you need to evolve you need to learn more and I would recommend all you to sort of do that as well we stay with that for just a moment because I'm sort of like also taking my own informal poll of the metrics that matter it was roow in fact I heard you speak it was one of your podcasts he was on stage with the UA society and we were having I heard you guys it was really exciting you know what is that metric and you know LTV Raz um Blended where are you at now uh interesting question it will take five minutes no but I try to finish it in two minutes I mean it depends on what what level you're measuring things at right for example if you're looking at the overall Blended uh numbers payback becomes your metric like how quickly can you make money back if

you're investing $100 how quickly can you make $100 back right that becomes your main metric the second main metric obviously comes from what exactly is your new user generating because in a world of specifically iOS and also on Android to certain extent because opt out is slightly increasing now you would see a lot of users returning back but the value from UA essentially is mainly focused on new users so what you can generate from new users is what you should also focus on so these are the two essential targets that we sort of keep internally when we when we're talking about the overall media mix but when you level down when you look at you know at a at a channel level or at an at a campaign level then major metrics I mean it depends on the space that you're operating in for us in the Social Casino space because we are mostly I driven for us it's essentially roas okay roas becomes one of the biggest uh sort of things to look at now if you go level deeper which is the creative level uh that I'm not really sure it becomes debatable when I when I start speaking

about Crea a little thing because for me this is my personal take on this uh I know in my team also my own team doesn't agree with this which is you know creative I don't think some exceptions are obviously there when it comes to playables and stuff like that but in general a banner or intial of 10 seconds or a video of 10 seconds cannot influence you that much that you end up doing a purchase in the product yes right that is what I fundamentally believe it's a very good momentary targeting because it's a good combination of having a good audience served with a good creative with a good landing page and you eventually converting but at the end of the day I don't think that this would help you increase your RAS a creative so my take is that creative should not be measured with Ras and the more data loss there's going to be in the future the more you are restricted and the more I would suggest looking at CTR and CVS is the basic metrics but again it depends I wouldn't say that it's very uh you know completely set in stone like it's up to

them it's up to the genre as well the sub genre of the gaming and stuff like that so told is very intriguing because then we're going back to you know the non-gaming world of just seeing the brand 20 times makes an impression or back in the day I remember when people were running into banners and interstitials because they were super cheap yeah and still saying hey you know it's like it's yeah they're still cheap it's like Billboards in the street what's wrong with that I'm passing and I see you know the McDonald's is down the road and I see it again and I see it and then yeah but it depends on the objective as well right so I mean for gaming Performance Marketing becomes the core like obviously when it comes to Brand it's a different equation together for gaming like people just say if you're investing this much give me this much return I don't care how you're getting it just get me that number so when in that word it makes sense that you know you focus on that and your and your creative is part of that but it doesn't it's it's not a it's not a deal breaker so let terms of the return yeah let me sort of uh like one is the metric to focus on one is the user experience

from a user experience creative becomes very very important yes there's no question about it because I fundamentally believe if you're able to Target the right person with the right creative with the right landing page you can convert that user or you can at least create that t the minders right so those like you know marketing things have changed these factors wouldn't change ever you know whatever marketing you're a little bit more forgiving when you're saying did it you know did it work did it return because you're not looking at the creative to necessarily be the point of conversion and therefore the cost uh I am looking at creative I'm looking at creative as a obviously we're trying to optimize because that's the only liver that you have more or less right so we are looking creative we are trying to bring in a lot of changes what I'm trying to say is like it should a roas day7 as a metric my personal opinion should not be a criteria of creative it is more like CTR and CVR and looking at those metrics that's what I'm trying to say like creatives are very important yes they're Inc they're very important you don't have to be when you're calculating you don't have to say oh it didn't deliver yes it didn't

deliver D D7 remove it that's something that I have an issue with like essenti and there are people doing that there are people doing I mean again it depends on sub General so I don't want to say that they're wrong and I'm right I'm just saying this is my sort of take on it yeah so let's switch back to UA at um more in like the the the top of the funnel because UA is like a big petri dish right you can test a lot of really cool stuff yeah with UA and one thing you can do and what what people are doing more is prototyping to validate a concept and then test the market fit and that's what it's about you know it used to be soft lunch but we don't that's a costly and long long process so UA is much cooler probably much cheaper much quicker what about the results how can it be used to validate the concept I mean look uh it depends on the objective that you're starting out with essentially because what happens fundamentally how we sort of how we sort of take it up is we get the product team in the marketing team in room we have a conversation okay you say what are your

what are your objectives like if it's a very soft launch if you just want to measure D1 retention let's make that an objective let's reach out to as many US users as you can and see exactly how the D1 retention is after a certain stage the metric would change it would become about D7 then it will become a monetization at some stage you know so it's a stage right you start from a very basic uh you know testing on app store trying to AB test multiple uh variations of the game version of the game see how D1 retention is D2 because initially retention are the metric over a period of time it becomes about monetization then it becomes about launching in the country that you actually feel the product can work and you know eventually holding up to a global global launch so these are the sort of uh you know the journey typically that you take so it depends on what criteria you set the start of the uh at the start of the objective of that particular phase because there are phases when you what are you prototyping exactly what are you prototyping like for example if I'm trying to prototype another social uh you know uh casino game in the slot space then I'm trying to figure out okay let's start very very basic let's start

maybe with a smaller country that could potentially give you for example Canada could be a replica of us right in in terms of user Behavior like when we are looking at the metric very small number very small so you can take that risk in that market so you decide the market you go there with like two three versions uh of the game you see okay let's say in the very start D1 retention let's just let's be very clear I want to measure D1 retention yes run it on Facebook run it on Google run it on Unity whichever partners that you are comfortable with see how these metrics are doing because you're not going to get organic conversion at that stage right so one also very important and fundamentally basic thing that I feel people Miss in this equation is they don't factor in the organic behavior that would eventually help you develop the game in the future right so what they do is initially when I'm looking at the data I'm looking purely from a paid standpoint and paid numbers would never stand out right you cannot compare a paid number to an app that exists in the market which is having a decent organic base true uh you need to

have because you obviously reading the competition space you're trying to understand in this space what is a D1 criteria what is the D7 criteria what is the r criteria in general what what what people are sort of you know how many how much money they're willing to spend on these games so obviously you do all of those uh you know proper competitive analysis and then only you enter the space but within that it's also very important to understand that right now you're trying to compare what is a paid world with a with a very high level organic plus paid where organic sort of always behaves better than paid typically in this space they're engaged they want to do it yeah I mean they are Organics they want to play yeah what about keeping UA costs of this type of strategy down in the early phase and this was an interesting point that uh uh another one of your colleagues made because what you want to do is you want to look at the channels the countries where you validate the game but at the same time how do you keep the UA cost down because you want to run this experiment right you you want to prove

this strategy in the early phase but you want to also do it yeah at a moderate cost obviously I mean look cost becomes very important because you don't want to spend 20 million to figure out the game is not going to work exactly so you you obviously limit the cost but before the cost comes a factor of how many users the product team is comfortable with to see that okay if I have a base of 5,000 users I'm okay with a D1 retention of 30% let's thr it this is our criteria what the marketing and the product are a dream on right then comes the question of which Market to go for that's where the most of the calculation in terms of cost actually begins because if you're trying to let's say you're just trying to run an app to see it's a tech test we call it a technical test which is basically just get 5,000 10,000 users see exactly if the tech is holding up yeah in that case you can launch it in any country it doesn't matter any cheaper country like in AP yeah just I just want to see if the Serv going to get crashed at 50,000 installs or not so if you're starting with that then the object of that is like you know very

clear then you can go to Philippines Malaysia India and any other of these areas because you have cheaper cpms there you'll get more installs obviously the user is not going to play these kind of games over there but you know you see okay people opening up app it's fine you know got a little bit of aof little bit and the C didn't but again like in some cases I've also been part of those conversations where people are sort of uh you know trying to expedite the whole process of launching the game yes now in that case you need to really test the actual market right now what what you can try to do is for example let's say in us I have to launch I have to do a global launch in the next 6 to8 months and I'm doing a soft launch right now and I'm trying to figure out if our metrics are sticking in the actual uh demographic of these users right so what we can do in that case is limit it by controlling the states within let's say us okay right so if you have five states that you know you will take out the list of top 10 states in general and you'll say Okay top five are these we don't want to touch that because these are our

future markets where we want to actually to go berserk we don't want to give a negative perception at the start so maybe let's not do that maybe convert something that is giving you some reflection of the overall market so that's that you can do something called a market matching okay right and you can say okay these are the sort of uh markets or states or you know maybe you can always find Mark for example when we try to do something in Australia we find something similar Market matching in terms of New Zealand so we'll try and launch it in New Zealand see exactly how the US is behaving it could potentially obviously Australia for us is a better Market than New Zealand but it gives you certain you know Insight of saying okay how exactly it is holding up so all of these things you try andig figure out because for example Canada has relatively lower CPM than us New Zealand has lower CPM than Australia so like all of these things to try to Fig factor in to figure out okay what do we need to do but at the same time one thing I'll call out is you don't want like you have to be very much in syn with what product is saying you don't you don't want to end up in a world where product has a different objective than you because if

they're saying they want to do a tech test and you launch it in US you're wasting a lot of money similarly if you say that I want to do a global launch and you launch in Philippines it's not going to help you because these kind of games are not going to work in Philippines right so like you have to be in sync with the product and that's also really smart because one you're in sync with the product but as you said yourself you're saying we're going to spend to do this but we're going to limit we're going to limit the number of states in the US or we're going to look for very very similar markets because be a waste to go to something completely different and then try and bring that back you just don't have that Apples to Apples comparison here's a good one for you I want to skip to creative um we just talked about measuring the value of the creative but let's talk about what works and what will ultimately work as a full game because you're looking at creatives and sometimes you're sort of like testing to say I've talk to others who use that even to come back and influence like in a casual game you know some of the gameplay some of the

narrative I mean it's not just about the creative so how do you validate that how does how do you understand what will work as a full game it has to do let's separate first of all right now UA versus retargeting MH right so if you're talking about UA in general you obviously it's a matter of sequencing from a you think of from a user standpoint if I'm a if I'm a user right and I'm looking at these ads okay two three hours on the game of uh you know heart of wiers you see that fine okay move on now I in my mind it's registered there's a game called heart of Vegas obviously you have that message for long enough I'll eventually maybe install and eventually maybe play the game right but with within that sequence you don't want to run a creative that is talking about level 50 that I know as a user I'm never going to reach oh yeah right you have to keep it very basic you have to keep it very basic because again that's that's that's why it's a combination of audience plus creative it's never one mhm right you can create multiple you can create like for example if I'm

trying to Target a lookalike I should have a different set of creators because I know these are Social Casino players and they can potentially convert right so I would have a different creative strategy for that as compared to running a very generalized broad-based campaign where I just my objective is to increase the top the Mind awareness with higher frequency for the users to eventually convert so it depends on the objective it depends on what you're trying to achieve with that which is why like creative is very important but creative has to be coupled with audience and landing page it cannot do anything on its own so this all comes together you can use UA to test concept to validate concept you can use the creative of course being careful that you're speaking to the audience that you really want to be speaking to because you're testing does the creative fly for the game concept what about greenlighting this what do you look at when you want to Greenlight A Game's development what kind of benchmarks this is early phase right we're going to stay in early phase because this is what's happening a lot of people particularly in the Pocket game audience they're like yes I want to

launch another game or I want to launch my first game so I'm thinking about them early phase making that decision the green light what works for you as benchmarks to look at the basic that you start with is obviously The Benchmark of the entire genre itself so when you look out at sensar you look out dat you try and figure out the data that is available in the market to see right okay maybe in Social Casino space in us your benchmark for D1 retention is 30% for D7 is like 10% 7% something like that whatever that number is right you start there but you don't just base the entire narrative on the basis that if I don't hit it let's not continue no at the same time you have to keep on evolving the product the the trick is to understand are you actually improving your retention with more product development that you're doing because obviously it's it's it's it's a stage-wise approach right you don't just go in and create the product and then just give it to marketing to launch no at every single stage the marketing is with you right right and the marketing is trying to see from creative analysis

from whatever users you're targeting say if you're running these kind of creative if you're running a creative that is saying that is talking about a very specific IP that is famous across the board great that's working very well if you're talking about a very generic IP that is not famous across the board it's not going to work so you know all of these things need to feed back into the product and say okay then these kind of ips need to register at the start of the game because the users would automatically be more inclined and become more trustworthy because of this similarly your landing page your ASO page needs to become very very clear about these things that okay what are the IPS that are working show them at the start show the events that are happen has to be coordinated has to be again all three things combined at one place so you you sort of obviously the higher level Benchmark becomes the competition and obviously if you're operating in this same space you know the variation you know what you're comfortable with you know what Roat you're comfortable with at certain stage when you're trying to move towards Global launch one of the basic things that I see sometimes there's a

difference is obviously what numbers product looks at what's what numbers marketing look at true uh you know because those two are looking at sort of different yeah one's a little bit more midterm one's a little bit more shortterm one's a little bit more patient exactly so you have to be more patient throughout the process and same I feel the product team also would feel the same thing about marketing that you know you need to be more patient with us because we're trying to uh work on the product side but yeah uh overall it's it's it's a mix of uh you know what the competition is doing in the market so it should also not be the case that you know your games are doing 20% retention you're okay with that but right now the market has moved on is doing 30% retention then you cannot launch the game with that criteria right even though your games are successful for the last five years but you have to move on and see how the market is reacting in then and now right and see exactly what are the benchmarks uh so that becomes very basic criteria but that's not the only criteria if that is fulfilled and you have multiple others you see how the retention is you see you know sometimes you feel div retention is very good D7

is bad sometimes you feel okay the users retention is very good but they're not monetizing so there are different stages within that that you feel okay what can be improved what can be done and uh you try and keep on making sure that the game development is going on and eventually you know it goes green lit and you know launch the game so key Focus not the only one though is the benchmarks the the App Store App Marketplace intelligence reports and the rest of them but there are a number of them I mean I've I've even been here at Mount a couple come and say yeah we do we do app data because of course everyone does right it's a different different space we got consolidation there's a little bit of space for a couple Niche players is there an interesting one we wouldn't have not in The Usual Suspects of benchmarks or sources of information that you would recommend to un to look at to examine to put into the mix when you're factoring again that big decision green lighting going ahead with producing a game one important thing that I was referring to for as well is modeling with the help of

DS and da right data science analytics modeling how the current version of paid would look like one year down the line when you have some organic base okay that becomes very important criteria because if you are pushing a lot of the PID and and your organic is not growing up and and you know you see that in the again it I said very high level obviously that you look at uh you know the competition space but you also look at organic pair ranking you all of these things model is important the customer feedback on the app the rating you know all of these factors are very much responsible for building your organic right so you have to keep in mind that okay and it's at a very high level I'm giving you an example but you know if you have a rating of four you have a uh an app store ranking of within top 10 in that criteria if you have all the landing page very much sorted out talking about the major IPS then your organic would maybe reach 20% of total installs and something like that now in that world

how would your overall roas overall retention would look like because organic automatically would give you that boost so modeling that is also very important you cannot just completely base it on the basis of what paid is giving you yes that becomes very very important that's something that I would encourage everybody to look at so we're talking about greenlighting the game and we've got all systems go now I want to just take a step back because what goes into the game when you're greenlighting it we know you had to think about monetization you have to think about lot of things you're going to do community building what's all that going to be building that all in what about building UA in from the beginning in that and saying okay does it need to be baked in from the start and does it follow straight through to postlaunch because it's going to change are there benefits to sort of pinning that down early or is there more of a benefit to evolving it so one thing that would fundamentally not change is the effect of marketing uh you know in the gaming space what I mean by that that is Performance Marketing

essentially runs gaming space if you do not do paid there are less chances of you and when I say PID I I'm including brand as well because a lot of games that have success with just doing brand but overall marketing if you don't do marketing games would not survive especially in a space where there are more privacy focused uh you know you cannot really do a lot if you're a very small developer uh trying to break out in this space I'm not saying it cannot happen I'm just saying it becomes very difficult to do it it's really tough to do it so which is why marketing needs to be biged in right from the Inception when it comes to the product Journey because at every single step either through ASO either through uh you know uh Play Store optimization either through looking at how the creatives are being responded to either by looking at how what kind of audience are actually you know we can do breakdown on audience as well you can say okay these are the audience that actually installed your game within that men of 25 plus is playing like this woman 25 plus playing like this like you can do all of those Democratic criteria that gives you insight into understanding okay maybe we

started developing the game for everybody but no we need to develop a game maybe for women 30 plus because they are the ones who are actually giving you high retention right so these kind of these kind of feedback would only come from marketing yes these kind of things would only come from marketing so because paid is the one that is driving the initial boost of all of these users right so that's why marketing needs to be biged in right from the start you cannot function and launch a product without the marketing team's input yeah now at the same time you don't want want it overcrowded because you want to run it like a startup so you don't want like five different people of the marketing team sitting in the product but at least one or two people in there having attending most of the Strategic meetings and giving their input and saying okay no this is how the market is reacting like because product can do things on their own that they feel is right within that space and they are right to look at them but it's marketing that gives you that lens to see how the users are responding and that feedback is very important and that would never change so about the flexibility in the UA you do have to bake that in marketing has to be there but you also want to be able to say I've

been talking to people oh we're looking at some we're looking for new channels we're trying to find new channels you know threads looks interesting let's do something there I mean you have to have that flexibility so where do you where do you balance between saying this is the way we're going to do UA but nah we're gonna do something different uh look I mean it's a bit tricky in that sense because you don't want to run the risk of exploring new channels right at the start uh the reason being that you know or or you can be too Innovative or you can just go creatively and say okay no I'm just going to do my influencer marketing to start with I'm just going to get some influencers to ask them to download the app to start with see how the users are responding I know these influencers are doing these kind of gaming genres let's ask them to do it right so that's also one approach it's it's there's nothing wrong in that but initially when you're starting out you don't want to risk running with a lot of Partners and trying to figure out which one would work better because that's not the objective it's just about getting certain number of users to see how exactly they are responding to the product have a commercial exactly do you even have the commercial viability right

exactly so that's the part that you need to understand but over a period of time like when you are sort of closer to a global launch that's when you strategize because by then your demographic is clear you know what kind of audience you want to Target you know what kind of audience for what kind of audience you build the game for right so you know all of these things and at that point your marketing would be decided on the basis of the demographics that you are sure of uh you know and then you sort of start innovating and you know trying to figure out different channels that stage so P what you've been sharing is really important for all of the genres but is there a genre in gaming where this works maybe better or maybe doesn't work as well you know this sounds like it might be really really good for hybrid casual casual holding for all the subg genres of gaming I mean what I'm saying I'd be very honest it it comes from my experience of understanding this and a lot of this is based mostly on uh Social Casino and it would also apply to hybrid casual what it might not apply to is the

action based genre and RPG and you know midcore genre and stuff like that but I still believe the fundamentals wouldn't change so the fundamentals that I'm saying would also remain the same it's the way you quote it it's the way you sort of you know present it could potentially change but every single game would behave a similar way when they're starting out because they're all relying on paid activity to boost them to see some sort of input to understand what the demography you're trying to hit right and the would evolve with that I I don't ever know of a product that started with just one clear objective and it ended up with that kind of demographic that at the start you say I want to hit this this kind of user these kind of users and you know at the end you actually end up doing that it it's rare I'm not saying it won't happen it's rare to find that so which is why you know U it is applicable across the board but obviously the way to present this would change for specific genre what I'm saying is coming from my own experience in the Social Casino space well these are like lessons for our audience no

matter because there's so much in there so much to unpack and you took so much time to explain it thanks so much P it was great to have you and I'm sure it won't be the last time no again thanks Peggy always always fun to chat with you this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocket gamer. b/p podcast

and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm bagloo I'm Peggy and salts and that's the wrap until next [Music] week