Session: Rewards Unlocked: Accelerating Game Growth with Rewarding User Experiences - Danny Cormack.

[Music] the next the next ACT is is kind of fun for me because uh um essentially with my history as as being the kind of original BST for um uh you know Unity ads it having somebody from Unity ads coming up and talking about rewarded ads is always going to be something I'm going to enjoy and not at all scrutinized No it should be fun basically we've got Danny kmack from munity who's going to talk about rewarded ads unlocking accelerated game growth with rewarded user experiences Danny good morning guys uh my name is Danny I lead Business Development for

Unity covering our various user acquisition and monetization solutions throughout Europe um it's a pleasure to be speaking today um I'm going to be talking about the topic of the growth in rewarded UA Channel something that no doubt over the last kind of day and a half you you've heard a few things about I'll be taking a kind of particular look at unity's offering in the space and I think first and foremost we can all agree that the rewarded UA space is booming no more is that reflected than in the number of sponsors that are here at PGC the app downloads uh the new networks and distribution channels that are appearing over the last 18 months to two years and we're certainly seeing it reflected in our offering here's a quick look at app downloads for the 12 month July 23 to July 24 trajectory is really clear nudging almost 10 million installs for the most installed Rewards based app in

July 2024 before going on to talk a bit more about the growth and rewarded UA channels we'll take a quick look at kind of why this proliferation of these these new channels may have happened what's caused the growth and to a certain extent it's one of Performance challenges in traditional UA channels um Ina video social networks and so on and so forth with macroeconomic changes taking into recession obviously we're a long way postco now but it will be remiss of me not to put covid somewhere on one of my slides that I presen this year um ultimately that's resulted in lower ecpm a general slowdown and made it far more difficult for marketers and UA managers to access the high quality users they did at the price point they did previously obviously we're taking kind of medium paced March towards a more privacy Centric environment as well with scan impending sandbox which you know Adam in the previous session is far

better to talk about than myself um but ultimately that's made us much less efficient from a UA buy perspective despite that and perhaps because of it um users still want more apps and games of first and foremost a form of entertainment but users want to be rewarded for the time they spend in app for the actions they're undertaking and how are unity addressing this how are we providing a rewarded distribution channel for our partners we feel we have the perfect solution in Tapjoy obviously Tapjoy has been around for some time I'm sure most of you are familiar with it um acquired a few years ago by Iron source and in turn acquired by unity a couple of years ago um tap Droid by Design allows you to acquire high quality users at scale um for those of you who aren't familiar with Off the Wall essentially it's a a Marketplace um through which users can

complete offers in return for said offers they receive rewards in the form of inapp currency um aligned with the action or time they've taken and you'll see all different types of campaigns from different types of advertisers driving deep engagements as well as kind of uh lower-end fund engagement micro microtransactions so why have rewarded UA channels grown so much why are we seeing so much more engagement with t Joy offer wall over the last kind of 18 months or so there's a few reasons um Tapjoy is a channel bought on the cost per engagement basis so in doing that you mitigate some of the risks inherent in CPI channels um whereby there can be a lot of uh data gathering before you can optimize you have to see lots of post install events so we're mitigating some of that risk um high value users as an Advertiser you understand your LTV Curve Your LTV prediction how your users behave and buying on a cost per

engagement allows you to take the user to a point in your funnel where there is value Brad in the previous session actually made a really good point around the LTV curve being slightly different for users acquired through rewarded channels but that's something that your rewarded partner should and can be helping you plot thirdly at scale because of some of the reasons I mentioned earlier around you know macroeconomic downturn lower ecpm in rewarded video and some of the other channels Supply Partners moneti ad games monetized with ads are looking for incremental Revenue new ad units so we are seeing more and more different genres of apps different Publishers who previously would have been adverse to off offer wall integrating the ad unit which results in more inventory for you as UA guys to buy touching upon kind of each of these three reasons briefly again we've tap jooy the types of um offer we run are CPE based you can have multi- rewards where it culminates in a deep engagement but but users are being

rewarded at several milestones for actions they undertake daily rewards um you're looking for slightly smaller microtransactions perhaps levels achieved making users engage within your app as an Advertiser on a daily basis coming back frequently to build a relationship and kind of Garner more attention then you have taken action CPA bit more friction here and it's largely the domain of e-commerce and Brands who are looking to run uh or drive rather subscriptions purchases in a web environment from a high quality perspective and how tap joy in these rewarded channels can drive high quality here we look at some um internal Unity data on the left hand side we can see retention by user acquisition Channel um and clearly offer wall in the orange from day 0 to 30 has a really kind of positive output looking at LTV by user acquisition channel from Day Zero to day 60 again we see offer wall performs incredibly well versus video for our advert sizes as

well when it comes to scale I mentioned earlier and we're all very much aware of the brand new reward-based apps that are appearing month to month new distribution channels new networks from an internal um Unity data perspective offer wall now represents 20% of the Android spend across all of our channels which is huge that's really really significant and on the far side you see our top 20 strategic advertisers by spend and in blue you see the proportion of their spend that's taken by offerall so offer wall has become again it's kind of come full circle in my time in this industry really really popular uh rewarding channels as we said are obviously booming and this is across a vast um genre or a vast array of different types of Publishers and advertisers and types of game so how does offer W work and and what should you be aware of when

engaging with rewarded channels and particularly with with with Tapjoy I think before kind of digging into that we can take a look at where offer will look sit in terms of the monetization stack for us it sits somewhere between the traditional inapp ad units and Ina purchase and subscription so it acts as kind of a bridge between those users willing to engage with rewarded ads and those who undertake inapp purch and it's a natural extension of the ingame economy and it's so effective because of the value exchange which again was was mentioned at length in the in the previous panel um users are rewarded a some in line with the action they're undertaking so a small action within the advertisers app you know complete a few levels redeems a small amount of inapp currency naturally if you're taking them to a deeper engagement there's a bit more friction and you'll be paying a higher cost per engagement

rate and I'll go on to kind of discuss that briefly now looking at the economics of an offer wall first time I saw this it kind of blew my mind slightly because it's a a slightly odd graph so I'll do my very best to explain it basically we see a matrix of offer difficulty and how that impacts conversion value in blue and conversion volume in Orange so low offer difficulty you might see low conversion value essentially probably a low CPA CPE rate that you're paying and also a relatively easy task for the user to undertake here you'll see high volume as offer difficulty increases you see a decrease in volume but you'll see an increase in the conversion value so you're paying slightly more no doubt but you're taking the user to a far more a far deeper engagement um within your app and when we talk about the growth of

rewarded channels and specifically the growth of offer wall here in a nutshell you can see how the types of campaigns the types of offers that you can run as an Advertiser has evolved down the years looking at single rewards which was kind of a zero some game going back a good few years so you'd have midcore slightly heavier maybe hardcore games driving a very deep engagement paying very handsomely for that but scale would be relatively low and it was uh kind of precluded slightly more casual games from working with offerall then there was the introduction of multi rewards where you're ultimately looking to cinate in a deep reward within your app where you're recruiting a user but again users are rewarded at several Milestones along their Journey so it keeps them interested and again this has broadened the appeal and viability of offer War to slightly more casual games and then this year Tapjoy introduced daily rewards um whereby again looking for a deep engagement ultimately perhaps but users

are rewarded for coming back to the app to to undertake kind of small perhaps micro transactions nothing too onerous on a daily basis possibly even multiple times a day now this has been something of a game changer because it's opened up the offer wall to extremely casual games we see great success with Hyper casual advertisers um and particularly kind of Evergreen long retention ad monetized card game solitire puzzle and so on and so forth so really really interesting this year there we go we see the future growth uh of offer wall and our offer wall in the advancement in Daily rewards making more advertisers and developers aware that it's available to them offer wall is no longer the domain of the kind of slightly heavier games it's very much for casual titles as well and it can work at significant scale um we're introducing Dynamic bidding and with the

monetization side of things rolling out um at a pretty fast rate to different types of genres more and more developers turning to offer water to make incremental ad Revenue we're seeing in great scale potential as well and finally my last couple of slides looking at the timer I've gone incredibly quickly I hope you've been able to understand I will slow down slightly now perhaps too late um we're introducing Unity rewards which is a massive part of our expansion of the reward based ad unit um this is currently in beta and it's our webbased offer solution specifically for the iOS audience it's live now and scaling very quickly um essentially webbased solution we can effectively unlock exclusive Supply available nowhere else through which you can acquire high quality users on iOS at scale we're currently live with around 75 advertisers um a pretty small sample the supply is ramping up

really quickly but we're seeing Forex the aru on iOS campaigns compared to Android and we're seeing 3x the day7 rows on iOS versus Android campaigns so really encouraging um and this will be ramping up throughout Q4 and into 2025 what's next I mean the rewarded space I think is is going to continue booming week by week month by month we see more net netw Works distribution channels and apps appearing in the app store and they seem to have a capacity to to gather momentum and uh and undertake their own UA very effectively for Tapjoy it's about Dynamic bidding so enabling Target robas campaigns for our advertisers very much in the same way that you're able to on unity and iron Source video networks and also the introduction of a far more robust self-service platform which enables you to get in there test the Channel with our support and be far more

independent that's me thank you very much for listening very much appreciated thank you very much cool so do anyone have any questions uh I I will obviously find some way of asking something so one of the things I've always struggled with the kind of buffer wall style is the the the process the player goes through to collect that piece now obviously I'm thinking about the old days where we there were some ambiguous um items on some of the older not not Tapjoy Chapo was always the better quality Kinder experience but some of the rewarded platforms weren't necessarily as good in terms of the user flow in terms of modern approaches a way that you're working particularly around daily rewards um how how much time would it take an average person to go and collect that reward and how do we make sure that they come back and play the game it's a good question it the answer is it it really varies it really varies so so at the hyper casual end of things you know

it can be you know incredibly quick yeah a few minutes it's four five levels up to to maybe 15 levels per day over over a period of time um naturally it's down to the hook of the game as with within any advertising Channel you're utilizing um but I think you know all develop developers particularly the guys at the slightly more casual end of things the high retention card games puzzles and so on they're super smart at bringing in hooks for users so it's getting to the getting users to those early stage hooks as quickly as possible and they understand their kind of monetization mechanic better than anyone so I I think a lot of it is down to developer and how smart they are and engaging in their own app but we're very much there to advise as to what the daily rewards should be what should you be asking people to do based on benchmarks no completely understand anyone else got any thoughts or comments or questions on that note then I'm going to say thank you very much uh and thank you all

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