🔥 The Art of Scaling Applovin UA & Admon: A Deep dive

let's say 5% of the impressions to this campaign will go for creative testing. If you have $500 budget and you put five% of those impression toward 20 creatives, every single creative will have very little room to test and to iterate. When you have when you blast as I said it, if you have a lot of spend and much more impression and then you can afford having much more creative samples and so let's say you you spend 10 10k per day You should aim, let's say, to add five to 10 new creatives a week. I think that sounds that sounds reasonable. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. That This is [ __ ] gold. [Music] Felix

talking to the early master trackers like a wizard in disguise to the high smack slows are beautiful it Don't delay. [Music] Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh, it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh and need funding, here's the deal with PVX partners. You can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid and it's flexible and fully tailored to your growth. So,

you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. Take control of your UA budget without giving away uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com. And while you have you here, uh we also want to thank your sponsors, vibe.com, because this episode is brought to you by them as well. They can help you grow your brand on CTV ads. Uh, with Vibe, you can launch high impact campaigns across top streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku, Tuby, and whatever else. I mean, all from one simple dashboard. We don't have all of these in Europe. Anyway, so, uh, it's built for brand all sizes. It's rated on 4.8 out of five on G2 for a reason. Join over 5,000 marketing teams already scaling with streaming TV. Visit

vibe.com to get started. That's vibe.co. go join them and thank you very much for joining us for this special episode. Uh, now let's get back to it. Thank you. Of course. It's very serious. It's very very serious. I'm really really sad you didn't get the memo. Like you should brought the you should brought the mustaches, guys. I mean, I can I can see who is the half the half gamer now. I guess you're the half gamers, Jakob. Yeah, you are the half. Was it me? I have my mustache. Yeah, but it's not a standalone mustache. So I don't wear anyway. Anyway, well, whatever guys. Yeah, like hello everybody. Welcome to another special episode. I think Phelis, you mentioned it last time when we had the special episode. All the episodes are special anyways, but this one's extra special. Oh, so now we're doing extra special episodes. Extra special. Can't wait for ultra special next time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like is this a gacha again? Gacha pool. Okay. Anyway, thank you very much

for coming then. This is it. All right. My name is Matthew Lanch. Thanks for another episode of Two and a Half Gamers, Felix Yakob. Hello. Nice, nice and great intro. Yeah. So, let's see introduce our extra special guest this time, Alexis. Thank you very much for coming as well. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, guys. Very nice to be here. So, can you Yeah, we know we all know you, but our dear listeners might not. So can you give us a brief intro about what you did, how you ended up in gaming industry maybe and then what you're doing at the moment? Sure. Um I actually landed in the in the gaming industry by a bit of a hazard. I came to to uplo in Berlin by chance. Um and yeah worked five years as a let's say account manager with the growth team the the BD team in Berlin. So helping the the mobile developers and the the app makers to to grow their games. Um doing both UA

growth and monetization. So yeah had the chance to work with a lot of people in the industry in in EMIA in Europe and a lot of studios and and different type of games. But uh yeah was really thrilling. Lasted five years had a blast and yeah decided to to take my own venture and uh to start my own business. So now I'm doing it basically the same but but on my own. So yeah, that's uh but yeah, not leaving the industry. This industry is too good. It's too too having too much of a fun to to leave it behind. I feel something about it. So today we're going to basically ask Alexi some questions just about UA with Apploven and admonetization with Apploven because uh we can't think of anyone better to guide us through this process. But Alexi, just before getting started, why do so many people hate on Apploven? Starting on the right foot, you really asked the question. Way to open it, man. Yeah. I don't think there is a hate for Appliance. Not anymore. Wait, wait,

wait, wait, wait. That's I think they used to be maybe like um they might have been this feeling. I might have heard that before, but I have the feeling it changed. Um Applin was not a love brand, right? You would have some companies like Unity was more seen as a love company helping like very close to to developers etc. Not anymore. Not anymore. Yeah. I think I think Applian had this aura of being very bullish, very uh very aggressive in the way they they entered the space and that might not have pleased everyone. You mean by single-handedly giving unsolicited offer for ROIO and stuff? But I think they sorry not roio merger with unity and sorry correct me correct me if I'm wrong and this is also something I felt over the years while being at is kind of enabled and helped grow so many publishers and advertisers and was very in a in an

advisory position that they kind of gained some trust in the heart of the the developers. I mean you guys also have been in contact with a lot of people. You've worked with a lot of developers. Maybe you can confirm that. But I think this image kind of changed over the years and Abloin is now seeing as bit as a benevolent and I think the the summ of this switch was you know when there was the runtime fees and uh Abloin stepped up for the developers when Unity kind of lost some points and and that was a that was a fun moment to to live. Well I think this the aura is still there. It didn't change that much. I mean, you might you might not like Applovin and I think that there might be a bit of that. You cannot work without Exactly. That's exactly where I'm going with this because I think Apple went from being an underdog somewhere now to the point where you if you don't work with Appin, you can't scale your game. Period. I mean, full stop. And like

that's that's that's an interesting journey for sure. And you need to get you need to have some balls to get there. I mean, we you guys have been to a lot of Abloin events and I think now everybody I think they've made a lot of great events. I can testify to that. I loved it. Um kind of miss it already. But uh no, I think everybody was very, you know, enjoying and and very friendly and I think a was a a good host in some absolutely for sure. Phys we want to we want to ask admona I think we want to start with UA because it's kind of upstream from admon right so I think would make a bit more sense and then I can button if anything makes sense with the questions but let's start with UA I think okay so I mean I'm pretty sure you already heard all of these questions before but you know we have have you here and people want to hear this uh as well so I think I think the major turnaround was when Axon 2 was kind of introduced and I think with Felix we were sitting in in soul and one

amplify event where we saw the graph where basically max like they showed us the max at like 180,000 developers on the mediation which definitely helped to the Exon 2. So how does accent to work if you can unpack that and what kind of signals do you let's start with what is accent what is you guys are starting with the with the real black question yeah exactly um I mean I can't really comment on what accent 2 is nobody really knows it's a bit of a algorithm algorithm for Yakob yeah for Yakob it's algorithm okay it is algorithm it's a mix of a great product um and and and lots of data and and lots of data, but it's a bit blackbox. You guys, you know, there's a there's only a couple people that know what it really does and what Okay, so it's some kind of epin version of Skynet. Great. What it what it does is it combines a

lot of historical data that Habinav had as being a mediator, as being also a first party data with with Studio, etc. combines all of this data with a great product into making you find the right user for your offer. That's as simple as that. And then what it happens in the back end, it's a bit more complex. I give it to you, but can't really give more details on that. I don't have them. But it's, let's be honest, like there used to be a time where you would run CPI campaigns to upgrade to address campaigns. You would have to collect purchaser to be able to run a purchaser based campaign. like this was a hassle and there was a lot of you know roadblocks to get started on your campaigns, a lot of learning budget that would be wasted into getting your campaign set up. Right now from day one you launch a ROS campaigns, it taps into an audience of users that are already known by the system and it adapts and it calibrates toward your goals and your your your campaign and your your game specifically. How does that possibly is because of Exxon 2 or because of of so

many data points that you already have or well Appli already had? I think that that's both together wouldn't be what it is without the data and yeah the data is also feeding accent to course and vice versa. Okay. So you can't really you don't really know or can't comment like what kind of signals is it? Okay. Nobody knows man. You're not the first one to ask. Of course. Exactly. like all these questions that I'm asking today like people are asking me is like guys only if I know the truth the truth is and Adam also is underlining that that's one of the best algorithm right now that has been built and the keys to this you know castle is is very locked and I think of course it's in the hand of I think a very few very few people because this is gold to be honest exactly yeah of course yeah it's like the Coca-Cola recipe you can't get on a flight if you both know the secret the same [ __ ] Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. But then then you mentioned an interesting point about the CPI campaigns and uh the ROS campaigns afterwards. And now I've seen the the

evolution from from the C campaigns that optimizing for let's say day one purchases towards day seven purchases and now Applavin is is pioneering for some time already like the day 28 attribution window. So can you talk about the differences like what is actually taken into taken into consideration for each of these different campaign types. I think the the release of the D7 and the D28 models was not groundbreaking but it allowed a lot of you know new campaigns. You basically tap into different type of users. If you have with games having longer break even window you cannot just rely on a D0 R. you could be meeting your goal at D0, but then retention drops and you're not making it at the end of the day. So I think it was it came the D28 and D7 came out of discussion that you know those games have longer break even window they need to be able to optimize toward longer time frame and be able to get those

users that are more retain in the times and you will have necessarily some some overlaps between a D00 D728 but essentially what they're doing it's it's different type of users you will you see it you run a D00 D7D28 you'll have completely different data the ROAS will be completely different. The retention curves and I think they incremental to each other. They're complimentary. It's not like you run one and you leave the rest behind. They really associate themselves together. And um right now I think most of the advertisers on they're running all the campaigns together not only one. So then what are the different so you are saying I mean makes all all the sense like every of these attribution windows you're taking into consideration different amount of data. So for day zero obviously less purchases but kind of I guess works well for the companies or games that are optimizing for short payback period with within the day seven I mean there's obviously more data

coming in and then you're optimizing different curves fine so I mean like when and in which type of of like point of time you're able to say this works this doesn't work because I I imagine for day seven it also a learning period for day 28 there's also a learning peri Yeah, necessarily the the learning period is longer with D28, right? But uh and this is the the mistake to do is like to judge and to assess the the performance of your campaigns based on the first week or second week of data when you're running a D28 while you know you should be the system should have at least D28 metro data to be able to calibrate efficiently. Thanks god it's not the case right these campaigns are calibrating on the go not only when they get 28 days of data otherwise that's be a bit a lot of money yeah exactly exactly but um I think they're just different models um you always have different users you'll have users that plays two hours a day for a year you'll have others that play very intensively you have different profile and what they

do they essentially tap into those different type of users and u why and how they do that they you know again the bunch of data Apple is sitting on being also a mediator they know which users are staying 30 days, 60 days, 90 etc. So there is there is a lot of knowledge and the pool of of users um they can tap. Yeah, I've seen I've seen like what you mentioned the different LTV curves and retention profiles. I've seen Adro campaigns day seven performing way worse than Adas campaigns day 28 and I was like how is this even [ __ ] possible? It's it's but I mean heads off like you said like this algo is gold and as soon as you see it works like it [ __ ] works. Yeah. I mean I've seen the roll out of D0 then D7 D28 and it progressively the one replace the previous one like D7 out beat D0 from far in retention figures in ROS in the curves in the way that the ROS is growing over time and D28 now is also

killing it. I mean all the all the all the advertisers shouldn't be running D28 because they literally yield a much higher quality of users and you will have the retention those campaigns yield are insane. So some of them will a bit freak out because they see a D0 that is half or even a third of what the D7 is yielding but over time in D14 D28 it will pick up and then you'll have a campaign that over times and beyond 30 will be much more thriving and having the best actually which is what you're looking for. Can I ask just a question here? Right. So you worked at AppLabin for five years right? So you probably saw ad spends of probably north of billions in those 5 years in UA and now you're basically a consultant on the UA side. What do you think are some of the differences how you structure an apploving campaign to someone who never worked there before? I think the the level of

automation that Apploving has reached now can of make it easy for anyone to start on Applo. Um your your level of intervention has been limited. somehow. Now I think the best you can do is have the right set of creative, have a good understanding of your goals and then you know the rest is kind of automated. So it's I don't think for someone that hasn't worked at that hasn't touched up it's it's not so hard to to get it on and to make it work. Just listen to your account manager. Alex is look every even like everyone like literally everyone can set up a campaign on Facebook, Google, wherever like that's easy but the fun starts after you know you you need to optimize you need to add the different creatives you need to change the goals like what are the kind of campaign optimization steps that you need to do on up and obviously like everybody can do it but there are always differences always if you already worked with it you know what you Yeah. And please include things that Felix likes to say, "Oh, you didn't ask

for this that we have this." Because I think half of the functionality will be hidden by this. Like, "Oh, there's this feature. Oh, you didn't ask for it." That's on the admon side, not on the UA side. I don't know. It's the same. Yeah. But I think you have a set of best practices that will make your campaign work on on Applovin. Um, and it depends on your type of game. I think the more you go into AP games or blended, you know, with hybrid monetization, the more you'll need to stick to those best practices because those are higher higher value users. So they are more expensive and the machine learning needs data. So if you have a low budget and you're hoping to have to make miracle with a low budget while you're acquiring 50 users per day, it's going to be tough, right? So I think the first thing is and the requirement in budget applic $100 it wouldn't work right. So that's why it starts at 5500 minimum

it's kind of push you to go quicker through this learning phase that is necessary for any algorithm. So the best practice would be you know have a good set of creatives playables of course combine them make some combination between standalone creatives standalone playable and short long videos long videos are working even better now like 45 seconds 59 seconds tap into as much gio as possible like it's not the use the case where it used to be like I start with US then I add T1 then I add T3 now you can literally run worldwide a single goal and the system will find the difference in LTV from all geos and adapt the CPI etc. So I think it's it became really smart and automated in the way that you don't need to really from day one put like a different you can adapt on the go but I think the the the advertisers that are the most successful are the one that understand that there are different maturation and different LTV curves per

campaign and per adapting your goals per gio um and also per campaign. It's not like my D7 is the same on Adas D7 on Adas day 28 or a blended D7. They're complete different campaigns and I think the best an advertiser can do on Approven is setting the right goals per campaign and per G. And when you do that, you maximize probably the performance and um and then yeah, when you your campaign I think caps um I think there's there's a lot of under statement into how much it's nice to have to have a campaign caps like there's a lot of advertiser in game that would love to spend more and there's they're not making it right. So if your campaign caps and you have a bit of a gut feeling that it's working, you can really like start unlocking etc. because I' I'm seeing it right now with with other clients by being on the other side. It's like I want to spend I want to be, you know, growing my game, but right now the it's not it's not capping.

So, two months before it was capping and now it's not. Yeah. So, what do you do in that case? I mean, there's not there's not a lot you can do. You reduce you reduce your goal and and and and as long as it's within your, you know, profitability windows, try to be a bit more aggressive. This is the part from South Park meme and it's gone. Not everybody knows the South Park meme, Mr. Mr. Chakup, but okay. Well, the thing is there always this like the campaign is capping meaning for for the the listeners like you're spending your budget within like couple of hours of the day. So, you could potentially increase the budget and then open up the inventory I guess. Then what happened to me multiple times like well look the campaign is capping but I don't really want to increase the budget because well cash flow cash flow situation of the company or whatever else. So there's like it's basically not not going to happen. Increase the budget mean spending more. No no no no because you said the cash flow sentence which

implies that the rorowass prolongs. Not necessarily the ras prolongs. It's just the cash flow issue. If you if we spend more, we won't have the money in within like the 30 days, let's say. It's like it's as I said, like it prolongs. It's a good point. I think Jacob, you're right. The more you scale and the more you want to scale, the more you're going to have to reduce your goals and the more you're going to extend your break even window. So that's that's part of the game. Uh if you had a day 90 break even window and you want to scale more, probably you're going to have to reduce your goal, which is going to push your break even to day 120. Is it going to make it is the question, right? Is your game able to monetize until then? You know, not everybody has like the the content and the game to actually be able to monetize for six months, nine months, a year, etc. So, yeah, but good point, Jacob. Could you let me let me re ask this question in another way. So, in your five years working at AppLoving, what were the top three mistakes you saw people make when running UA on that channel?

The least about this. Yeah. Yeah. Just can we make it? Can we make it 30? I've seen I've seen I've seen a bunch, but yeah, I think I I I mentioned it. I think the main one was focusing on CPI. I think there's been a lot like my CPIs are too high in the campaign and that would make them freak out. You know, it's like whether your user is €2 or 20, you have a goal in the campaign. As long as the goal is reach, you know, like and you meet your profitability, whether the user was 2 or 20, it doesn't really matter. So I think that was the first misconception I was hearing a lot that CPI is the key metric to to to follow. Um that's that's one. The second probably that I was saying is try to grow I think that was specific to IP games but try to grow an IP game with a $500 budget. Like you games means you're going to type into user that cost like 10 2050 maybe $100 per install. So if you have $500 budget, you have

literally five users, five users or 10 users. And if you have a conversion rate of, you know, 10%, then you have one purchase with your 500 budget. That's not going to help the algorithm to to calibrate. There needs to be understanding that those games will tap into whales and tap into high quality user. But for that, you need to put the budget frame, right? you can't grow the same way an IPO an IP game and an ad driven game. That's that's just I think the misconcept. Yeah, learning budget and and and and budgets in general are going to be more expensive with as long as you tap into blended hybrid and and and IP games. I think that's um yeah, that's a big one. You have one more. You have one more. One more. I'm one more. You want one more? Yeah, I think that the biggest mistake, let's call it this way, um was not really to try to overrule the way the system works by controlling uh the

goals for instance. You know, it's like you have a D7 or D28 window and you're changing the goals every day. You're basically sending us a different signals every day, which doesn't help the system to find the right users. So, one day you're like, my D7 is 50, the next day you raise to 60, fine, it's going to calibrate. Then two days later you raise to 65 then it's like okay no it's not 6 50 is not 60 it's 65 those type of different in the ROS goals makes the system type into completely different type of users and so your CPR is going to increase you're going to have a complete different behavior I think the the understanding of you have a long optimization window of D28 let it at least 10 days or two weeks to calibrate on the goal if you see it's not meeting the targets you can change, but doing it every two days, three days is only going to hurt it more than than anything else. And yeah, I think that's that's three. You asked for three, I

gave three. No, I wanted to Yeah, I wanted to say first the CPI it's always freaks out all like everybody. I ran a match free game which got 30 $40 CPI on Facebook and I was like guys like you're [ __ ] lucky. this game usually is the CPI for these games like 60 80 90 150 that's that's that's the range all over the place. I started running AppLoving and the the CPI was 100. I was like, "Oh my god, it's so expensive. I don't know what what we are going to do and then there was one one day where the CPI went to 200 and there were few few payers from that campaign. The ROI was like seven days like 100% in seven days. I said guys like this is your this is your whale. This is your quality player. It doesn't matter if it's 200. It really paid back in seven days. What are you talking about? Then the the other point you may

made made about making changes all the time. It's just like people are always not patient. Like it's not going well. We need to do these change. Like guys, like chill out. Like you need you need to leave it for a while. Like not do like the changes like 10 times a week. It's not going to help. Especially I find the algorithm for pretty reactive in the changes. Like for instance, Google takes ages to adapt to changes. Yeah. So, but the the point on the CPI you mentioned I think like $40 in Facebook versus $100 on on on Apple. I think that's question a lot of people have been asking. But what matters is that this $100 CPI is actually going to actually mature in a much higher LTV and end up in a much better ROS than this $40 Facebook use. Yeah. People are used to see Facebook CPIs, but then this only the golden cohort kind of CPI and what

starts at 40 ends up at 120 in in a month. Whereas up lo kind of stays within 20% maybe up or down. It's still it's still the same CPI across the the campaign life of the campaign. But then you mentioned not doing the changes that often like what's the good cadence to actually make those changes like once a week, once per two weeks or like how does that kind of Yeah, really depends on the the type of campaigns and optimization window. If you have D0, you can change basically every two days. Yeah. Okay. If you have D7, wait at least three, four, five days. If you have D28, at least 10, 14 days. But okay, again, you know, you'll always need to have the system as much as you can calibrate on the go. when going toward this optimization window, it will always need kind of mature data. So for this level, it needs at least 10 days of data to really calibrate or take another direction. See, if it's completely out of the goal,

it will really realize it quickly enough, but you need like metro data to be able to really assess your campaign performance. And if I'm running ad row as campaign on the UA side and let's say I'm I have a puzzle game that's 99% driven by ads. How should you think about when you have big gains on the admon side on max like let's say you implement Meloco and it gives you a 15% rise on interstitial rewarded. How should you think about your UA rorowass goals for your ad rorowass campaigns? Then you mean adding molo will change let's say okay no let's just say like I have a really big win on the admon side. Let's say I have a 15% rise on ad armpa by adding a new network. Do you change the goals then for ad ro row campaigns or do you kind of just leave it or how does that work? You can I mean if you have better arpa with a change you make on admon or product changes you make you can allow yourself to be a bit more aggressive on the goals so that you scale more. So I mean that's a good win if you manage to

make a five 10 15% AB gain with the changes whether it's admon or product. I mean take advantage of that because either you're going to increase your profitability with the same goals or you can just you know reduce a bit your goals and then scale a bit more. So that's but could be address organ. Okay. Yeah. Some Yeah. Some people say like oh well we increased the Arab D but didn't change the the the campaigns or anything. That's debatable always. But then let's say you made a lot of changes on the on the campaign side and the campaign died. Basically there's zero spend. So like what to do now especially on uploging? Do you create a new campaign? You reduce goals to like I don't know 0% and just let it let it run like Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the creating a new campaign is a bit of a myth. Uh it's not

going to change anything. the the learnings are you know you have a package name and the learnings are hold at this level so whether you create one or 10 different campaigns uh it's not a fresh start you have a learning and if you want to kind of flush the learnings if you want to you know come back on learnings you know if you've set 100% D7 ROS campaign died because a bit unrealistic you're going to have to you know review your expectation and review your goals now but the truth is I've seen in in a stack of UA channels. Applovin is is often able to really give you what's your what's your game KPI. It gives you the optimal retention of your game and the optimal rows curves etc. Of course, depends on the campaign advertiser that would say Apple needs a 40% target D7 while it's been reaching 25 on Unity, Facebook, Google, etc. There's something you're doing something wrong, right? So it's actually usually the contrary that with better maturation curve you should and that's what I was saying earlier you should

have a goal per channel depending on how those those channels and those campaign mature over time. So if your campaign died it means you probably had an unrealistic goal um you were setting the bar too high and you need to kind of review it down um to to start it spending again. Yeah. Yeah. So then what do you do like you really decrease the goals to bare minimum just to start spending or like what? Okay. So I've there's been a lot of that and that could make a few people freak out because I understand you have like a 30% goal and you say okay go to 15 just to restart the system. So it's [ __ ] five. It doesn't matter. I mean you just need Yeah. You just need data to to make it work. You need data. Exactly. That's that's a good point. You need you need to flush your learnings and restart from scratch. And as soon as you get users and data, you're going to be able to increase again your goal toward your more realistic levels. But yeah. Okay. So, but the the kind of the the step from campaign to dying to restart is

just basically go and try to get the the learnings even though it's going to be just the goal of let's say instead of 30% it's going to be five just to get spent. And then what like then you increase this the target every let's say a week or kind of yeah progressively okay progressively again depends on the optimization window but you know I wouldn't do you were at 30 you went down to let's say 10 I wouldn't go back as soon as you see the start spend starting I wouldn't go back to 30 immediately right those kind of jumps is completely gonna yeah yeah it's gonna exactly so I think the range of accept acceptable change is the higher part. I'd say 20% is a big change already. So 10 15% is acceptable. Yeah. 5% is maybe too slow. You know, if you've went very aggressively on the way down, you go 5% every 3, four days, it's

going to take you a while to go back to your realistic level. But yeah, 10 15% is I think the the realistic type. Okay. Yeah, it's it's pretty it's pretty helpful. What also would be helpful to to understand the creative mix and the kind of I mean Facebook back in the days back in the days they were always like saying oh playables are the next level [ __ ] and they failed so much because I mean unfortunately there's no kind of proper placement on Facebook newsfeed it was only in audience network but wasn't scalable on apploavin if you don't have playables you're done how What can we do? Please unpack this. How are playables kind of uh being the big part of this uploving campaign? Yeah. If you don't have a play, I'm not sure you're completely done, but you at least at the disadvantage with the competition. Yeah, exactly. Everybody now kind of runs um playables and you

know there used to be studio that had an edge on the competition um back then and now it's kind of everybody running playables and if you're not you're kind of footing shooting yourself in the foot. I can translate that. That's Alexi saying if you don't have playables you're [ __ ] Yeah, that sounds to me about saying thanks for thanks for reading between the lines. No, but it's it's let's be honest like with the quality of the game, it's not the hyper casual time anymore. No, no, no. Of course, of course. Any users could fit your your games and make it work for you. Now you have games that have, you know, break even window from three, six, nine months a year. Um, AP user that cost a 100. Um, you want to make sure that those installs and those CPI that you pay or those user you get are valuable and they are they have the highest intent when downloading your games. So the playable is just and I think that that makes sense, right? A user that is playing and watching a lot of ads per day. If you're the one that shows him a really nice playable, which

is a like a better window into your games than other games, and he likes the mechanics, when he downloads the game, he has a high intent. It's going to be high quality users that probably plays your game for much longer than somebody that just got hooked by a fake play fake fake game play and just realized that you fooled him, right? I will stop you right there. You will you were faked by the fake gameplay, but then you you have a fake playable which is even better. Come on. But I I I can understand like this is qu kind of like a a qualifying the user playing the snippet of the game and then it says in the game. Obviously in these days where you have different mini games kind of hard to to to work properly on on this but then like I've seen this in different accounts and what you're saying I I can understand but it's like I have videos in the campaign

and as soon as I start adding playables and playable end cards so it's basically video plus playable and then a standalone playable suddenly I could scale happening on uploading campaigns. So, it's not only about like qualifying users. It's kind of like I I like I don't know like it's the type of inventory that uh the playables are tapping into or like how the state kind of and what a playable does it it essentially increase CTR and engagement, right? So, you're you're basically able to tap into, you know, higher quality users with with higher CPMs. So, it's all about signals even in the critics. All about the signals. Yeah. It's about engagement interaction. So you will have a playable that you know converts better. So it attracts more, it has more traction than than other creatives that might not have the same kind of engagement matrix. So yeah, I mean now again coming back to this but you want to have playables to self-

select the better users. Yeah. Qualifying the user. Yeah. Okay. They're filtering tools basically, you know, like you know that when you pay $20 CPI, you don't want somebody that sh after day one. So, you want to make sure that the person that downloaded your game after playing it is going to play it for for long and pay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But reading between the lines and looking at the engagement of the creatives and everything and there's qualifying users, I would say this is a kind of part of the answer that I was asking like at the very beginning what kind of signals Exxon 2 is taking into consideration. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's an interesting piece of information for sure. So I think since you're talking about Axon the algorithm changed but also you know the creative optimization also changed. So there used to be back then and when I was running campaign at Abloin you'd have maybe out of 50 creative you'd have two winners and the rest would have no traffic and no impression. Since Axon 2 you're now

going to have a lot more creatives that are sampled and used. You know you'll have your spend is going to divide it between 10 15 creatives from all sorts. You're going to have a banner. You're going to have a playable standalone. You're going to have short video plus playable. You're going to have long video plus end cards ad will have a certain type of user and different CPIs, right? So that's the I think that's the future of UA and creative and and a bit like if we tap into generative AI, it's serving the right user, the right ad to the right user. And that's effectively what's happening now with with uploading creative algorithm is upload a lot of punch and see what the system is able to get out of it tackling and and targeting different type of user at different CPIs sometimes different type of performance in this case like how often do you you should refresh the creatives or add new creatives every week. Yeah, it's a good

question. It depends I think on your volume. If you have a campaign that is blasting, you can afford to refresh more regularly and with more. What does it mean blasting? I mean, let's say give us some give us some rough numbers here. 100k a day, 50k a day, 10k a day. 10k a day. What's blasting is I would say blasting. No, I think even with 5 10k a day, you can be very not aggressive, but you can be a bit more active on the creative refresh. Um, because you know, you're sending a lot of impressions. You know, you want to avoid creative fatigue. um and renew your stack of of creative regularly. Um there's regularly and there's how much you how many creatives you also refresh. If you have a campaign that spends you know thousand a day and you're putting 20 creative at once like see how the algorithm is working it allocates a part of the impressions within the budget. Hello everybody. Thanks for uh joining this episode. Are you wondering what's the latest development with Epic versus Apple mean

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at fastspring.gg. Thank you very much guys for sponsoring this episode. Now let's get back to the content. Bye-bye. Let's say 5% of the impressions to this campaign will go for creative testing. If you have $500 budget and you put five% of those impression toward 20 creatives, every single creative will have very little room to test and to iterate. when you have when you blast as I said it if you have a lot of spend and much more impression and then you can afford having much more creative samples and um so let's say you you spend 10 10k per day you should aim let's say to add five to 10 new creatives a week I think that that sounds reasonable yeah okay okay that this is [ __ ] gold seriously like this is really Good. This is really good. 40 minutes in. Now we're getting to the gold. No, this is really good.

No, this is really good because then because so you don't really need to test creatives in a separate campaign. You just you just add the new creatives in. Algorithm allocates 5% to the new creatives and then decides based on the early numbers if it's performing better or not. Exactly. It's going to allocate some samples of impressions. If it see it picks up with a better install rate, better ros, and it's meeting the the campaigns goal, progressively going to push this one a bit higher and see how it compares to the other winning creatives that are higher amount of impressions. I think again, if you're if you're spending 500, I wouldn't refresh every day. If you're spending 10K, you have more room to refresh. You're spending 100, you can refresh every two days. Yeah. Yeah. Just out of curiosity, can you say the biggest campaign that you've seen per daily spend? It's going to be a couple hundred, a couple million a day, right? Like in that region, right? I think we went above the six figures per day. Yeah. I mean on big launches and the big players. Yeah. I think it's

nice. There's company that have those kind of budget and I have the expectation with new launches that we're still in gaming. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Are we in China or are we in US? There we go. Now it's fun. Trying to fine. Now we we're sitt and dance. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I'm I got all everything I I wanted. Yeah. Should we shift gears a little bit? Yeah. Questions. You are here as well. I'm sorry. I forgot about you. So, as usual, let's do some embush stuff. What's your take on the current offer by EPA in merging with Tik Tok and what do you take out of that? I think it's great. I think I mean if it would happen if it would happen. Yeah. Since since I joined Abloin, I think there's been a very like smart company vision. All the acquisition that had been made, you know, with Mopub, with they changed the whole whole picture

so [ __ ] great. Like the whole Yeah. But the whole acquisition over the years had been had had there was a vision, right? And I think Adam has a specific vision. And for Tik Tok the opportunity is there that there is a huge amount of attention with a lot of users that are not so well monetized and what Apple does you know it has a lot of demand and it's able to you know increase the the revenue of you know I think the potential of Tik Tok has been only scratched they only scratched the surface and with a company like Abloin that has this kind of execution that could really take a company like Tik Tok to to another level in terms of revenue, but it's also when you think about it, it's social media. Applovin is another type of attention. It's people playing games. They would be able to tap into the social media world, right? Like like the Facebook, the Instagram. So, they would be able essentially to kind of double their attention within to to reach the user

while they are on social media, but also while they're playing games. So for me that's that's kind of genius because you're like basically extending your your your your reach and um you're able to onboard much more advertisers on the demand side to scale to an extent that you you know like that amount of data is insane. That's insane. I mean, I don't know how they going, you know. You know, Adam was also putting it. I don't know if you saw the last Yeah, there was a new article lately. Exactly. The last press release where he says that's why I'm asking he's turning it as well into like job creation, etc. I find it I find it genius. But, um, do the the Aloon is able to tap into 1.4 billion user, you know, via the SDK, etc. But now there will be a lot of overlap with Tik Tok. But it, you know, it's another time of the day. It's other type of users, other attention might be more fitting for the e-commerce. That's what I want to say like for e-commerce like that's like now kiss now kiss.

Jesus and that's why I think it comes at the right time while Apple is trying to to scale up the the e-commerce initiative having Tik Tok right now under the the umbrella would be be crazy. Okay. Yeah. Monetization or do you have more ambush questions? Jacob, I'm okay. Like I know that like there's lots of stuff happening there. Like for instance, there's a the initiative or let's say some rulings already trying to dissolve Facebook and move it from WhatsApp, Instagram, and all these other things now that we have these all like divesting initiatives like Tik Tok. So, we'll see. You know what? You should you should leave that [ __ ] when we talk about Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's have a like separate Facebook episode maybe. Yeah. Let's go to Yeah. Let's go to the meat of this. Yeah. Let's go to the meat. So, in the last 5 years, max mediation, I guess, has gotten more and more automated with everything moving to header bidding, right? What are the top three things you'd advise publishers that are sub 10K a day? What they can do to boost ECPMs now that most of it is

optimized or yeah, automated? Good question. I think there's a wall behind him where there's like the NDA displayed. Let's keep looking there. Generally, generally, I'm not a fan of, you know, seeing the CPM as the the Northstar metric. I think there's a lot hiding behind it that you cannot really influence. The CPM is a factor of a lot of add. Okay. Add armp question. I think that's that's I like I like that better. But um I think you know with seasonality etc with how many impression you show per per user with the freshness of your users you you know there's a lot of things that can lower or increase your CPM but to to increase your your adopter let's put it this way. Yeah. The best you can do is I mean try to have the most stacked waterfall. I think it's it's it's a bit basic to say but the more network whether you have eight network or 15 there is going to be a difference. You are putting more competition in the auction you're giving chance to much more um networks to bid which kind of you know

pull the value up. more networks means more competition whether in bidding or or in waterfall. I think the waterfall is not so much of a topic anymore, but um you're dead. Works the same way, right? If you gamble there, but um no, I think also the the other thing is to add localized localized networks like Bengal for Asian traffic line for Japan, line Japan, Yango for Russia. Um that applies only for people that have the audience there, for for games that have the audience there, but that's not completely ne negligible. So that's that's a thing to take into consideration. There are some hacks that you can try but they they are not 100% proven. Uh they can work on some game on others with the refresh rate etc. But I think the best for your for your adapt and what you can do is to run efficiency. It's it's you know it's a bit of a virtuous circle that you won't have good monetization metrics if you acquire very basic CPI users without

optimization. And to have you know high quality users also you know show high ROS you need to have a good setup. So one feeding the other, but if you really want to have the best opt out metrics, you need to run some some competitive campaigns, RS campaigns on on all networks. So how does UA actually push up ACPMs or ad areness of of the users? You're basically tapping into higher quality users that have higher retention or higher etc that are more ad engage or that tends to do more purchase. So that will by essence, you know, drive the the metrics higher because those users will interact more and engage more with your game than classic CPI users that will not, you know, be necessarily driven toward a goal. So that's cause to effect. I can't tell you how many times I've worked with clients and then they're like, "Yeah, our eCPMs, the benchmarks we're getting were way below." And I'm like, "Yeah, cuz you're only advertising to non-payers. What do you expect?" Yeah.

And it's like, "Yeah, but we want higher E CPMs." I'm like, "Yeah, well, you're not showing payers any ads, so okay, like they're going to stay low." I mean, the eCPMDK is a thing, right? If you only have old user in your game that you show them ads and they've watched 150 ads, it's not going to be the same value of an impression if those are fresh users that just came into your game and that watched five five ads. So, this is this is definitely a thing. And with the you know comparing your eCPM with the one from the competitor doesn't really make sense. Maybe you show 50 ads he shows only 10. So of course if he shows only 10 the eCPM the value of an impression is going to be much higher than you showing 50. So yeah that's kind of one other question right so what advice would you give to publishers on Mac specifically on iOS where this is a bit more of an issue where apploven has taken 50 or 70% of all the impressions

there's no real advice there's no real advice to that the game the thing is apploin is is very strong on iOS I think there is no mystery to that and if they able to take 50 to 70% is because they are the only one that performs on this OS. Google, Facebook, other network were better or higher performing and more competitive on iOS wouldn't be that share of voice, right? It's just they're they're feeling lack that has been, you know, set after ATT. But you know the only thing you can do is have the highest competitive stack adding all you know the bit machine mo and all the other networks that you can even if they t take two 3% of share of voice in your stack they are essential they bring you know the thing up and they might be able to to take a few percentage of share of voice to to to upload in but the reality is whether you have a game that have 30% or 80% share of voice of apploin it's what can you do

about it like there's nothing you that says you're going to have a lower um AR if if this is the case. And bid floors, when is that a good idea? 2018. Yeah, it's it's something publishers have been playing with. Transparently, I haven't seen a lot of like successful cases. The thing with bit floors is you are basically saying, I don't want to show an impression under a certain level of CPM. So you'd rather not show an impression and hurt detention if it's not higher than a certain value that you set. But how do you set this value? Right? It takes a lot of experimentation to know that your bit flow should be at 015 in T3, 050 in T2 and 1.5 in in the US. you need to like adapt and you might actually lose on a lot of traffic because if you put your bid flow too high maybe you start like removing 10% of your impression or 15% of your

impression potentially this will have a positive impact on retention but it might also hurt your revenue so you know that's that's this trade-off where it takes a lot of testing good if you've managed to see an outer lift with this kind of test but it's it's not so straightforward to say okay I put a bit floor and everything's going to Yeah. And I guess the second last question I have for you before uh at least I'll be done. Uh one of the things right that everyone's noticed in the last two years is how much longer rewarded ads and interstitial ads are getting and how much harder they are to click out. I think the longest ad format on app loving is probably I think it was 115 or 118 seconds for rewarded ads. Mm. When is that a good idea? When is it a bad idea to have these aggressive end card formats? Yeah, I think actually I have the thing now. I mean Applo was one of the precursor, one of the driver into it was iron source started and then it

kind of became an arms race. I mean the truth is everybody's doing it, right? Even Google started doing it. So they understood that they were at disadvantage with the other network and there was kind of the acceptance in the industry that user now are more okay with ads as long as you know the ads can be 59 seconds 100 seconds as long as you prompt a skip option for him to exit it before the end if he wants to watch it until the end fine but you know the thing to do is probably to prompt early enough but the maximum upload I think is still 59 seconds that's the longest a rewarded video can go 59mon Come on. I heard I heard recently that all the networks can do 1 minute 30 etc. Yeah, looking at you unity I'm not pointing any fingers but no I think that's um that's something to manage as well with what type of games you have. If you have like very long retain game and at driven games with six months nine months you want to retain

your user as long as possible. You don't want to make them fed up after 3 days because your ads are unskipable. So you'd rather keep those user long and adapt the templates to make them a bit more conservative. I think every network is giving those options right. There is a default template that you know are set but if you can request to all networks lower and make them a bit more conservative that's this is the the part where you you know you actually ask something to be done but you don't know if you don't know. Yeah. That's it. The same as that. All right, last question. Banner refresh rates. So, Google 30 seconds. Every time you if you're like mediating on ADM Mob, if you go lower than 30 seconds, you get horrible results. If you go lower than 30 seconds on AppLin, you get really good results. What's going on? Just talk to me about banner refresh rates. It's a tweak that allows you to basically show more impression and have

a easy PMDK. You know, there's no truth. It might works better. I mean, there is a some kind of understanding that today everybody's kind of between 10 and 15 seconds on max. You kind of need to test as well. Um, it's always been the the answer. Test, see it for yourself. 10% might works better for you on iOS and 15 max might works better on Android. as different networks handles differently the the refresh rate. You're showing more impression. Maybe they don't have time to actually um be competitive and and refresh in the auctions. You know, try both 15, 10, maybe even 20. Um I can't tell you why Google performed better at 30 seconds. I don't have this answer, but yeah, the standard option, right, the max optimize that's 10 seconds, correct? Max optimize, I think, was was 15. 15. Cool. Nice. I think we covered a lot of really good stuff. Yeah. Majority was UA, which is the interesting part. The

admon not that much, but agree. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think uh we'll leave that decision to our dear listeners. Alex, any last comments you want to share your contact details? They're obviously going to put them into the show notes as well, but anything else you want to you want to share? No, it was great. It was had a good time. Um, if anybody needs anything can reach out to me. But yeah, you guys are the are the gurus, so I think you also have the the answers to everything. Was we try to have but we don't always necessarily have all of these interesting bits and pieces. So that's why we have extra special guests like you. Extra uber special guests. Appreciate it. Yeah, we really appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much. So guys, thank you for listening as well. Uh this was another episode of Two and a Half Gamers. Please subscribe, share your comments under the YouTube or join the Slack channel and yeah, see you

next time. Byebye. Thank you very much. Thanks, Alexis. Cheers. Cheers. [Music]