The Big Lie of User Acquisition: Strategies That do not Work in 2021

now however now however we are um we've got a nice controversial uh title i was like this um the big lie of user acquisition strategies that do not work in 2021 boom i love it get in there um so yeah this is a nice confrontational tone uh i'm sure hannah um of split metrics will be will be very charming and not too confrontational though but um but yes um you're going to give us a bit of insight into what's not working and maybe working in in in ua and it's obviously a changing very changing sphere at the moment with the recent uh sort of privacy and advertising updates yeah definitely hi chris and thank you very much for having me here i've heard part of calm's uh talk was very insightful and thank you very much for whereabouts are you hannah where are you where are you based at the moment obviously

the weather is just crazily hot here uh we're not used to it and it's just so hard is i've got i've got a very similar uh divider in my house there so i was just let's just learn how you'd use it i'm gonna going to go and rearrange some things anyway enough about home decor and more about ua i'm going to leave you to to launch in and i'm here in the background you'll get your full time don't worry we're a little bit behind that's that's it sure let's let's start um let me share my screen first again hi everyone my name is hannah i work at speedmetrix and we are a mobile marketing company providing solutions and services for the um app store optimization and apple search management and automation and i personally lead the account executives team that do apple search at uh consultancy and help clients get the most out of this channel i mean abstract

chats so today um i'd like to talk about the mobile marketing strategies that did not really work i mean i wouldn't say do not work but are not really enough in 2021. um let's go let's start um basically during this conversation during this talk i would like to cover the aso and a b testing part and also then switch to the pad acquisition especially to apple search um let's start okay do i switch it okay um i guess everyone would agree uh that the current virus pandemic has changed the way um mobile users interact with apps and games um and another important change in 2021 is the app tracking transparency framework that was introduced by apple um it granted users the right uh to choose

whether to share their personal data or not and it is definitely making a significant impact on the mobile app industry and of course uh affects the uh marketing strategy in mobile so uh what mistakes can you avoid uh to stay on the um fast-tracked growth and brand new generation um let's check them out um if you're thinking that your game is uh engaging in itself and brand is not important i'm afraid you can be wrong here um so why is a strong brand so important for user acquisition and app store optimization um first of all the tendency of the last two years is that users come to app stores with a purpose in mind they search for a specific game or app intend to use generic search terms less

this was a trend last year and uh 2021 is not an exception here secondly after the idfa deprecation and after the introduction of the att framework attribution became kind of quite confusing um it makes all the more sense now to concentrate on your brand um i'll talk upon this later in more detail uh but when you have a strong brand when you have a recognizable brand it gives a really impressive results when you run search tab ads on apple search ads and um thirdly i and i guess everyone would agree here um brand uh awareness influences the conversion in the positive way uh the point is the higher the conversion the more often your game or app will be shown to users in the app store so it's um all one big cycle like you see on this slide

new users install the game or the app then app store rates uh the game higher then more users see the app in search browse or check top charts and then as a result you get even more users downloading your app so this is about the brand awareness and importance of investing into your brand next strategy um is that is not enough this year is keeping the a b testing for later again not the best idea why uh first and i'm sure everyone have heard of of this is apple um just introduced a few changes to the app store and the first one is the a b testing and then the build tool to apple street charts to apple um and now you'll be able to test icons screenshots

videos and compare their performance within the app store this is definitely a huge opportunity that will positively affect the mobile marketing and it's important to include uh these a b testing activities into your marketing plans that's for sure um however this is just a tip of iceberg uh here i'd like to talk more about how a wider range of a b testing opportunities can make much more difference and first of all is uh testing on pre-launch um it is about testing your game or mobile app idea um or certain functionality and features before even developing it you can show your mobile apps prototype to your target audience and decide whether you should build it uh what is more you may compare a few concepts select the best performing one

and then put it into practice for the existing game you can identify the features that should be delivered in the first place on the app store with the upcoming a b testing functionality you won't be able to do that i mean if we're talking about the pre-launch testing however or you can do the pre-launch tests with split metrics uh you can identify the best performing features settings characters the logic here is very simple um just focus on features that are most attractive to your customers and then deliver them first um next thing about pre-launch here are just some more ideas on what can be tested on the pre-launch stage after you've identified your target audience um what core mechanics work best it can be words puzzles match three or something completely new then you can explore what plot

characters resonate with your target audience uh what awards will motivate them to continue playing and thirdly uh you can test the graphics so will the game be black and white or maybe cartoon style or maybe your users want to see the realistic 3d graphic all of this can be tested on the pre-launch stage before your app even goes live uh next thing about a b testing is uh that it is very helpful in the context of go to market strategy we are talking about positioning targeting and rebranding if necessary a b tests will help you collect data to compare performance of variations with screenshots containing different messages this way you'll be able to understand whether your positioning strategy resonates with your audience for example some users need games

to relax some to pass time and entertain themselves some of the users are eager to enter into a competition so this requires completely different marketing strategies and approaches in each case and again a b testing will be as a solution here we at split metrics do not stop repeating uh that creatives is a king and any idea even the best one can be improved from time to time we we publish uh ace of reports split metrics and they each time they prove uh that visuals have the highest impact on the conversion uh changing the icons screenshots or video can bring a huge boost to your app performance here's for example one of our clients they

edit a character as the main element and changed background and as a result the new art raised the interest of users by over 30 percent this is huge and we have many cases like that when we see very positive dynamic after the creatives were changed so our advice is always run a b tests um each time you're experimenting with visuals when you add seasonal modifications to creatives when you adapt them to new market or simply want to improve discoverability and conversion the a b test will really help you hear and improve your marketing results okay so this is about organic about a b testing now let's switch from organic to pad acquisition and apple search in particular i work with apple storage chats mainly so i can

share more tips with you here one of the pitfalls we often come across here is the idea that pad user acquisition doesn't affect the organic results actually it does um so let me explain more how this combination of the app store optimization and pad user acquisition work it's quite a complicated scheme here on the screen so pad user acquisition will bring even more target traffic to your app page uh that will be interested in uh your game um both uh apple's abstract optimization and pad your user acquisition have a strong effect on app visibility they improve search performance and app ranking in the category and algorithms react positively when the number of your app installs increases and then um scaling pad user acquisition will expose more users which will bring more organic traffic as a result

so all of this is connected uh but on the other hand uh app store optimization has a strong impact on the performance of your um pad user acquisition campaigns for instance um if you run apple store chats such metrics as a tab through rate and conversions can be improved considerably with the help of the aso tools including a b testing in our team we often analyze clients accounts on appleshare chats and we see that when everything is almost ideal there is a space for improvement uh in terms of tap through rate and conversions and once we work on this on improving this metric we uh invite our aso team to do that um the overall performance in apple stretches is growing the kpis are improving so this is really important to also pay attention to these metrics and combine your aso and patio activities

let's go next um yeah so i've already started to talk about apple search ads so among different ui channels i'd like to focus on this right now um first of all apple has introduced the idfa deprecation and this is a huge change in um in the mobile marketing landscape uh there was a lot of discussion uh last year and this year on that um and this really changed the the market according to appsflyer we're talking about uh 58 of users uh that opted out of tracking uh in all categories for gaming it's even more it's 66 percent and it's really a lot however um my comment here as a result nothing basically has changed for apple 3 chats uh ua managers are still able to

optimize their campaigns to raws and in app events with the help of such tools as search as hq by split metrics and they are still um able to reach their target audiences unlike other ad channels that have to use sk network now apple search ads uses its own framework called ad services for privacy safe uh install attribution and manage measurement um so long story short um apple street chats as the user acquisition channel is already a must-have in your ua portfolio so my advice is to not ignore it in 2021 it will really give you huge opportunities for growth and we see that after the ios 14.5 release the number of clients who are studying their apple structures campaigns who are investing more into apple storage is growing okay let's see what i have else yeah one

more important thing that apple street charts can help with is um when we talk about having a strong brand i mentioned how important it is for your app to pop up in search results first um and not the app of your competitors however if you do not run apostrophe chats with your brand keyword that then your competitors will likely do so and they will get some part of your traffic um so an app in search results takes almost a half of the screen and users unless they're highly motivated will likely tap on the first app they see also if we talk about organic and pet uae connection apple thread chats is also a great source of insights if you want to collect and optimize semantic core you can see the conversion for each keyword in your ad campaigns and choose the best performing keywords

to add to your metadata long story short if you would like to get this advanced management feeders bulk management automation just check searches hq by split metrics we provide all of this data and the possibility of making optimization of your campaigns towards raws and target metrics um yeah so here are some real world results of our customers that run apple search ads um again publisher in a games managed to increase their profit by 22 percent compared to the year before uh they used search eq for the automation for custom reporting for advanced filters and this allowed them to relocate their budget from the keywords that just wasted them but they are all of their money for apple street chats to something that was profitable in this case they uh got an increase in profit

good um yeah next misconception is okay i'd better stick to the same ua strategy i used to have in 2020. is it okay should i leave it as it is or probably i need to try something else um the answer is yeah you'll never know until you try um the mobile marketing um it's very dynamic the new ua opportunities appear every few months and you definitely have to test them out to be on top and speaking about apple search ads there are some good news from this channel um in 2021 apple search ads already opened up two new opportunities for growth the first one is new storefront china which is absolutely huge and the next one is a new placement search tab ads so let me dive deep into that um yeah so apple search is now available in mainland china

for booking campaigns in a week so next week ads will start to serve on the app store earlier we have helped some china-based companies scale for global markets and got really impressive results in just three months so we hope that will also it will also work the other way around because china is one of the top revenue generators on the aso on the ios according to the reports and um last year it counted for almost half global mobile app spent so this is a really really impressive opportunity for mobile apps and games so you can reach the untapped audience on the app store before most of your competitors do and and at search hq we've started to support this storefront right from the day one to you know to catch all of the

possible opportunities for growth next thing is um new placement that was recently introduced is search tab ads um it's been available for a couple of months uh now and uh it also uh was very actively discussed one once it was launched uh searches hq we've investigated the performance of this placement and found that in fact it's a really viable tool you just need to know how to apply it the first best practice to apply this this search tab ads is to drive brand awareness if you are willing to invest in brand building apps research tab campaigns are worth the cost on the other hand we observe really outstanding performance for the strong brands running this type of campaign really they um are completely within their kpis

and there is still some uh some space to increase their costs because the kpis are really good um next thing um will it will give you a good opportunity if you are using a search tab for um retargeting um of your users um if you want to re-engage with these customers uh it will also be very helpful because it catches their attention before these users uh become inactive um we've already have shared early statistics on search tab ads in our blog so you can find data by category and poster front just go to our website splitmetrics.com and there will be the data um yeah here are just a few examples of these benchmarks um yeah and so also speaking about

search tab ads recently we've seen a great improvement in its performance for some geos customer acquisition cost has decreased by over 30 times the initial number um plus some clients see an increase in brand impressions in pad campaigns after they run search tab ads um just a fresh case from one of our clients as they have a strong brand in europe the search tab ads have just shown impressive results for them and not only for returning users but also for new users all the performance data are is within their kpis and even better we'll be sharing more data soon in our search has benchmarks reports so uh stay tuned um yeah so it looks like that's all if you want to know more about our solutions benchmarks any tips how to work with apple street chats just feel free to childhood to answer your questions thank you

wow that was great that was really really good there i'll we'll leave those up on screen just for a minute so people can grab them um i've got a few questions from the audience we started a bit late so we can probably get through uh two or three look at that's nice um that was really cool hannah thank you so much for that it was kind of a mixture of some good some sort of broad ideas and and some real details so um i really um really appreciate that so i'm gonna try and put a few these questions out um there's a very specific one which is related to what you're just talking about um how can advertisers improve volume in apple search ads campaigns isn't it always low volume that's from someone in that's well that's a good that's a good question um uh on apple search um usually as far as i understand this is related to the uh search my drum campaigns when apple searches recommends the um the search term suggestions um how you can do that is to first check the data for a longer period

of time if we talk about the low volume search terms um and then um so this is the main tip and uh it's hard to identify what's behind this low volume terms but still if you can take a longer period uh you'll probably get the data on the stretch terms behind these low to low volume terms hopefully this will help that's good that's good i've got a couple of questions here about um pre-launch testing i'm going to kind of put together um one is uh do you worry that pre-launch testing could reduce the amount of innovation and new concepts for games as it doesn't always allow for new games to be easy i mean this is a general question from a lot of game designers about kind of i guess data led to game design rather than things another question is does pre-launch could or does pre-launch testing affect the overall cost of game production and could that turn off investors um i would say because we have a big amount of clients at split metrics who are testing their games in pre-launch and it is actually

reduces like mainly reduces the cost of your game production because first you identify the best working idea you identify it depends on what you're testing probably you're testing the category subcategory or you're testing the message to users of features and we see that they um those publishers can go live or can go to the market with already tested and good solutions so they do not make mistakes in terms of their positioning in terms in terms of the functionality to release first because right from the beginning those games are already interesting to their users and they are more motivated to download them more active and they drive more target audience to to your game so this is how it actually works so overall the cost doesn't inc of course pre-launch testing is not free you need to drag users there but um you invest you make an early investment and it will pay off later okay i've got a couple of questions

about uh sort of sort of related um one is what is the industry average or recommended budget for a b testing in app store search ads i guess that's quite a flexible answer that depends on the scale of game i guess but yeah what is it like a minimum average budget there's an also a question about um relatedly potentially that you split metrics obviously provide the service what sort of budgets needed to use a third-party company for this so those are kind of related i guess like is there kind of a minimum minimum level or a recommended level for putting into to give this a trial i would say the biggest investment here from the very beginning is to drive the audience to the test it's not the tool itself but the audience because you need to drive the pad traffic to the test um i wouldn't say about the price is because this is not my team working with that but if you reach out to me or to anyone at clickmetrics it is better to do it by me uh i'm sure the team will give you the correct numbers but

just keep in mind that the biggest part of investment is the uh audience uh driving audience to your tests there's a kind of question about that as well here which is pardon me what sort of scale of audience do you kind of advise for a pre-launch or even later on a b test like how how big of uh how big of an audience do you need for that test for it to be useful you know how many yeah that's that's a very good question um so this depends uh depending on how many variations you are going to have for your a b tests because there can be two variations or three or four variations but we recommend to get at least a thousand users per one variation so based on that you can calculate the average pricing two variations two thousand at least but fair enough okay that's good i'm gonna try and squeeze into two more uh quick questions i'm gonna have to let you go back into the ether um talking you i think you talked earlier about brands advertising your brand and promoting your brand in um in apple search ads and obviously it's not quite the same thing but earlier we

had um adimo talking about in-game advertising and brand advertising that way so i was gonna ask what's your thoughts on in-game advertising or new advertising formats that people should consider because obviously you know with the changes recently it's certainly opened up uh challenges and an opportunity for people to try different kinds of of advertising promotion are you seeing anything else that people should look at on my side i can talk only about apple searches because i'm quite proficient in this direction but speaking about this channel um it's definitely like it's necessary uh to invest into your brand keywords when you're on this channel it's just obligatory because otherwise your competitors will do so and will your game or app will appear like i mean your competitors game or app will appear on your search terms which is not needed absolutely and so first of all invest into your uh brand uh keywords this is just must to have an apple street

chat um yeah and one more thing that i mentioned speaking about search tab ads this is actually the main purpose of this also is to promote your brand when you run ads on displacement on apple search chat again your brand will become more and more recognizable so this is another thing you can do okay so one final question that i will let you go um obviously this is i presume from a small developer um not every team can do all the things you've outlined um what what are the most important would you say you know what is there a hierarchy of where people should focus first and because you've recommended quite a lot of ideas and suggestions there is a um focus your attention yeah that's just a great question and it's related to the whole marketing strategy when you come to the app store but uh split metrics will also have the agency team and they do like you know promoting apps from the very beginning and what i see how they do that they first start with the aso part because this is really important to improve your app page to make sure all

of your creatives are working well you have a good conversion from the app page you have a pilot converting icons all of this a product page part and then switch to the pad acquisition because if your product page doesn't work well if you have you know very bad screenshots on the product page that do not convert at all um your investment into the pad acquisition will be just a waste of money so first start optimizing your uh asl part and then switch to the pad acquisition that would be the plan fantastic hannah you have been uh been a pleasure to talk to you very very efficient as well which is good so i'm gonna let you go back and enjoy your day and your sweltering heat in in belarus uh and uh yeah hopefully you'll uh have people can reach out and ask you further questions through the meeting system or discord or whatever and yeah and and through that or so but thank you so much for your time this morning really appreciate it yeah definitely thank you very much chris thanks for having

me here and feel free to reach out by mid to match i'm happy to answer any questions you have fantastic all right