The Mobile vs Web User Acquisition: What Nobody's Talking About

[music] Welcome to Deconstructor of Funds growth segment. I'm Josh Chandley, Doof's resident growth operator. Joining me is Adam Smart, global director of product for gaming at Appsfly. Thank you for having me.
So, Adam, Appsier has launched web attribution. Almost everyone listening, if they've even ran UA, has only ever bought app installs. Why should we start caring about measuring the web?
You kind of have to go back to like apps full release there. We launched the modern marketing cloud which is really our vision for the future and the future for marketing as a whole like and it's bringing everything together under one umbrella. So no longer just mobile attribution. We're looking at web, we're looking at PlayStation, we're looking at Xbox, we're looking at Oculus even. So, we're trying to sort of get into the position where we're going to be able to measure everything for our clients and

then tie it all back together again sort of centrally. So, you'd be able to look at the performance of campaigns spread across your entire estate rather than just in one place.
You're talking about PlayStation Oculus. Is this for new clients or is this to expand for existing clients too?
This is for anybody who wants to work with it. So at the moment we we obviously have about 70% of the mobile market which are doing things outside of mobile anyway. So obviously with where with PlayStation whatever the platform is. So anybody who wants to start working with them can start working with them.
So let's say I'm I'm used to buying app installs. You know how why should I start buying web?
Web's interesting. I don't know if you've ever done much with web, but it's uh it's a it's kind of a different animal. Gaming companies out of necessity have always been very innovative. You know, even going back to the the old sort of Facebook Canvas days and the apps on

Facebook Canvas is they've always had to be very resilient, understand what the changes in the ecosystem are going to bring very early on and to try and work out different solutions for those problems. You know, we've had the massive change from Apple of, you know, scan at a a few years ago, which massively impacted the market. There was a resilience there and a and a and a idealism to get past where we've been, and that's that's worked pretty well, but I think it still had an impact, and it still scarred a lot of developers in terms of do we want all our eggs in one basket effectively. you know, there was the the the um changes from privacy sandbox and that kind of thing which then got rolled back. I think it's left developers a little bit like, you know, what can we find other platforms? Can we run in a different way? I've heard a lot of smaller companies popping up that are porting Unity across to HTML 5 and that kind of thing. So, a lot of developers

are easily able to start running on web. It's really sort of opened the door to having your your game on web and then you need some form you know obviously a lot of these people if it's a Unity app that's been converted into HTML they come from a mobile background so they understand how mobile attribution how mobile marketing works performance marketing and so they want to just be able to do the same thing on web but that's not been a thing
no I mean web has had measurement probably since before the first phone. Yeah. Yeah. But it's always been really different like how how is Appsfire's solution different from what's available today where you're combining all these different platforms and conversion APIs where you're sending things back to the network and stuff. Web's always been really easy. Like that was one of the cool things about web. You could have a UTM parameter, you pass it through the the URL and you know where that user's come from. That's cool. Like that's that's not changed. That's still there. Everyone can do that. That's wicked. I think the biggest problem is when you

start to look at things in a mobile mindset, you start to have conflicting views as to what actually led to the install. Then when you go further back, you start to look at actually if I want to drop spend or push spend on one of these campaigns, you then need to understand which one actually worked. So it's not just a question of thinking that you're right and going, "Yep, I'm going to run with this." It's a question of actually understanding where the installs came from, where the installs providing a good rorowass came from, and then being able to boost those. Yeah. Because it's a fundamental problem like the MMP is this neutral third party verifying where the hell this install came from. The basic example I would give is like if you're launching a really tiny game and you run UA on Google and Meta and on on Tuesday you get one install without apps flyier. Google and Meta may both

tell you they caused one install.
It's
and now you're saying, "Oh, there's two installs I'm paying for, but I only had one user come in."
Which campaign actually worked? Yeah.
Yeah. And so before this new product, how would you do that for things like DTOC?
It's like web shops
very difficult. There are some tools on the market to be able to do that, but not it's always been viewed in a completely different way. I mean, if you look at a lot of the larger companies who are running web instances, whether it's food delivery or ecom or something like that that have an app and a website, mainly with the website being first. It's been a very different setup for user acquisition and a very different mindset for user acquisition. And I think that shift has sort of caused web to operate in a in a completely different way. So what we're trying to do is for everybody that's been running mobile first essentially is to make web operate in the same way as mobile.
Why now?

I would have personally liked this about seven years ago when I was back at product madness, but you know at times. I think the shift to to the modern marketing cloud and the way that we're viewing the future for AppSlar and the future for the industry is really to enable as much as we possibly can. And I think the timing just hits right now for being able to do all of this. Also, like it's not just the attribution that needs to change here. You know, you've got a lot of networks that historically haven't run websites. You know, when when you see an ad inside another another game that you're playing, generally speaking, it's to an app. Is very rare or it has been very rare that those go to a website. So, you've not been able to run a lot of a lot of networks don't support that because there's no feedback loop for those networks to be able to support that. Now, with us changing this, we're trying

to drive that whole sort of industry shift in being able to open up different advertising channels that you would normally work with on mobile, you can now start to work with them on web as well.
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the feedback loop. And I would say that the reason that we don't see as much web traffic on, let's say, inapp ads is exactly what you just said. How do you beat a competing ad campaign when they're able to run on rorowass and they're able to target with detailed purchase or ad revenue postbacks and really get exactly the right user
100%.
Without doing that for yourself.
That's a mobile mindset like that.
It is. It's a variable marketing.
I'm a mobile guy so this makes sense.
Exact 100%. But that that's you know you talk to you talk to people who come web first and it's a it's a very very different mindset but it's one

that they have to get their heads around because I do feel like it's a stronger way of operating. I mean it's a more structured financial way of operating.
Yeah. My very first thought when I saw this announcement from apps
Oh god I'd love to know this. Oh uh uh was holy this is going to dramatically accelerate DTOC buying inside my games and the reason for it is I think that one of the biggest growth levers for AP monetized games over the last couple of years has just been the growth in web shops not just because of the take rate but the the increase in the ownership for the relationship with the player
massive
um companies like apparell yeah
yeah yeah exactly Exactly. And it's it's a whole new surface. The tough truth on mobile gaming right now is that we're maturing, right? The market is relatively maturing to where it was 5 10 years ago.
Yeah.

And that means there's a shift from millions of new games launching and runs running lots of new user acquisition to as a share of spend. I would assume that you're seeing, you know, retargeting go up.
Yep. Exactly that. If you can move a loyal customer from a a 30% take rate to something much lower, that's just business.
It's maintaining user base. You know, your your VIPs, for instance, the longer you can maintain VIPs and to keep VIPs coming back into your game, that's a hell of a revenue driver.
Yeah. And so, I mean, it's huge. It's huge. And so from my brain, the way I I see this web announcement is that the biggest unlock is DTOC. Do you agree or is it web games? Is it crossplatform? Is it console 2? What's the biggest unlock on day one? It's the tool that opens up a lot of different avenues. You know, it's not necessarily, hey, run a website now or run a run a web version of your

game right now. Although I know a lot of companies that are sort of triing it. they are giving it a shot to see what they can do. Now, web's always been an absolute nightmare for any form of retention. You know, in comparison to Facebook Canvas, web was always an absolute nightmare to try and keep people coming back to. But now with mobile, obviously it's much much harder when you haven't got an app installed on your desktop to keep people coming back. So, there's problems. You know, there are a lot of problems with web. There always has been. But I think being able to acquire users through web will bring up lots of alternate ways of doing things. What I'm seeing what or what I have seen in some of the early testing is it has dropped CPIs, you know, by quite some extent to some of the companies that have been triing this early on. Whether or not that stays for a long period of time, who knows? But obviously early adopters with anything get the the sort of fruits of that. We're starting to see more networks

actually sort of actively bringing in web business because of the feedback loop that we can offer without people having to go and install each and everyone's SDK web SDK. The problem is the Q&A that comes alongside that. You know that can take weeks to see that there's no knock-on effect from bringing a new SDK into your operation. Now by having apps flyers SDK within you're integrating with one SDK you're going through that painpoint with one SDK. Cool. But you're also opening the door to lots of other feedback loops just as a consequence of doing that one. So it does kind of aggregate all of those SDKs and to bring that feedback loop back to the networks. So you can literally start just turning on working with whichever network you want.
Yeah. Like mobile. What I'm struggling to understand exactly is because the pitch I'm hearing is you run Uway to the web the same way you'd run it to an app. So let's say I'm running a social casino

game. I'm between 30 and 50% DTOC. What changes from my studio the day this turns on? Probably the biggest thing is the team that is doing mobile user acquisition can [clears throat] pick up web user acquisition like it's the same thing. You don't need a separate team. You don't need a different skill set in order to be able to run on web from the very beginning. That's a bit of a game changer from how it operates at the moment. you know having the different understanding of web for me again it opens up these different avenues which from a product side of the business you know I come from the product side of the business so like being able to suddenly think about hey maybe let's release on web let's release on PlayStation let's release on Xbox let's let's try something new it opens up the mechanism to be able to do that it's an enabler

okay it's interesting Because from my point of view, web is a scary place to run Uway
because again, [clears throat] I'm a performance focused person.
You don't work with affiliates.
I don't work with affiliates. I' I've only ever run UA to apps. And so the way I think about allocating a budget in a dream environment, right? I want to see every dollar allocated so that it gets roughly an equal return wherever I put it next. Everything's in balance. I don't understand without this new tool how to do that.
You're coming at it from mobile mindset which is is exactly my my thought process as well. I find it very hard when you're talking to companies and they're they're currently working with Google Analytics and that kind of thing. It's you know that's not a competitor. [laughter] You can run both of us quite easily. They're very very very different things.

That's half the problem as well. Like it's going to take some time for the web mindset to really understand the mobile mindset and to start working in that way. We at AppSire do see that as something that is likely to happen and that's why we're sort of trying to enable that early on. This is early days. Look, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. I think it will take time, but as soon as companies start to see the benefit in working this way, you will start to see a shift.
To be fair, you're right. I am massively biased. My my brain has 16 years of thinking exactly one way.
I I'm ex I'm exactly the same. Like,
yeah. [laughter] And you it's it's funny because I've been doing a lot on the the the sort of PC and console side of gaming as well recently and it it's exactly the same there because it's more of a historic kind of industry. It's it's very different the way they operate. It's way more like the the movie industry. It's

very very difficult to explain the sort of benefits of performance when there's no visibility of it or understanding of it.
But there are some advantages to that path too. That's a learning that mobile can definitely take.
Yes, that's that's fair. You know, I think Applier's pitch on the announce was that mobile is the most accountable channel in advertising, which is an interesting way to position performance. The counterpoint our web compatriots may say is that, you know, with fingerprinting, with click manipulation everywhere, is mobile performance still actually the most accountable channel in advertising? I do think it is and I do think it is a lot safer than than other platforms in terms of manipulation and that kind of thing. I I think mobile for all its weaknesses, installing the game on the same device that you're seeing the ad on is always going to be a benefit to sort of clear attribution. As

soon as you start looking at other platforms, you know, as I say, I've been doing a lot on PC console and that kind of thing over the past while. And you're seeing the ad on your mobile and then potentially installing it on another device in your household. That is far less onetoone. That deterministic flow is not there at all. Although there's been lots of roadblocks put in the way, I do think it is still one of the strongest channels from that respect. Yeah, I think that from my perspective there are interesting challenges.
There always has been to be fair on on mobile. It's not like this is it's suddenly changed. It was more in the early days it was more trying to work out how to manipulate the system, how to do things in different ways which would give you an advantage. Now it's more how you're able to sort of work with the system. It is I mean the curse of the visibility that we get with apps flyers like app kind of style UA is you get visibility.
Yeah. You can actually see problems very

very clearly. There is no hiding from from click fraud protect and everything around that. You know we we put a lot of work into the fraud aspect of things to be able to make a safer environment there. Unfortunately so do the fraudsters. Um, so it's a constant game of cat and mouse, which, you know, we're never going to be 100% fraudfree, but then nobody else is. So, you know, we're we're sort of working at it as hard as we possibly can, but like I say, so are the fraudsters. [laughter]
Yeah. And with this style of attribution, we can at least measure and see that happening in real time.
Exactly. The benefits as well is that the web approach has had a really hard time buying ads shown inside mobile games and apps. It's really hard to penetrate that when you can't target with the kind of granularity that essentially a unified real-time postback system with attribution um enables. Do you agree that apps launch

is like connecting those two worlds?
Oh, massively. It's enabled DSPs to be able to move into web without a huge sort of friction of the SDK side of stuff that I was talking about earlier. But it also enables with that feedback loop, it also enables them to sort of enhance their optimization and and their targeting based on information that they've got back as a as a consequence of the loop. So I do think it's going to improve the the targeting over time. It's going to start to improve how ultimately the the rorowass that they can provide you as a customer. I mean what do you think about it? Have you have you ever thought about running on web? Is is do you run on web? Is there is there sort of an advantage point that you can see for doing that?
For Wildcard for our business we we don't see as much benefit into to running the UA into the web. However, we are ad monetized and so any way that we

can help customers facilitates access to our inventory, we're we're really excited about and from our perspective, one of the biggest trends for inapp ads, which is I think competing with DTOC for the fastest growing revenue segment right now is the diversification of demand from purely app-based UA to web as well, whether that's gaming or non-gaming. growth has been absolutely breathtaking. But even that but even that is somewhat reliant right on conversion APIs which is essentially sending like their own custom postbacks to to app and that's additional work that you're trying to solve for.
100% 100%. And so what's interesting is so we talk about apps flyier as an MMP you know verifying who caused an install but you also talked about your is it a rebrand is it a repositioning last year with the move to the mobile mark or the modern

marketing clouds and that's really you know attribution doesn't doesn't challenge conversion APIs and these old ways of doing things it it's something bigger than that can you help me understand like how how you the the modern marketing cloud and how this plugs into it.
Yeah, I mean it's quite funny. We realized fairly early on actually that there's you have like Adobe Marketing Cloud, you have um uh Salesforce and we don't fit there,
but we also now because we're sort of moved out of just mobile, we also don't fit in the mobile MMP anymore. Um, so we kind of ended up creating this new genre, if you will. Um, which kind of fits what we do, which is quite impressive when you think about it. Um, but we the idea, look, the idea, regardless of the of the name, but the

idea is fundamentally we would be the one-stop hub for marketing across your company. So whatever it is that you're running in whichever capacity you're running it and whatever persona you are within that company, we would be able to give you the information that you need in order to be able to do your job effectively. So that's kind of the the thought process behind modern marketing cloud. And then for us it's it's really building out that structure and building out the different platforms, the different everything that we need to support under that. So, so like I was saying at the very beginning, sort of aligning that centralistic approach of this is the user that came in through this Facebook campaign on Android and then they've gone through on Steam and purchased the game and and they're now playing on Steam and you know, so you can you can almost attribute everything

back to the original Facebook campaign if you wanted to, but you know, obviously every business is going to have their own business logic. their own understanding of how they want to run it and what they want to see. But it gives you the opportunity and the visibility to understand the player flow across the the company.
I remember when I first learned what an MMP was. It was because we were running CPI campaigns. Postbacks weren't an issue. Training ML wasn't an issue in the same way. We were essentially doing site bids. that the mobile world has grown so much whether it's just doing rorowass campaigns whether it's doing complex attribution you know we talk about CTV but there's also problems like pre-install campaigns digital turbine or with uh Unity's Aura where the the install is forced and so how do you how do you attribute that and now we're talking about well there's not even apps and it may not even be on the

device you thought it was. Exactly. And so the way I'm storing it in my brain is
your vision of this next iteration of MMP in a world where it's not just install that matters anymore. is that you're kind of the first party data hub and you're quarterbacking my data in a clean way to wherever I want it without me doing dev work
and giving you the visibility to be able to see everything that's going on across all of the platforms that you're running on. Yeah, it's just amazing seeing the the unlocks that are happening right now on how UA is working with everything that apps flyier is doing for for web and the modern marketing cloud. How is UA going to be different in in one two years?
We haven't it's been what it's been sort of half an hour and we haven't mentioned AI. So
I think that's that's that's like the

first for a conversation for me. Look, I I think AI is going to change it dramatically. I think it already has in terms of creative, in terms of the the sort of fraud detection, measurement. It's slowly sort of creeping into all areas of life uh across the board to be honest. So, in UA, I don't see that as being any different whatsoever. I do think we'll start to see again over time like in the future we'll start to see you being able to control campaigns based on performance you know almost like do you remember seven 8 n years ago I'm showing my age here um you you there was all this sort of fuss about uh rule based you know rulebased campaign management so you could set up a load of configuration to be able to decide whether a campaign was going over a certain threshold and then you could automatically sort of stop it or it or or scale it. Um there will become an element of that and I do see it sort of you know that expanding more but

obviously with AI it actually thinks about what it's doing and and sort of tries to do the best thing for you. I think we'll see a lot more of that over over the next while the next few years certainly. Um, and again with creative, I I I I really think we'll start seeing uh playables coming into things more and more sort of a AI creative playables. And that's going to be interesting in terms of being able to spin out uh playable ads in in matter of seconds, you know, just like you can spin out videos right now. I think that will open up a hell of a lot coming through, you know, and the the again for the early adopters of that sort of thing, you're going to see the immediate boost of of early adopting.
Now, creative production is just changing incredibly fast. The only area I disagree with you is I think that there's a really good reason the rules-based world that we tried to create maybe around COVID time.

No, no, I remember doing it way before co
really. Oh jeez.
Oh god. Yeah, it was a long long time ago that that I first got involved in that.
Oh wow. Okay. So okay, you've you've successfully aged yourself as older than me. Thank you.
I know, right?
Uh yeah, it's okay. Uh
that seems to happen a lot. My point was that the challenge is that um and I I haven't actually edited a campaign in a very long time, but there's an art to it where different networks like to be treated in different ways and the rules are always changing, especially as we're seeing, you know, longer event depths um and changes to to how these campaigns work. And it's not really as easy if um performance is a little bit light for the last x day. Lower your target.
That's part of the reason why not everybody now is using a rule-based approach to
Exactly. And so I'm not I'm not sure I'm not sure that AI is going to solve that

very quickly. There's also issues like okay is performance is going down. Is it fraud?
I actually think the opposite. I I do think it will happen and I do think it'll happen relatively quickly in terms of being able to identify and run these things. I mean, I personally wouldn't want it to sit there and run everything for me and take actions and everything else until I had enough confidence in it that it was going to do what I'm asking it to do. But I I do think over time it will. And I I do see it actually happening and and working quite well whether or not the cost aspect of it sort of outweighs the the you know we've been seeing a lot of that recently uh certainly all over LinkedIn and everything with the the sort of the running cost of AI behind the scenes and it actually costing more than the people that you did have to be able to run these kind of things in the first place. So I, you know, I'm not saying it's going to take over the world and it's going to take over everyone's jobs and

everything else because I I don't see that happening. I see it as more of a scaling tool enabling you to work and do do many more things in a in a shorter space of time.
Yeah, I think that's that's more reasonable. Uh, I think especially with data sets the size of Appsfire, you know, you're not going to be able to just give it raw access and have it have it just start burning tokens.
No,
no. [laughter] Uh, yeah. Unless you're like literally made of money. Uh what I do think is interesting though is
the the amount of repetitive grunt work and reporting and things you're just checking
as a UA person
massive
and getting all of those done automatically with super with some superficial at least analysis uh can help you do the thing that's really important.
That's where we're starting to see some really interesting use cases with with agents like that have one job. They're they're constantly checking that one

thing. It saves so much time and I like I think that is going to work incredibly well. We're we're at the moment we're looking at how we can bring agents into AppSire more and more and more. We've already got a a load of them, but we want more to build it up more so that you have access to use if you create an agent, you can share it with everybody else if you would like to and that kind of thing. We're sort of looking at ways that we can bring that side of things in the sort of community aspect of it in more.
Amazing. All right. Well, on that note, Adam, thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Pleasure is all mine.
I appreciate you spending the time to walk, you know, through web attribution, but also the mobile marketing cloud or the modern marketing clouds,
the modern marketing cloud,
because yeah, things are changing. I think we're getting set up for a pretty big shift. So, my last question, where should listeners go to learn more?
The website's always a good place to start or reach out to anyone from Appsfire. Uh, I mean, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn or, you know,

through any channels.
Awesome. All right. Thanks, Adam. Been a pleasure. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor Fund Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructorofund.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators. Thanks for listening.