The secrets of Russian mobile game user acquisition

[Music] thank you all for coming my name is Tim I'm the managing director free by mobile where Finland based mobile marketing agency so we help mobile gaming companies to penetrate into markets where these companies have the least expertise which are Russia Korea and hopefully Japan pretty soon so today we're going to speak about user acquisition techniques in Russia and Russia's pretty interesting a market but before we go and before we dive into user acquisition how many of you here guys are actually mobile marketing experts or mobile marketers could you raise your hands please okay one all right anyways I think I think there's gonna be interesting for you for you too so let's look let's have a you

know distant glance at the Russian market overall so Russia mark I mean Russia on the map is pretty huge very pretty big and and average revenue per use in Russia's to be honest comparatively low it's about $8 per per user but if we Russian market actually is the fifth market according to a penny by downloads so if we multiply the $8 by the number of gamers there we can actually get a pretty big number it's gonna be two hundred and forty two million dollars so how big is two hundred forty or forty two and this is a quick comparison chart it's roughly 20 percent of the UK's market and about two thirds of Canadian market and it's also finished Swiss Czech and Portuguese and all these majority of European countries cumulative Lee so Russia's is much

bigger than that but is Russia really really different this is this is an interesting question and when actually tried to look at it penny to see to see some some differences with other marques actually came came across this this wonderful screenshot which indicates that Russian along with Japanese Chinese and South Korean audience is willing to pay and this is this is a grossing apps these audiences are willing to pay more in games which are not pokemon gold so the restaurants are heavily dominated by by Paco mango go by grossing and it's pretty interesting apparently Russian market is a little bit different and in the regards a little bit more inclined towards Japanese Chinese or South Korean audience but still there are some companies that

have made it to the top and this are they interesting here to note is that most of these games are strategy games another interesting point that I've noticed is that most of them are Chinese separately Chinese companies do you know some some some secret service they have something and today we're gonna reveal how they actually do that how they make it to the top grossing and Russia so before before diving into into that let's have a look at real quick look at similarities and differences so Russia Russia if you like if you publish your game for Western audience you don't really have to make significant tweaks to your game to make it up building for the Russian audience because Russian people have pretty much Western mindset so Facebook is across the board the king of user acquisition so you I mean Russia is the king by

quality it's not a king backed by quantity and I'm gonna speak later about what company is the king of user acquisition by by volume video has a better performance apparently [Music] no need need for licenses whatsoever as it is in China for instance as we've just heard digital can reach the majority of population so no need for any TV ads or outdoor ads at least for the beginning you can get a significant traction we're using digital channels only but there are still some some differences the main difference is the language like a Russian population speaks like Russian people only 10 or 11 percent of Russian audience understands English so language is crucial it's not only related to in-game activities or in-game interaction with the audience but it's also related to your media can your communication with media and your partners in Russia unless you have a marketing manager who speaks Russian

language you wouldn't be able to communicate well with your partners there and of course it's also related to support and community management and a big difference we've met with West is the ecosystem actually so as I'm already mentioned Facebook is not the dominant player in terms of user acquisition there are some local companies such as my my target VK and okay which are the biggest social networks in Russia and that's that's one of the biggest sources of traffic there in terms of search Google also is not dominating the market especially for web Yandex has possesses about 80 percent of the market share so if you want to go with search you definitely have to consider local companies such as Yandex or maker mail.ru affiliate is an interesting interesting thing interesting channel and I'm gonna speak about it a little bit more there are a lot of affiliate networks in Russia the DSPs are also one one of the

channel that needs to be considered premium and local magazines for your public relations and as I mentioned the secret so the Chinese companies use the it's the affiliate networks and actually from so wouldn't be wonderful to have a like an army of mobile marketers to drive installs for your game with payments based on their performance so this is exactly what affiliate networks do you slash media buying agencies you can order them a certain amount of installs at a certain KPIs and you can payout based on that KPIs so unless the KPI is hasn't been reached the guys are not going to be paid so this is this is one of the secret sauces the Chinese companies use so they set really have been strong keep you eyes for for their partners in Russia and they pay them as long as they

deliver the quality traffic and also post payment stems so basically if you want to go and publish and run marketing campaign of Russia you don't really need to significantly invest your time or money into that you just find a marketing partner like an affiliate network you set a specific API and you pay if they deliver significant significantly high level of quality and of course some disadvantages such as fraud because you don't have significant control over where this traffic has been delivered from and too many context to manage so for instance at Rabin mobile we manage about 30 at net 30 affiliate networks and this is this is like 30 30 people in every every company and adding to that that you may not have a russian-speaking manager in your team this is gonna be pretty tough

and this is a real real life example from one of affiliate network in Russia the game is Galaxy agent published by telephone is currently one of the top grossing games in Russia and as you can see they heavily use the affiliate network help of affiliate networks and the retention rate I mean and their KPI is retention rate at least 15 percent so as long as this ad net affiliate Network delivers this this this traffic that he's that KPI they pay them out $1.00 per installation so that's how it goes and yeah and of course we have one significantly like have a really good example case study with with American mobile gaming company the goal was pretty simple to drive high quality install from Russia and this is how we this is how we used it this is strategy that we've developed for this

company we've worked directly with social networks and this is this all channels are local ones so we didn't work with Facebook neither Google nor any other Western ad network so all these activities that we've done we've been working in Iraq with Russian that networks affiliate networks have driven about 90 percent of the whole traffic that we've been movement we've delivered to the client so as I mentioned affiliate networks are significantly important source of traffic if you do networks we've managed to directly and our own traffic sources of course the KPI that we've sets your clients was I mean to our top partners was retention rate so we didn't pay them as we paid them as long as they reached a 15 percent retention rate and we had our personal KPI which which was optimization KPI and it was seven percent seventy ROI so the client may

made seven percent return on investments within seven days so this is how it works the clients involvement as you can see from here into the into the campaign management was minimal everything was tracked and monitored by the client in the clients dashboard and all the work has been done by up by our team so these are the results that we've delivered and with we've passed the campaign in mid-august and we have again resumed the campaign in early September so as you can see there's an upward trend starting early September so yeah I mean this this is the screenshot of since we've started and until until now as you can see there is a significant improvement in rank and this is download ranks so this is this is about grossing this is about revenue as you can see they're currently sitting in like tenth position tenth spot by

crossing in Russia overall so basically this is the 15 10 to 15 of app overall that that makes that makes more in Russia these are the real numbers so we've since April we've delivered about more than half a million installs for them at a rate of 175 and as you can see the spread between iOS and Android is significantly is significant towards Android so Android makes up about 90 percent of the traffic so that's it for now so as you can see from the from the example decline and reached a new market for themselves without really investing into it neither resources neither it's time so yeah that's it that's it any questions any questions that was very interesting very quiet there um you shared a lot of day today yeah that was very good we like to

see data shared okay so you were saying that the Russian markets about and this thing's like 25 percent of the UK knock into revenue sighs gee from a trend perspective what's the what's the kind of forecast cuz obviously the size of what we're talking about today about massive population markets have the potential to explode so what is there is there yeah yeah it is growing it is ringing so well I mean you know when I mentioned that the Russian market is about 20% of the UK market I didn't I didn't mention that it actually is significantly less competitive than the UK market and apparently as every games market it is growing I'm not sure but I wouldn't be able to provide you with exact numbers of the growth of the market but apparently it is drawing and it's drawing tremendously by at least at least half half of the market each year okay well the UK mark you might get less competitive whoever

we're leaving shortly that seems to Australia well thank you very much thank you much Tim I'm giving a round of applause please [Applause] [Music]