two & a half gamers session #15 - Can UA save your game? Does your game need UA? UA for beginners

[Music] welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast we have Gamers session 15 it's 15 guys so we are discussing the latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge and uh you know guys please don't forget this is a 4 a.m conference discussion Vibe let's not take that too seriously we're discussing always the fun news uh okay so let's dive a little bit into the topics but before we do that uh you know we are getting some heat and uh and we love it we're making new friends uh of our podcast and we are seeing a nice increase of the viewership and uh nice increase on the on the listenership side as well so we got actually corrected on some of the things that we discussed so thank you very much guys for doing that because we obviously don't know everything but we are trying to discuss everything that is

happening in our lives and uh and campaigns and everything so um do we have any any comments on that feeling yeah absolutely so uh after releasing our episode uh our friends uh Appling actually reached out and explained me actually a couple of things uh what I said actually wasn't true in all cases so I actually had a warped understanding and you know they were nice enough to clear it up and I actually learned something new and you know know you got to be humble enough to say when you know you didn't have the correct information so just want to correct three small things from the how to read uh ad monetization data the app loving episode we had yeah last episode so yeah number number 14 there's three things I want to clear up so on the 37 minute Mark uh basically I said that all auctions have to be done within 300 milliseconds or they get kicked out of the auctions that's actually not true and it wasn't true so as long as there's lines left

attempt like attempts will be made in a waterfall and basically even if there's no fill they'll continue to request every single line in the waterfall so that kind of just Echoes a bit more why it's so important not to have too many placements because if you have a placement in the waterfall they will get called No Matter What so if you have 120 calls you will go the the bidder will go or like the algorithm will go through each and every one of them but in might take you know 20 minutes for an ad to load so that's why you can't have too many of them second thing is at the 43 placement uh Mark is when you start seeing latency so I said that around minute 38 uh so what I said was apping Max usually skip to torto so that relates to last point I made apping won't skip any lines in the waterfall but basically it will pretty much run through until the end of the waterfall is reached so there's no limit on going through the whole waterfall so what can

happen is like you just won't have an ad load but it will yeah their system will never actually skip any parts of the waterfall but you might actually not have an ad load so at the 399 minutes 15c Mark I also said that if you have less than 03 fill in any of the top 10 placements it screws up the bidder somehow uh app loving says that this is not true and they do recommend that if you have high fill or high placement calls that you do isolate it to specific Geo to avoid latency so those are the three things I learned from that episode and yeah sorry guys now I know where know they where they are coming from uh with the pronunciation of uping because you are saying it very closely to app got yeah but you know you know like English is not my first language applovin mcloven in you know like it's just yeah make cling as well yeah okay but actually did get some heat from that as well so you know uh yeah app L that's

how you say it not there not n there there's no yeah sorry for that so uh what we are going to discuss today applin acquires sple just continue with the commenting on our friends from applin obviously and we have mobile game Revenue decreased for his first time in q1 2022 then we have uh m&a um report discussion and like report from Anon uh from invest game and then then the most interesting part everybody's looking forward to the basics of UA I'm going I'm I'm going to talk about the kpis we should uh be looking at in the first stage where the game is still in idea then a second stage where you have playable scaling the game and some some trends for 2022 and uh then we have some UA myths at the end which I think yakob is very keen on

asking those pop up all the time so let's see yeah yeah in my uh in my regular life as well and um honestly hope I really hope I will be able to record the whole podcast because uh I'm not sure like what's happening here in the US but a internet is really shitty so uh nothing new yeah nothing new and uh there's always some noise uh in the background I feel like in the in the airplane actually so sorry for that and my MacBook is obviously really getting really old so um yesterday when we were well guys were recording I was supposed to record the Slovak podcast as well but then I just appeared for 30 seconds and then I disappeared because my MacBook died man man like you're in the state that brought us the MacBook just buy the M1 and like enough I know seriously yeah yeah my wife told me already like you already like you told me this like two

years ago you're bitching about the MacBook but you still didn't buy one like are you broke or something cheat so yeah I guess I guess I had to I I just have to buy a new one yeah but step by step yeah let's yeah let's dive into the news so let me start off with this because honestly I think this is my favorite story of the last like 18 months at least because this is a true mobile Cinderella story that very happens very rarely so reported on I believe it was episode three that when New York Times took over Wordle uh there was a random app on the App Store that was run by under a developer name that was a first name and a last name Steven corvado uh essentially saw a huge spike in installs we worked out on that episode that we estimated that this app word app was making roughly around $188,000 a day in ad revenues because of this Spike

I being super nosy and you know couldn't leave it alone added Steven carva on LinkedIn and said congrats he gave me a thumbs up and said thanks buddy so you know I actually have a little little tiny part of the story not a major one I do admit but a tiny one so the news is that Steven carada's Wordle app has been bought uh by app Loving's Apple Studios so he has taken the Money and Run and this is probably one of the Beautiful Stories cuz if you think about it if you're making around $118,000 a day in ad Revenue which we pretty sure is true based on their Dau and how many Impressions should get served yeah be careful be careful man no okay fine I I have no inside information on this this is just me counting it on episode three but anyway so yeah yeah yeah so using that as a basis so uh 18,000 a day times 365 that's around what 6 and A2 million so

even if he caught maybe a one one and a half or maybe even a 2X that's a very very healthy exit and it's like you know the stuff of mobile legends that I think you heard a lot like 2013 14 15 but then these kind of yeah unicorn Cinderella stories just stopped happening when the market started consolidating and yeah I just think it's a beautiful story and you know stepen being my connection on LinkedIn congrat congrats congrats you don't see much of these these days that like a single guy makes this this amount of an exit well like the beautiful thing about the story is like from what I could see just wait for my exit from my company but the thing is like he like he I think he had like a 9 to-5 job like somewhere for like four years and just had the app up so it's just like a nice bonus that happened to him so yeah Kudos yeah yeah pretty nice bonus indeed

yeah continue congrats again yeah congrats enough enough uh unicorns and Cinderella let's get down to uh brass tax and talk about something a bit more darker yeah couldn't this week's crash in crypto um oh well no no let's not yeah let's not talk about that I I accidentally opened my coinbase app and just cried I turn off notifications I don't want anything to do with it salana you're killing me no but the thing is like I I should get my wallet out and just start uh buying this you should buy a new computer that's what you should buy oh yeah I I wanted to buy it with Bitcoin but now I can't okay but yeah let's get to the actual news so there's a sensor Tower report saying that mobile game Revenue decreased for the first time ever in q1 2022 uh that means that the player spending decreased by 6% year-over-year uh from 20 22.6 billion to 21.2 billion

compared to the first quarter of 2020 however this is still up by almost 20% so I'm guessing this is pretty much the covid bump showing itself in the data whereas the market is still kind of healthier after that 2020 where if I get the right Co really in the world started in what was it like March or something like that 2020 if I get it right so because that's Chinese New Year when it started this was like February 2020 so I was somewhere there so that could be like a good period to compare to and regarding the games that are there as the Staples in the charts honor of kings and pubg mobile of course are dominating the top with gin impact uh in the third place and then for the first time since the pandemic began Pokemon go has fallen out of the top 10 and only one new game got into a top position this quarter and that was unsurprisingly lineage V or w w

w yeah which in like I I look through it it looks like Diablo Immortal is pretty much a lineage action RPG and yeah lineage is pretty much like a safe bet it's like a religion in South Korea whatever you do with it it makes a lot of money yeah and U not as high in the revenue the most downloaded game of the quarter was Gara free fire nice so okay I mean it sounds a bit like a click baity like news title right because I mean you studied psychology right Rema yeah so what's the first thing that you do when you have a set of numbers and you have one number that's really big and out of whack you eliminate the outlier right before you make your like the context exactly like you had the biggest Spike and you're comparing that to like last year when everyone was in lockdown

yeah it was it was something like we talked about the roio report last time where there you know reporting increase but if it put it on the whole line of like five years from the IPO it's actually Flatline so this seems to be like the same tactic here but yeah overall is it the same tactic because this is this is covid um influence but then the the Roop piece or the the numbers actually yeah it was the m&a of uh the Ruby games and I mean it's still like part of their portfolios it's not the same you can't comp no that was downloads Reven okay Revenue was a different story even Ruby games can help you there yeah yeah yeah okay okay fair enough yeah but I would say it's still kind of healthy uh because I guess everybody understands that the growth was not healthy or sustainable longterm it was just like the Boost from Co and yeah it says here that it's still kind of more than it was before before Co hit so I guess the trend is continuing to have a growth

Direction but it's not just that you know as big as before Co so we'll see well really looking forward to 2022 uh and then the the year after and to see like how it actually grows yeah this is I would say this is the year of consolidation not only in a way that like o I heard that million of times already oh this is the year of consolidation but look at the stock market of gaming companies and you will understand why it looks like that okay okay okay I know I know it's it's looking really interesting let's say that way yeah interesting is the the right word here uh but then I think we can move on to the to the m&a part uh and uh and Anon from invest came uh the report that he's doing on like quarterly basis so now uh the report says that um the m& activity is kind of declining even though we see quite a lot of activities on the

blockchain side of things but we need to mention that like we could see a boost of the you know Microsoft m&a and then uh and that was in in 2021 so we we saw the Microsoft uh acquisition of zenin Max then uh embracer acquisition of asmod but then uh regardless of everything we see now it's a downward Trend in 2022 yeah so uh that's also because the the two Acquisitions the big ones that we heard this year are still not counting in because they didn't happen yet yeah they didn't happen yet there potentially could not happen also yeah that's that's your bet I know I know your just what the market is saying if you look at the stock price yeah okay then we have uh we have there's some more numbers and um so it says that private investment escalated consider between q1 2021 and q1 2022 in

number of deals from 146 to 174 and the deal value from 2.3 billion to 3.2 billion so uh interesting numbers and then blockchain related gaming m&a attracted around 50% of these uh investment these numbers and Investments and that's not going to slow down I think yeah that's the usual cprit there 450 million C for U galops our favorite Apes uh then 4 billion at 4 billion valuation there's animoca with 359 million at 5 billion valuation and then there's immutable series C which if I get right is a gaming protocol uh at 200 million value at 2.72 billion so yeah and the in in in well not normal but in free topl space we saw the 255 million series for dream games at5 billion Royal match yeah and

then that game company raising 160 million from sequ tpg okay so uh so what to what to do with this what should we yeah it's interesting what should we see as a trend this this piece of news is interesting because even said that that 50% of the private investment was going into blockchain which which which on the other end means that uh even says in the article gaming investment active into pure gaming companies has declined from 96 deals to just 52 deals from like 2.7 billion to just 1 billion and I'm hearing this more and more that pretty much investors are noways not that interested into your you know next Clash of Clans or next Clash Royale they would rather want to have Clash of Clans on block CL Royale you mean the new Warcraft game oh yeah that there's actually really really interesting game called Heroes of mavia

that I saw which is actually Clash of Clans on blockchain they already raised like 8 something million of course they of course they yeah they so so there there's like a lot of these currently and you know whatever you do if you if you put it on blockchain it's much more attractive to be an investment Target these days yes but the thing is you don't get the investment so easily anymore and if you don't have the game first I think it's going to be really hard to get that's the thing that until until this point I think everybody was gaining the investment without anything no prototype B PowerPoint presentation we're going to be better than axi maybe do some some better job with the economy hopefully and then here's the money go I think after this week it will be much harder oh yeah yeah yeah of course I mean everything like uh announced after this week of the correction on the on the crypto Market it's going to be o really really high but you know like

this is something that happens always every year there is a correction it's healthy to happen to get the fraud out of the market because you know you know these these decisions pretty much breed Mal investment in the end so now do you have much healthier players in the market I really don't get like how everybody's surprised when it when it happens I mean this is like it happens every year around this time or maybe in summer like this like every everything just crashes and I like oh well crypto is dead everything blockchain is they like seriously come on guys where are you I think there's an investment term selling May and then be away like you know go on holiday selling May yeah but like I remember also like my early days in finance I remember asking like the director who was like six levels above me when I was like it's not no little nothing I asked him like oh what do you think of this crash and he's like H it's sunny it's cloudy and he's like you don't care it's just part of the normal cycle like that's going to happen yeah yeah until you work in lemon

Brothers anyway the selling like this may it's quite interesting now like they're deploying so much capital for like blockchain gaming and we all know like these Mammoth companies that come around that actually do something great that takes about 10 years to do and for people to start admitting like wow this is something new and different so in like four or five years that's when we'll see like the best of these actually coming out with cool stuff that actually go like oh there's something here so it's just um I think in four or five years we already need to see what's coming out of that Mark suberg meta promise oh yeah everything's going to be saved by metamor banging on the in blockchain World in blockchain World it not it's not going to be four to five years it's going to be four to five months because it changing so rapidly anym I'm just I'm just praying there's ads in the metaverse cuz you know otherwise there's not going to be a big need for ad monetization I I'm telling you there will be ads like I I read upon

this when I was doing my thesis uh at at the psychology thing that we talk about and ads ads are going to be like something completely different the metaverse if it happens like it was described there like it will happen and that's going to be like personalized NPCs that will be custom tailored to your hobbies to your you know preferences like a person will approach you and start telling you about the best thing that he bought and it will it will like it will be like a person it won't be so Mach will come up and like tell me to buy a kit kat yes exactly and they will you know the ey tring and everything on top of that like you can pretty much Mirror Mirror people and like increase the likeness and like look at look at him look at him how he like if someone wants to dig into this go there and dig into the virtual human interaction and Stanford lab that already have studies on this 20 years ago like I'm telling you I love it there's nothing more beautiful than ads yeah exactly that design

REM look at look at the aqu he's really always a skeptic and now he's like oh well you know we all go I'm not skep I'm just describing what will happen oh it's really great because you have this uh glasses on and the the light is coming out like behind you by the way that that was the lab that was the lab that pretty much convinced Mark zuberg to to buy Oculus by the time yeah but what you are describing Yu I already saw uh some deck actually from one company that is building this uh NPC related uh ads um and it's not only like NPC but also like t-shirts of the of the characters signs on the roads and like Billboards within the game and and stuff like that so I mean people are already thinking about it and making it happen um but it's still like far from being uh well any

moment like should um should uh should we move on to our new success segment uh you for beginners well luckily I I want the name any uh it can come after me oh well maybe I will I don't know uh what going to happen usually I I get banned on on Facebook or any other so yeah that's uh that's all me so yeah okay so let's let's discuss the the basics of the UA and uh well where I always get a question like when do you think UA should uh should start collaborating with the game team and um and what's the best time basically and I always say look as as early as possible is uh is really great because then uh we can do a lot of things before even the the game is in production and um and when the

game is still an idea like how does the UA help and what are the metrics or kpis we can uh we can even look at so so UA can can help you just before uh trying to brainstorm the idea for the game with market research like a definition of the of the target audience because well you know it's really important to know what uh what is your target audience what who you are building the game for um with the keyword research as well uh that's really important to just grasp the the potential keyword uh discoverability and um and Impressions and then like Market marketability test with the focus on the on the ctrs and and then even the connection the marketability test with um the service because that's uh that's kind of like a interesting thing that you can do even before uh starting to build the game so why I'm saying focusing on the CTR it's mainly because uh these days we

have all these tools like uh split metrics geek lab and uh kudos to Jess I uh I love you for for uh doing such a good job on the on the tool side for Geek laab and a lot of people just use G use G clab foring doing these marketability test but it's really really really confusing sometimes and we already discussed it in the in the session number 10 with the with the marketability test so I won't go there but just looking at the ctrs at this point is is important because the the cpis are not like the real cpis you can get so uh just be just be careful in terms of the like moving forward from the stage where you have only the idea to to actually the stage where you have a playable game so what is the setup that you can do for a soft launch or what are the kpis you are looking at and uh and testing when you have the actual build so I I always start from the technical point

of view when you have the technical soft launch because uh even after certain time in the development you can be sure that not nothing is going to work as intended unfortunately even if you implemented all the sdks and mobile measurement Partners Firebase and everything it's just most probably not going to work 100% so the technical stage is exactly for that so you're looking at the crash rates comparing the the number of installs between the different UA channels mmps and you're trying to compare that to the to the iTunes and Google Store as well because this is really important to to look at before you start spending actually real money and also if you can hear that my uh my daughter agrees uh of course yes I can of course she agrees she's uh really a UA expert by now being on being on on the podcast with us

you're doing the the basic ASO setup keyword research uh description writing and then uh brainstorming the the name of the game as well and um and then moving to the retention stage basically where you just look at the day one day three day seven retention numbers and the and the ratio between the day one and day three and day seven that's also really important because even though you have like 50% of uh day one retention and then you have 20% dayree that's that's kind of not healthy that much and you see like lot of players uh churn right after day one or day two and you need to well do something with that but then looking at the ftu onboarding flow but also the the actual UA metrics like CPI IPM which is instance per mile the CTR and the and the conversion rates on the on the creative level because in uh in this stage you can have multiple

creatives trying to decrease the cpis and get enough uh enough data points on the on the campaign level for measuring retention but then if you are also testing creatives it can be somehow misleading because uh different creatives have also different retention profiles so if you're using fake ads you can have really low cpis but you can also have very low retention rates and this is something that you don't definitely don't want when you are in the retention stage basically yeah but uh what else we have yeah Felix so you spoke here very eloquently by the way um the first stage and the second stage like so the first stage like idea concept and then when you have a playable game say you're on a Sho string budget like how much money would you say like minimum you can spend here to actually get something valuable yeah uh in marketability test uh you can get results or some directions uh within

couple of hundreds dollars for the for the test so let's say like 500 600 like 500 yeah 500 to 1,000 you can uh you can definitely get something statistically significant because you are using um different optimizations uh rather than just mobile app installs so it's cheaper then in the te technical stage you can have data for like 100 bucks it's just very very small yeah just just to get like couple of hundreds of installs in the let's say Philippines and then uh that's it but then it gets a little bit uh more expensive in retention and and monetization Stage so in retention it's usually like anything from 5K to 10K a month uh ideally even more but just like 200 daily installs and that's uh that's pretty that's pretty healthy for making any decisions and then then anything uh from 10K to 20K in monetization stage because well you need payers uh and the

the level of budget depends on the well percentage of like players to payers uh conversion yeah but this can be also much more depending on the game genre let's say if you have a PVP game with matchmaking you need to actually have a healthy matchmaking which requires a big CCU or at least some kind of like larger CC which means you need the inflow of players all the time so that can get much different between different type of shandas I guess yeah that's that's very true but also in in this case with PVP you always mix uh the different optimizations method so for the CCU or like the matchmaking to be able to happen you just load uh front load the the traffic sources with mobile app install optimization and the player getting players for cheaper uh into the game and then uh measure on the side the uh the retention metrics with uh up even optimized campaigns with engagement

events so anything from uh tutorial completion level achieved and stuff like that so uh you know you're measuring actually on the quality traffic and not only the mobile app install traffic that these days unfortunately is pretty shitty just just to just to yeah know say that uh right away uh on Google mobile app inst optimization is that's like really bad traffic is always below every Benchmark you can get on Facebook is slightly better uh on Unity is uh well it's okay it's decent but it's still not uh what you want to you want to get so that's why I always use like multiple sources in the in the soft line just to Benchmark everything because if you have uh let's say Facebook only and then uh you make decisions based on this um this one channel you can you can get screwed because you you will kill the game based on one one channel and then uh then then what then what it's just uh you know really not ideal scenario because what I

I found out this um in one game that I managed before it's just people were running Facebook and it was wasn't looking that well and um then it was either kill the game or just try another Channel and we tried Google and and unity Google was really shitty because uh of what I mentioned but then Unity started looking really good so so we kept on going with the game uh based on the the multiple channels that we had and then uh benchmarked it and then Globe launched even afterwards and it was pretty pretty nice success so it is true U can save your game that's your UA me that's your U meth it's not like depends on like what what do you mean by save your game yeah we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there okay we'll get there so ma is now taking requests for new clients he can fix any game yeah fix I can yeah I can fix any game out there yeah well not it's not how it works but we'll get there uh so I

just come back to the Dem monetization which I think is really important in terms of the early monetization for the game and you are anyway trying to measure the CPI versus LTV or trying to look at the day one three or seven drawas and uh while testing the purchase campaigns because um that's where the money comes from and even if you're in the monetization stage and you're trying to optimize the camp CS for something else you won't get any Roi from from those campaigns unfortunately there are a lot of discussions about you should use the proxy events for purchases yeah you can use that on paper it looks pretty amazing in reality it doesn't work you're you're going to get different type of players for example you have uh you talk to your data team and you see so if players actually achieve level 25 they are more likely to P to make a purchase so so you go back you set that

level 25 as an optimization goal because you think this is going to bring you a lot more money because it's going to be cheaper because no no one else is actually optimizing for these type of events what you can you will get is cheaper traffic but also very not shitty traffic but very different type of players they won't eventually pay they will be just the type of players that achieve the level 25 and that that's uh where then unfortunately this is how how all the algorithms kind of work so you need to be very careful but it's a very good exercise to to actually try and test it out because even this is my own experience just won't work but I definitely encourage you to test it and see for yourself so um you just don't blame me for saying that oh but it's my experience unfortunately data won't lie m so uh yeah so what else like how how do

you think about scaling the game and what is the profitable UA and how does that even work so as I mentioned in the monetization stage you it basically comes down to the CPI versus the LTV equation I mean scaling the game is possible up until the LTV allows you to do so L LTV always dictates the level of spend so fortunately there's no other way how to go about it you can do some creative tricks and uh decrease the cpis to certain level you can work very closely with the product team to make everything happen but it's not you know it's not enough yeah creative tricks what are like top three creative tricks is that like you know IP fake ads like is that like or isse fake ads Innovation uh like we discussed with uh with raid Shadow Legends uh doing the slightly different creative angles then from what I see at

the moment is hyper casual Concepts turned into your uh your game so you're taking your assets and then just try to mimic the the hyper casual games that are in the in the top charts at the moment and something that kind of works well at least for me so that's another evolution of fake ads another evolution of fake ads but uh you know at least you are uh closer to the to your game bottom line yeah bottom line is UA cannot increase your LTV which needs to be increase your bio prodouction team period yeah yeah that's that's it I mean you can you can use multiple channels uh that have very different um quality of the players and different ltvs as well but again it's very much capped by the LTV anyway y so that's yeah that's that's very true uh what else yeah I know when um when we usually start with with the new game and we Global launch uh the game

like everything looks super amazing because of the golden cohorts golden cohorts mean like the first players that uh actually come into the game yeah very active and uh they pay quite a lot and then suddenly after two three or four months you you see like oh well everything is decreasing what the hell so U is is doing a shitty job but well not really but everything changed everything is changing so uh so from what I see sometimes like you are seeing very good numbers in terms of the ROI from the beginning but then uh you're kind of moving the the ROI Target from like day 30 to day 60 to day 90 but we need to be very careful about like doing that so if you don't have the long-term retention uh you can move the ROI payback period to whatever you want but if they if you don't have players after day 60 then you will never see that when

would you kind of consider the team or let's say for the team to collect this day Ty because you Global lunch and then to get like day 60 retention it takes two months so how aggressively do you spend that in a way like as you said like if you don't have long-term retention but you don't know it anyway well you have the soft launch data okay you have the soft lunch data but you know soft launch is soft lunch you did your improvements there's a bigger traffic it works differently now blah blah y yada yeah of course but uh that's why you so you are in soft Lune for more than three to six months because then you can get actually oh yeah well cing AG agrees uh then you can actually get uh get data for uh for more than like one or two months and then try to assume or extrapolate from what you saw in the in the soft lunch because what you will get after global launch is going to be better but then it going to come down to the levels of soft loue the late soft loue because you're in the soft loue for six months you're just you know in this like very limited amount of

countries so you that's kind of like very close to the truth that what you will see after a certain period of time after the global launch let's say maybe one month or two months M so yeah you always need to work with data from the soft Lun afterwards because well exactly like you don't know you don't know for sure oh yeah of course and it's going to be very different for for uh on a different level of scale as well of course like if you have 100 daily user you you will see 50% day one retention but then if you increase that to 300 or 500 the yeah the the retention will be slightly lower because uh it's not going to jump that much from one one number to another yeah yeah like assuming that you know you keep a steady flow of content and features going into the game kind trying to improve it not really pivoted but you know doing the liveops thing and making it better so it's going to like even monetize differently hopefully with higher LTV yep yeah of

course can you make it a bit more modern like do you see any Trends right now or anything like that or like how's it yeah uh you already laughed laughed at me about like UA diversification of channels which is kind of like a big Trend that I'm I'm talking about since the the beginning of the year because uh it's not only about one big Channel or two big channels that you're spending heavily it's now smaller budgets on multiple channels which uh is obviously more work but it's paying off because um it's not an easy job and it's really challenging from time to time so you need to be on top of everything and and uh try to uh move the budgets from one channel to another channel that actually makes sense because um it's changing really on on a weekly basis and even uh what we discussed I think a couple of sessions ago about the different optimization methods so if we are

running a a purchase campaign it can have longer um payback periods but on when we are um live on the Adas campaigns you can see the money back really quickly in day seven maybe in day 14 even so we need to keep the keep an eye on the on the campaign level is that right yeah question Mr Felix so yeah ad Ras campaigns like it's very interesting for me to hear because like it directly impacts a lot what I do like especially if you're scaling with row campaigns it's something I can see straight away in a game I'm managing for admon like who would you say right now does the best ad R campaigns like I know it's not a lot of partners that do it Google Google right away and uh even Rudy asked me this question on the on the side uh when I was in in Istanbul like oh wow can you say a little bit more about that of course the addas campaigns are really great you just need to implement one uh one event and just collect the value uh from the the mediation and and send it

through Firebase to to Google and it's paying off really it's really really powerful type of campaign for the heav well you need to have like at least 5050 split between ads versus inaps and then uh you can make it work so not like a heavy usual 7030 IP game uh it it can work but it's not going to work on the same scale as uh you had more yeah so so you it can be a part of the UA mix when you say it really works like what kind of scale are you talking about like how much per day are you spending then if you like oh this really works is it like 10K a day 100K a day like what's context here no 100K a day you wish or I wish um it's yeah anything from 1K a day to 10K a day and um I worked with one game where we spend like 5K a day on this type of campaign and it was uh getting back in like seven days there are also like different uh nuances in there but you know we can we

can keep that uh for later sessions to keep to keep you interested our dear listeners okay shall we go to the U me yes yeah yeah let's go yeah let's go yeah so let's let's return to the first one U can save your game that's usually yeah it yeah it can save our game yeah why it's always yeah it's it's uh it's what we discussed with with the LTV so um UA can uh acquire good quality users but uh to only to the level of your game LTV it's just uh you need to increase the game LTV won't you won't increase it by just uh acquiring different type of users it just it doesn't work like that you can decrease the CPI on uh on the on your traffic but sometimes with the with lowering the cpis you can even lower the the quality of the traffic as well and the LTV

so it's a seen this it's yeah it's uh it's very very difficult to to always uh talk to these people like yeah well you are the U expert so you can make it work uh well I can make it work to the extent of uh the game kpis and metrics if the game kpis are not good enough then we won't be able to scale that or I mean in translation I can work it to the degree of the LTV scale and after that I'm kind of back where I was yeah exactly so we can we can like um experiment with different uh campaign setup Geo setup optimization setup different UA channels but then and creatives of course so we have all these uh different things that we can optimize and experiment with but it's not going to work the same way as um as with different games so because I'm getting this this question like well I have the very similar game than uh let's say merch Mansion how how is it

possible that I can scale it to the same level well first of all uh look at the kpis is is your retention the same as theirs is the level of content the same as as theirs the liveops and everything so is it but even if it would be you're still not first to the market exactly that's what I wanted to say the next like they're first to the market and your game is like 10,000 merge game out there already so you need to take that into consideration as well so if you if you create a new gen then your cpis are going to be super low so you don't need that high LTV but now you need the high L TV and you need the way better kpis to be able to get certain like certain amount of of spend that's it that's that's just how it is yeah let's go to the next one UA is the problem why your game is not performing good it's the same thing as that we discussed right right away like right now it's uh but it's we need to say like

there is a lot of UA agencies and Consultants that are really so it they can you know do a very bad job it's going to sound wrong but like what what makes them is it like experience or lack of depth of knowledge of how these system the UA like systems are constructed no they just don't care you just you know like uh you have budget here spend it and if if you spend it against the kpis and you don't you don't don't see the return immediately then uh they don't do anything they just spend the budget and that's it because they the budget is budget spend is that what they care about because they're getting budget like fee from the budget spent yeah so the incentive is different exactly incentive is different what would you say would be like some kind of obvious sign for a non-ua person to kind of get a quick hang on that yeah UA is not really running as it shoot that's a great question yeah well depend Define like what means like runs as it should so if you if you

have the the we the the weekly meetings or ketchups or you're looking at the data and uh and it's not making well sense in terms of the ROI then you ask questions like why is why we are not making money and uh there are always different explanations so either it's just a new channel you are trying to get from one optimization to another optimization that's like for example example Unity you need to run Mii campaign to get to the r Channel Ras optimization and that campaign you'll never never never get any any money back so that's like nor let me try complete Noob question so let's say I have a suspicion that you're feeding players that are not interested in the genre that I'm running into my game so like pumping match three people into RPG how should I know that well uh you can ask about what kind of targeting the the UA person is running at the moment but the thing is with uh the

level of automation these days and the triaa campaigns on Facebook and the same thing on the Google site which is the the US Universal up campaigns which is now up campaigns but uh you don't have that um option anymore and you only thing how can you target the the players is by the creative basically so you want avoid running or acquiring players from match free to your um RPG game it just based on the level of um data you are sending back to to Facebook or Google that's the the main Roi metric so basically it's not about the the match free or any other type of um it's about genre it's now about more about what kind of events you are tracking and what kind of events you are sending back to the to the channel so even if you are

getting match free players into your RPG it doesn't mean that they won't play and pay and until they are firing events so even these match free players can be very valuable if they are paying if they're not paying then you won't send any any events back to the to the channels and then you won't get those players because that's how the optimization works all right yeah let me ask one question to kind of uh maybe take us home should dsps always be part of your UA dsps well dsps uh I don't like to work with dsps and uh I usually I usually includ them after the the regular UA channels like Facebook Google networks uh afterwards why it's just my personal preference so other other people can say very different answer answer very

differently okay um yeah this is also one of my other favorites uh game will work even without UA uh yeah it will work if you can get uh the level of Organics as Hill Climb Racing or Subway Surface uh which uh is 10 years ago 15 years ago maybe now it's very hard to get uh the Organics and even if you get the Organics it's not sustainable you don't have the control over the Organics let's make this clear it's impossible period okaying won the lottery like they did so well like yeah congratulations to them like that's the original Cinderella Story yeah yeah very true OG Cinderella OG yeah OG C and with that in mind I think we can we can stop here uh to let our listeners to process all the

information because I think it was like a lot of kpis numbers and what whatever else zero though so um there you go thank you very much for listening thank you very much guys and uh see you next time bye bye-bye uh DPS should always be part of your UA mix or as I'm asking should they always be part of your UA mix sorry I just uh I just received a a new a new podcast member again so what what piece I was just wanted to ask like the last one uh just