two & a half gamers session #46 - Deconstruction of App businesses from UA, GD & Admon perspective

[Music] welcome everybody uh this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers session number 46 we are sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our UA uh game design and AD monetization day-to-day drops we're also discussing latest industry news from time to time while having so much fun but let's not forget this is still 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so please not take it too seriously we have Felix braber here yaku and myself mat laner and a new camera or not new camera [ __ ] it moving camera from yakob oh my God I'm going to kill myself we we've acknowledged you got a new camera Remo it's really nice but you can't move around front and back the whole podcast like that this is so annoying this is so [ __ ] annoying you're so happy about it as well that's more annoying

yeah I see he's moving all the time okay so I think uh listeners you won't see it but uh if you want to see like how he moves around please take a look at the YouTube also while you are there definitely subscribe if you didn't do so before ah happy New Year happy new [ __ ] Year to everybody and to your new camera as well oh no no camera it's just a new app the camera you had already before so it's fine exactly happy New Year happy New Year oh go oh my God it zooms out oh my god dude that's so distracting man it's so distracting all right never mind never mind all right let's just let's just go I can't yeah let's just go let's just yeah let's just start I think um some of you already um asked for this and and Felix is also pretty happy about the the app Business uh and I got like recently one um email regarding my subscri um

newsletter that should I should definitely talk more about apps so today it's not only about gaming or well it's not about gaming at all but it's about apps I mean it's okay yeah yeah we're getting the app game it's very it's very connected anyway it's very connected anyway and uh yeah so one important thing to mention we were uh well the top of the list for mobile marketing podcasts uh well top 10 so thank you very much guys from Singler especially uh John for mentioning mentioning Us in the article we are very happy about it thank you very much I'm very honored if you've built a mobile game for iOS or Android you've experienced user turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with a dict t by identifying your users likely to

turn early you can showcase another game in your portfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at addict.com [Music] amazing uh yeah so uh yob you want to kick it off yeah yeah I can start amazing but please don't move yeah don't move too much because it's super distracting okay don't as well anyway uh yeah we're talking about apps today so I took some case studies or let's say examples that I can talk about uh which demonstrates how monetization differs in apps but does it really differ it's more of a like uh I would say evolution of what being using games this the last time you're using that camera up on this pod like 100% yeah no way this is happening again so talk

about redcor which is uh less of a game more of an app or more of a game less of an app uh let's see and then we're going to talk about our favorite du lingo for those why is it our favorite because they have great monetization they ex super well on yeah it's like a gaming app that hides as as an app it's like an app that hides as a game and you learn in process oh yeah yeah of course yeah so uh we have that and then uh one other thing to go with it is cahoot which is like a subscription it's our favorite app yeah that's also our favorite that we use a lot so why not so let's start with redor um red deor for those who don't know is in that special category of something between a game and something between an app it uh pretty much is an iteration of design home that's the famous game from crowdstar which was pretty much very very I would say it was very trending at some point

but it pretty much created its own genre of people that are not really into games but in the end they are playing a game even though they don't know pretty much where they're creating this kind of decoration uh genre which is like I would say the real decoration genre not the one that you have in like Garden Scapes and all these other match three games where you just have illusion of choice here you have actual choices uh if I understand correctly the home design game has even promotion for real Furniture like real world furniture so you can even kind of you know promote your I don't know if there's Ikea or whatever is there but they definitely have connection to the real world there well maybe if you didn't do a surface level uh review then you would know what kind of uh cooperation they have furniture yeah it's a lot of American Furniture that's fine yeah it's great uh but anyway uh ricore is an iteration on that because in design home you build

the whole thing in 3D and they have all the furniture in 3D redic cor uh is uh a game where you or it's the am I saying it wrong ricor is the company and the game is what no no no RoR is the game and the company is forget that we'll check them mon anyway what they did is that uh you are decorating something that's more of an image not the 3D thing so what you're changing in pretty much just the textures and what's really interesting that happened during even the development of the game is that they switch their monetization model from you being able to buy things directly in in the shop and they put in our good old GAA there yeah which of course skyrocketed the thing so what it means is that you can buy some of the things when you're decorating those for few us this but you cannot unlock the thing

forever you can unlock the thing forever in the GAA and what's really interesting here is that this is this this app or game it doesn't really POS as a game it even the whole interface and everything UI is very very sleek and it looks like an app but in the end it uses the typical very typical gaming elements that are working perfectly on an audience that's not really looking for a game so that's that's the main thing out of it so gacha works great even though you don't really expect like gaming people going into the app and like looking for their best you know slots in GAA and everything uh so that works great they have their typical hard currency soft currency uh loop there so that's I guess normal and the whole thing is based on this kind of very very interesting voting system that's coming also from design home where you vote on those designs and it's kind of player approv that this is like the better design out of the two and everything

pretty much is a custom there so that works great and that's like a great example like how to use pretty much streamline gaming monetization into something that's more of an app but in the end yeah it it's we can argue that this is more of a game so let's move put that more in the game category right yeah let's move to something that's definitely not the game but it actually uses a lot of gaming monetization so if we go one step further with our examples uh there's a dualingo app which definitely is an app this is not a game even though respect for this app yeah yeah they killed on the game design if you game design they must have very good systems and vectors they do they really do so they're they're very Innovative uh someone there definitely looks very closely onto casual game genre um so what their main thing is is that they have the hard system from MCH three so pretty much when you make M Stakes during the courses uh the courses by the

way are laid down as a saga why not so you're going through a journey of progression they have the full-fledged rooster of characters and the the mascot the ow that teaches you the things like it's it's very very gamified but as you go through there through the Saga each course have like I don't know how many questions or whatever I just randomly selected like Ukrainian course for for starters and like went through some of it and if you make a mistake you lose one life as you would get as you would lose one life within Candy Crush that's normal but what happens is that if you lose all of those you can watch an ad to get one more life yeah which is very good yeah uh but it won't end there regarding the ads uh ads are also shown uh a little bit during the game play if I understand correctly as interatial not

game playay mate usage it's us so you can get rid of those if you buy the subscription which also gives you unlimited amount of lives and you can kind of go at your own pace as it's advertised uh so that's one way to get rid of the ads but also what they did and this is really brilliant like for me this is the like the most important thing they build even hard Curren into it yeah that's amazing so you have gems and if you earn gems you can double the gems that you earned with an ad so bad now that there was supposed to be a zooming out of or zooming in like oh that's brilliant there there you go and then uh they have a free chest uh offer in the shop that you can claim for an ad uh how would you use gems if you

ask in this game so actually what people buy app mate not game it's app it's app sorry uh so what people buy here in this app is streaks and this is something very very unique because I don't think so I ever seen it in a game not an app so what can you buy here is pretty much you are playing the game for some time and the game tries to encourage you to log in every day because you keeping your streak and so on so forth because you're learning da d d d da whatever something happens you didn't log in you're losing your streak but if you pay you can freeze it and keep it yeah therefore you keep your really really high number of login days that's nicely shining there and you can continue and you spend gems for that so yeah uh that's pretty unique I would say uh for an app and actually it's pretty much completely if I I don't think so there's much like app play benefits regarding

that if you keep your usage usage benefits so there's just this kind of a really really nice high number there so yeah I even have those like streak freezes equipped now currently that I can use and if I guess I don't look tomorrow I I still keep my streak so but I would say it's pretty subject subjective because only people that are kind of into it regarding the app users consider it valuable and the game or the app can figure it out that this is value for them so they monetize it and this is really really nice thing that they have there that they pretty much were able to create value in their own internal economy even though it's kind of very small and very shallow and still they were able to monetize it so that's that's like pretty great and the ad placements are like I would say pretty good like for a game you could say it's pretty standard but for an app I think this is like next level in that

category because I haven't seen anything that that's been this this this good have have you tried this one or any similar like language apps no I played well played used the DU lingo for for some time yeah of course it's hard to switch uh when I actually trying to learn more Spanish so I used that quite a lot then I dropped out because well [ __ ] it you lost your streak right and you couldn't watch an ad iost my streak yeah yeah exactly as soon as I lost my streak then I'm out it which surprise me like I get the feeling cuz I was using Duong Longo before they made these changes and then also after they use the changes trying to learn German uh you know I'm not really good at it you should yeah and then uh yeah like you really know they must have hired a game designer and like put full trust into him because a lot of times when I deal with apps especially on the ad side usually like the founders of the company or people high up they don't want to change things that often so they must have given like a full latitude to a game designer to actually make these

changes and they must have trusted that person a lot so it's very impressive and very good to see yeah I I I dig up some numbers on the on the app oh you did oh nice using our second favorite data tool or favorite no it's like a article the internet oh okay actually yeah some people started asking uh like like which one is the best or like our favorite the the first favorite or the second favorite I have a lot of hate for the second favorite one now so I don't want to name and shamee yeah uh so what did I dig up is that in 2021 uh dualink could generated uh 224.50 million in revenue from subscriptions and this would represent roughly 90% of the company's total revenue for the year so I guess the rest is done by ads if I understood correctly or some other streams of Revenue that I don't understand but yeah it's still can very very subscription heavy so even though so yeah they have these at

placements I guess it's not that big but it's even spoken by the co they don't want to kind of you know uh put you out of the experience of app usage uh but one of the other key elements is that uh duoing goes very very heavy usage of AB testing and they said that the company runs around 500 tests every quarter to determine the effectiveness of CTA buttons pricing tiers and so forth so I guess that's how they got into this current position have all these placements and everything because they you know they're doing a lot yeah well that's how how it should be yeah I I think this is the overall team in this environment where apps are trying to implement some gaming based monetization or like mobile games monetization that you need to run a lot of ab tests you can run a lot of ab test because hopefully you have a lot of users there and then uh yeah your users probably aren't that uh as the one in game business where

immediately all Discord gets fled because I have this feature that the other guy doesn't have and and so on so for so so yeah I guess it's much more easier for you to do that and on the other hand uh yeah you're probably doing anyway kind of smaller iteration with this you're not really kind of a yeah we're changing now from gacha into like direct payment model or something like that so should be should be really easy to try to Tinker something out so Remo you said that duelingo earned what like 200 million in a year and 10% of that was ad Revenue was 20212 that's quite long ago but that's still a lot like that's $20 million a year in advertising Revenue that's like 1.6 a month that's like quite decent yeah it's pretty pretty good yeah yeah yeah there's this very nice case study on Google admob site that's called toing go partners with the admob platform to optimize mediation strategy and increase Revenue by

70% the problem is that I don't see the date of that article so don't if this was before or after we should talk to our uh Google friends and uh ask for some back Channel information back Channel information yeah but definitely it's it's like very very nice implementation uh for me the thing 200 million is that's very very nice yeah indeed no no milon sorry still yeah okay still at the 200 million that that comes from the gems that could be the streak freezing that's very subjective yeah don't know but yeah it's very interesting but I would say this is like my way to go example when I'm ask always about like tell me about an app that's done like gaming monetization like implemented it properly yeah just for uh just for context as well so they're earning about like 50 Grand A Day In AD Revenue which would make him a like medium-sized gaming publisher on the ad side so yeah yeah easily easily and that's a couple

years ago so yeah yeah it could be much much higher now well I'm pretty sure it will it will be way higher in 202 uh last thing that I want to show off is kahot our favorite quiz app that we use that's our favorite quiz app yeah if you seen us around on conferences and uh I've been using cah for like quite a long time I would say for like 5 to six years probably even in using I remember we were using it sometimes uh but these guys are using mainly subscription I didn't see any ads or think but this is pretty much I would say the mainstream way was being done currently in the app world that you lock certain features behind subscriptions and those features add value into your kind of app economy so if you look at the Kaho subscription tiers what they are increasing is especially the scale so the higher the subscrip destion the higher the scale of the whole thing

meaning that at the highest you can get 400 players per game and the lowest you get just 100 and if I get free it's like 25 or something I don't I don't remember what's the limit there is like like up to 50 or something but yeah if if you're running a university course or something and you have the full you know room of students and there's like 400 of them yeah you want to have the biggest subscrition because they cannot participate so that's a no-brainer the other thing is that they have a lot of kind of quality of life features and that's that's the usual way to go here like if you cannot really you know cut features out of your app behind a subscription and you want to you know give it to the user it cannot be done because of the app design because cutting something out would be like giving your car with two wheels have a nice day so if you cannot do that uh sell comfort that that's like very very very good thing like I always talk about this when we talk about arpg P of XEL does this you want higher inventory buy

more inventory slots you want you know this and that buy buy this thing because uh it's very easy very I would say convenient for instance one of the examples they have here is that you are able to uh do slide import from pbd presentations into cahoot so that's that's that's very very good if you have already something done you know can just integrate it immediately or have some kind of a student lead modes don't know what's that or like collect feedback and opinions with pull and drop in yeah like I guess some kind of more convenient features that you will be able to do anyway but it's kind of a more of a hassle so selling Comfort behind subscription is also very good especially if like there's Direct Value for the user so I would say that's that's the mainstream way and I guess apps will need to switch a little bit more and more into dual lingo because still even though it's selling Comfort uh nicely through subscription you are still not monetizing like what 90% of your users which do only go us now that

they have these ads so that that's that's very very good but again the key with the ads and I guess they run like thousands of ab tests is to you need to can offset some part of your value economy into the ads so you know you can buy the LI for gems it's normal but you can buy one life for anet meaning that you are pretty much giving the user free gems for anet in in its sense I would say so there's a budget that somebody designed in the app that said okay you can get this many gems through payments or like you know playing the game or whatever and this many per day or per some kind of period of time through ads and they have then the whole economy budget and they pretty much cut it down and said okay this this amount of economy we allocate to ads and you need to do that so that's that's the I would say the main point of this whole discussion nice okay cool good so yeah Felix you want to

take it from here and talk about ads so I can then yeah I think ads is a nice like segment so if Remo stops moving before I fly to Slovakia and Bash his camera against the wall oh please yeah so yeah like I said like this is a primarily a gaming podcast right but in the last six months I've been working with quite a lot of non-gaming apps as well and so I just thought it'd be interesting to kind of talk a bit on the ad Revenue sides and compare apps to games and also give some tips on how you can improve ad Revenue so if you actually have an app so uh to first start off almost said game there as well um to start off the biggest difference is obviously that apps tend to monetize uh with subscription instead of iaps and that changes that the dynamic how ads and AD Revenue can be perceived internally in an organization like in gaming companies you know specifically hyper casual ad revenues front and center and with apps you have a lot of

functionality often like Remo said built in behind a subscription wall so when you work with apps typically you'll uh have a subscription team and they're usually not happy about implementing anything uh that gets in the way of user subscribing or gives away any that functionality for free in parenthesis even though you're getting ad revenue from it uh so you have to kind of do a bit of the same back and forth uh between like the designers and like like you do on the IP fronting games for anything ad related uh usually what helps here quite a lot is actually if you can yeah make estimations very detailed estimations I can add as well with decimals I guess right decimals can say like yeah you can actually like uh yeah estimate like roughly what like uh money can be earned from ads if you hit a certain threshold um on the mediation front it usually looks a bit different as well so a lot of apps they also have a web page or like a web presence which means that most of these companies use Google ad

manager on both web and mobile app so Google ad manager is a good mediation like for crossplatform because that's what it's designed to do uh however the main drawback here is that ecpm tend to be a bit lower compared to admob and that's because there's no gaming demand where it's quite hard to actually get gaming Demand on gam so uh for example uh they do something called open bidding but open bidding doesn't support unit app Lin or Facebook so it's a bunch of other sources so if you have video inventory you're actually missing out on gaming demands ecpm and they'll usually be about 10 20% lower than if you do have gaming gaming demand so if you're actually using gam and you actually want to a Google ad manager and you want to start opening up some gaming demand um you actually usually get the people complaining about the quality of the ads because of you know our discussion on fake ads and sex asids like that's really rampant in the gaming but not so much in the app

industry yeah uh but usually I say like it's best to actually like actually try it out and ban these like sources so you actually get some gaming demand to run it up there's actually simple and basic trip trick if you're as trip I yeah take flight to Dublin then uh yeah take a flight to Dublin and make friends with the Google but if you're actually using G if you're using G and you want to try some gaming inventory uh the networks you'd want to start with is the usual suspect so app l in unity and iron source is good places to start and Facebook you can do that on Google ad manager either via SDK then you basically have to set up as a yield group and add a tag line item and then boom you'll have gaming inventory uh another option if you have a lot like of inventory so like you have a big app and you don't want to go through the hassle will actually integ creting the SDK but you still want to

test gaming inventory before doing the dev work what you can also do is set up a buyer network via DSP and connect uh to a programmatic deal and get them in through like Google ad man or mediation you have to pay a bit of a higher cost to Google than you do through an SDK mediation uh but if you have significant enough like a inventory to sell that means that usually you can get APPL or Unity interested and yeah make a direct deal with DP uh so that's some very specific Google ad manager related tips by the way yob do you remember when we talked about the SDK hustles and implementations how we said it's it's kind of like a big problem to actually Implement multiple sdks it's very big problem yeah now he's like oh well SDK hustles now he confirms our Theory not the can confirm or deny eyes are beautiful and like you know the sdks are the intestines the ad monetization business

to get beautiful ad easy it would put him out of the job ah oh my God okay okay sorry sorry to interrupt of course yeah as usual as usual yeah so apps uh usually like know uh their converting moments in their life cycle quite well uh in gaming is also like quite easy to convince someone that after X amount of time you should show ads and see how the US B reacts yeah it's not that easy to convince someone but let's yeah let's easier compared to that but like I'd recommend the same like experiment with both interstitials and Banners and start running AB tests a day or two after typical Peak subscription conversion time so if that's on day three when you're getting new users I'd say maybe start on day five uh like either with banners intertial and see how it affects our tension if it's day seven subscription when would you start day 10 yeah exactly yeah yeah a couple days

after and then basically work my way down uh so for banners I'd keep on a refresh rate of about 15 seconds to start with it's quite aggressive refresh rate but uh it's like quite good for getting the revenue up and it's yeah kind of the average that you're usually set in games so basically start from there and work your way up or down to see how it affects your recession uh retention uh D with recession recession as well also like a top tip for interstitials uh set an ecpm floor uh so basically that guarantees that you're only showing an intertial ad if you get paid a high enough ecpm so basically that will help your retention number and yeah honestly experiment and that's half the battle one here if you if you set the high ECP floor does it mean that you will have very low fi rates as well depends where you have like if you have a bunch of you know users that are in uh yeah like tier 3 or anything like that yeah the fill is

going to be low but if you have a bunch of us users you could set a floor of around like $7 right and that means you're only showing interstitials so you're not affecting retention as much but that's something really good to like play around with because you know everyone gets annoyed by intials but if you set a prize floor you're guaranteed to get paid for that annoyance so you're not always showing it okay but if then uh um it's like 100 impressions for that type of floor and I don't care it's say yeah yeah but I'm not saying said it like super high but the thing also what happens is if you have multiple interstitial show like like ad trigger points in your app what can happen is that if you show more than four for example it's a recency so you're paid less and less for each impression for the same user so then you could cap it that way based on like how much money you can get instead of yeah capping it on like your side so you actually let the open market decide instead of you as a designer he talks about it like it's so easy yeah of course it's easy oh better

here 50 seconds of 5 Seconds intertial every 10 seconds nothing in this life is easy but nothing in this life that's worth keeping comes easy yeah yeah of course of course it's basically trading retention for monetization that's what it is let's call it by its right name yeah and you you need to find a sweet spot that's it yeah if the sweet spot is with high ecpn floors and won't hurt that retention that's fine yeah if if you earn like five additional like $5 it sucks pretty much but like that that brings us to the rewarded ad unit you're zooming out all right the rewarded ad unit also known as The Mighty Harpoon of ad monetization in the gaming side right so the thing that sticks out here when working with non-gaming apps is that they tend to say that they're very interested in trying it but they very rarely actually want to follow through andest T it so the bottom line is to

give some like yeah you have to give up some portion usually that's behind the app subscription or unlock some new features and then put that behind a rewarded ad unit so the thing to say here uh is that like the ad rewarded ad R unit is so accepted on the gaming side of the industry that users are guaranteed to have seen it before and that wasn't the case a couple of years ago so usually what I have to do here is I have to explain it like this so let's say you have a rewarded ad unit that like that usually gets around $115 dollar global average ecpm so if you have a DA of around 40,000 people and only a couple of them couple of the percentage like are monetizing via subscriptions so if you get an ad viewer rate of 75% and an imp so impression per daily active user of four on that 40K da that's like $1,600 A Day In AD revenue or 600k a year so keep in mind if Mor da is in a tier one Gio that ecpm figure will be around $30 so like yeah

implementing rewarded ads can get you those numbers on yeah the ad Revenue side is shaking his head I can already see the Pokemon episode where the guy was selling Magikarp for 500 and he says like and if you buy this thing you can breed it and have two for 500 and then you have four for 500 and those four will have another four for 500 my battle to get respect from Remo the game designer continues well this is even better than my question because I wanted to ask if you use decimals in the ecpn floors as well but this definitely of course you do of course 75% at conversion like you're super super expert already if you can get there like I don't I don't think so I ever saw that in a game like really six like u a lot of have 75% yeah I maybe to work on too much midcore games where you know ads weren the priority but 75% is very very high

yeah that's pretty high you can even say 50 but yeah like it does happen and it's not of course yeah but then we have different decimals you know yeah yeah yeah different decimals anyway I'm going to end my little segment here on our rant uh over Facebook policy so I think it was last episode or a couple episodes I mentioned that like if you have an app meta does not let you set up placements for a rewarded video but actually hides it so if you have a game it's super easy to set up a placement for the rewarded out units and in the dashboard it actually says like only for gaming so I got a bit triggered to find out like why so I dived into the Facebook documentation and there's like nine points that you have to meet to be compliant for policies for showing a rewarded ad video and things like tap to play can't be monetary nature nature so you can't give crypto or cash transfer it's just a bit frustrating that meta just assumes that

you like apps don't know how a placement works and it's like the only major ad network uh in the world that basically makes it hard for apps not to show rewarded ads and you have to run jump through like a lot of corporate Hoops to be allowed to show Facebook inventory on an app for like a rewarded ad placement so what you can do here is you have to send like an internal email like through the general contact link usually that ends up you bashing your head against the wall so you actually have to send them like your ad placement with pictures and you have to say like how you're meeting all these nine points sometimes then the general like email they tend to maybe unlock it yeah after five years so the only way to actually get this unlocked is to have a Facebook like rep because they're the only ones who can actually do it but how can get Facebook rep it's not easy to get these no it's not no it's just it's just frustrating it's just like guys like you guys are on decline but why wouldn't you want to show rewarded ads for apps like it's just such a no-brainer to me it's just weird [ __ ] yeah sounds again super

easy to get like Series 5 Marvel cards oh my God suddenly we ended up in Marvel snap Universe suddenly he just wanted to talk about Marvel snap because there's no ads in that game and that's why he keeps bringing it up yeah of course 100% now we we already talked about it like earlier today and uh it was a good discussion but we can have a discussion about that uh sometimes during definitely want to just update the the global launch article that I wrote because they definitely change some things and uh it's good it's always good to remind ourselves uh and uh others how they do and how the how others game do as well that we discussed already so but back to the app Business actually so uh now finally the interesting part are you selling yourself for the app

game no no no I mean I I work with uh apps uh here and there um it's very close to to gaming in terms of the UA slightly different but if you know how to do UA for games and well you can you will do good uh job for apps as well in here the slide difference is basically in the UA Channel mix uh where for games the Apple search just really suck balls in here for apps it's actually like a big portion of spend I would tend to say it's like more than every every other channel because yeah it's really really the truth at least from from my experience uh if not the biggest then at least like neck to neck to to Facebook or or Google or Tik Tok for sure but why is this like really important well because of the intent of the user and because of like how the actually UA how this UA Channel works so user is trying to search for different types of apps I

know fitness apps Health apps motivation apps well battery savers whatever generated AI apps you you name it so and this is how how the Apple search ads can bring pretty good results because it actually uh pairs the results with uh the user intent so you might ask what is the best campaign structure for Apple search ads so there are like three different types and uh and campaigns you can run and uh set up from the start which is brand uh campaign for brand keywords competitors in your space and some generic keywords so so let's uh let's say I will give you an example let's say my my app is called generate my pretty phase with AI so the brand campaign would be obviously the name of the app and some some other synonyms and some mistakes and types that can happen but then you have a competitor Campaign which

obviously I would use alenza Ai and I would use also other apps in this space such as Dream by Wombo reface Wonder Cartoon Avatar face play goard Etc so you get it and then in terms of the generic keywords it's usually like okay so AI generated art generative ai ai generative images AI images and stuff like that so you can your app can actually appear in these search results obviously we have more placements in the in the Lio search ads but they're still kind of new and uh it sucks a little bit always there if there is something new in the the Apple search ads just wait couple of well weeks or month until everybody tries it and then the competition kind of Fades off and then that's the best time to actually start running those new placements like the opposite huh yeah it's like look so there was this new um a new placement uh I think last year

before these today steps and other other placements man I tried it it was so [ __ ] expensive and they charged based on CPM model not CPI or tap it was ridiculous now it's fine because nobody well not nobody but the the competition definitely way lower so so yeah just to wait a little bit and well if you don't have like super high budgets and you're trying to be a little bit more efficient yeah just wait a bit just wait a bit question yeah so just for context like for an app what's a CPI in the states like for a fitness app or something like that just compared to gaming so I know like how expensive it is on Apple search ads I have no idea okay I guess I guess that's the same situation with genre depend genre it's super different it's super super different $1 or is it like above $10 of course yeah yeah of course no no no app yeah definitely sub 10 uh depends on the the actual keywords

and like how well optimized is your campaign for start it can can be like if you use the you know if you start running the the campaigns like right now and you then optimize as you go then it's uh it can start like5 $10 and then just you just optimize and get down or lower the the CPI afterwards but I would start well in us and then adding other Geo campaigns like one Geo per campaign based on the revenue obviously that you have or you see in your internal dashboards so but then that's like that's Apple search ads then we have The Usual Suspects here like Google Facebook Tik Tok and and honestly sometimes even ad networks depends on like what kind of app you have and if it's very close to what the Aku mentioned at the beginning if it's well r or it's more game but you can have different uh coloring apps different uh well what else I think different uh apps coloring gaps are kind of more games app if by the way it's from uh reworks

reworks 2021 for 600 million so okay that's my correction there yeah yeah okay so but yeah well usually like my usual combo is Apple search as Facebook and and Tik Tok uh because well for some reason the apps managed before and and sometimes I I come to contact uh are mainly published on iOS but well if you have an Android version well Google ads is a must obviously so uh easy and then if you have ad monetization then all the ad networks that can work on the on the ad R campaigns as well in terms of the creatives uh the creative brainstorming and the the production is always a great exercise not only for for games but for apps as well and well here the like yaku mentioned the game play well won't do the trick just showing up

your your app won't do the trick because well um you need in those creatives you need to Showcase like what your what is your app solving actually like what kind of problem so you can use usually like these uh let's call them testimonials um both in static images or or videos but for apps uh static images actually worked always very well for me so they're cheaper to produce but also the lifespan of the the crav is shorter as well so you use M Damon with crypto.com for example use medon with crypto.com looking at looking yeah you can do that as well uh and then uh the easy trick would be uh that every my knows turn this best performing athetic to video so it's m day one cryptocom looking or like his eyes are are going to shine that that would be very

easy very easy easy [Music] video but here uh for the app specifically like you said like the ugc content uh makes much more sense uh because it can like underline the messaging so much and you know met Damon like showing up for crypto.com that's perfect it's perfect but you like if showing up a real face uh that talks about like the problem solving of your that your app actually does amazing in terms of like experimenting here obviously using different ugc or influencers is a great way to iterate on a on a winner creative here is a slightly different in terms of the creative brainstorming because as I said like you need to be showcasing the the problem solving uh then you can try different uh approaches I've just read an article about misleading ads in different well different genres or different verticals than games so might be

interesting option most probably I wouldn't go for it but then you know if you want they also have misleading ads yeah they also have misleading ads you think it's a crypto trading app is really a language learning app yeah yeah there you go we should do an episode on that definitely no no no okay yeah I will bring up the the the article next time and we can definitely talk about it okay H then in terms of the campaign optimization um this all depends on the monetization strategy is all like both of you discussed obviously there in this world like loot of subscription apps so it's uh it's more about how you can leverage different events and how you can optimize for subscription but if you have a hybrid app which is great and uh as one marketing Maven or or industry analyst mentioned in the past this is the vet dream of the UA manager because you can combine all all of these optimization and Leverage The you know B networks did

you just call yourself a maven well that was in the Pocket Gamer article last time it was industry analy yeah this time it was yeah yeah so so this time how do you promote how do you go from analyst to Maven I don't know I don't know well it's uh it's apparent never know yeah yeah that's apparently what uh what you do in in game in gaming when you just put publish articles that are actually useful for for people you're you became Maven okay so so but back to the actually campaign optimization so you don't always only optimize for free trials or subscription events uh but you know you try to do this experimentation on on different events within your app and even you can set up a combined events so for example if we take the generate my pretty face with AI example you can combine an event let's say free trial and then generated the

profile picture in one event so every time these two actions actually happen you will send an event and then optimize for it because uh this indicates that this user that you just acquired is actually more engaged and this is all that matters uh you can also try to experiment on different events like generated profile picture like five times in last uh three days or well in the first three days of the of the user Journey you can uh you know whatever it's uh it happens between a free TR and subscription you can even uh try to look into different um events that happens after subscription but then the problem would be it just takes a long time to actually get to that level and uh get those data in so ideally you're looking on like day one day two maybe day three of of data points and then use that in the campaign optimization as an as an event so yeah that's uh yeah easy easy sounds

always Easy Sounds always easy always sounds easier than it is unless you're speaking to remu about it because then give you so [ __ ] one more thing one more thing that you mentioned feels about the web uh web pages because then uh that came into my mind a lot of apps have these web pages with uh subscriptions and everything uh there so they you know they don't need to pay 30% on the App Store side of things so how do you run UA for that it's well it's the same thing with just different uh different events that you need to optimize and different uh let's say tracking Solutions but then you are using well you can't use apple searches but you can use actually Google AdWords and the the actual search that that was that was before um also available on the app well on the mobile site but now it's available on the the website and then Facebook Tik Tok you can run these um

these UA channels based on the events again like you said so it it can be subscription in this uh this case it can be free Tri in this case it can be as well like different uh things that users actually do in the in the app afterwards so yeah there you go and also uh so thank you very much Tik Tok for sending me a lot of Swag uh next time I'm I'm bringing a either a cap or or some some other things for the podcast i' been so great Christmas gift yeah I think like the main main thing out of this is that you need to know your value economy even though it's an it's an app and then you need to be able to sell it properly yeah and therefore based on that you set up your UA setup and creatives that are fake as not fake dude come on not F well next time shut up about fake fake Maven fake Maven fake Maven fake Maven

you're a fake Maven all right let's let's finish there so we get below the 50 minute Mark yeah I think so yeah thank you very much for listening uh and watching as well definitely subscribe on YouTube apple and Spotify and wherever else and keep sending us the feedback we really appreciate it and yakob is moving like immediate so the camera moves as well so this is the best time to end this until next time thank you very much guys by me [Music]