UA strategies in the post-IDFA world LIVE - Gamedrive x 2.5gamers!

oh okay go live so I need to actually press the button we are live it says we are live so let's see if it's uh it's actually happening it is happening oh my God it's actually happening amazing perfect I'm seeing us on the second screen okay all right thank you very much guys for uh for coming to this amazing special live session which we are doing actually for the first time I mean second time but we kind of don't count the ma Vegas live thing so today again welcome this is special episode my name is mat lerich I'm Felix braberg and we are your hosts and we are joining for with the my games team for the final episode of their game Drive program so welcome Sola marketing director at PX Sonic my games and welcome Anon head of Industry relation relation [ __ ]

can we do it can we do it again oh we can't relations my games makes it all the more special man yes ah welcome guys so tell us a little bit more about the game Drive thing yeah yeah thank you guys so much uh this is exciting this is very nervous for me at least I don't know about Sola um she knows way more than I do about you know the UA and marketing so yeah hopefully she's she's I will be talking yeah hopefully she's not that nervous anyway thank you guys so much for this thank you mate thank you Felix uh thank you yakob uh even though he's not present on the stream um yeah basically uh uh game Drive is uh what we have been doing this whole year for the third time third season uh I guess some of you might have already heard about it and this or that way cuz we've had like three online sessions and uh two offline sessions

back uh at Nordic and uh Mob dictum in Istanbul and what it is essentially is um it's a business platform for you know knowledge sharing for you know sharing wisdom with people like you with experts like two and a half Gamers um with uh with other experts uh with investors and all this is to help mobile game developers uh we launched it back in 2020 the first season was back uh was in 2021 and uh this year is the first one we've done that in a kind of a hybrid format cuz the first two seasons were online only uh due to all the obvious reasons and then uh Malmo and Istanbul were the F the first two locations we've done that offline and yakob actually took part in the Istanbul one in mobed dictum back at the beginning of September and we have uh all these amazing Partners helping us out like Google and AWS for games and data Ai and

you guys and game analytics and lots of other amazing people uh from the industry um yeah we try to cover pretty much uh all the topics that can bother and may be important for mobile game developers from marketing to live Ops to Investments to production to creatives whatever and uh seemed only logical to close this year uh with you guys seemed like the best option uh cuz it's uh you know it's the Christmas kind of a Christmas episode although only Sol has prepared for that uh yeah so it it seemed all the more reasonable uh to make this one with you and uh we experiment we have been experimenting the whole year we've been doing offline sessions we've been doing round taes we've been doing uh different kinds of you know asking different number of experts and then the final

experiment of this year for game Drive is making sure this is streamed live yes with no edits uh so basically this conversation get uh can get it get anywhere really yeah that's pretty much it thank you again so much and uh I don't know if solo wants to say a couple of words that well first of all yes I would like to thank you guys for having us and uh for invitation and for this opportunity to talk about this things like user acquisition and idfa apocalypsis era in marketing world so yeah let's do some good stuff here yeah you already kind of teased domain topic I mean it was already in the in the promotions and all all of the anyway so yes today we are talking about the let's call us strategies in the post at the fa world the topic that everybody talked about like million times but we also also going to talk about like alternative UA

channels maybe a little bit of synergy of ASO and UA creatives organic traffic little bit of Community Management and wherever the discussion goes and also since uh well I'm the guy so we have the the live chat so I'm now reading the chat [ __ ] me so it's going to be very disturbing but no honestly like if you have any questions during our discussion uh yeah please ask and we are going to cover the questions and now I see that I'm a bit low on volume so classic yeah the classic problem with with my mic the classic problem M because I had the mic in Maldives and now the setup is wrong well is still Maldives thank you uh so Manuel is also also here in the chat amazing anyway okay so let's let's not go there yet so what should we talk about also uh we might turn this into an interrogation about rash Royale in war robots we

already talked about it before we started the live session by the GU could I just start by asking just like for for some sense of authority here just so we establish like so it's not too much [ __ ] being shared like mte roughly how much UA money have you spent to date and how much are you currently spending then I'm going to ask SAA the same question because I just want to know roughly because I'm the token admon person so I'm just asking here so I want to know so you're not just spending $100 a day because I can spend $100 a day I mean it's okay so uh until this day maybe 42 million I guess profitably I hope so uh and today when I look at the old accounts could be 30k per day okay maybe cool so you don't have to say exact numbers but just you know as long as it's more than $100 that's good well my number is bigger yeah yeah yeah yeah so you're bigger than Mach I'm the new in room

which is amazing that's that's what we want to hear that's we want to hear because honestly the all the I DFA fun stuff uh but she didn't say a number M you interrupted her when she was say a number yeah that's what the point actually so definitely so yeah our uh just for today uh our daily spend is uh bigger than what much are you spending okay so bigger than okay good answer political answer very good answer so you guys definitely know what you're doing then you to so I'll Trust you guys for this convers yes and actually of course with RI positive so yeah oh yeah like everybody's talking about RI positive these days scopely and all of the Monopoly go and let's not go there okay anyway in terms of the idfa yes like and then I'm I'm asking you sol right right here um in terms of the idea like what changed for you because when we were talking about this just before

the podcast we said the war robots are quite stable for the last three years so like how is that even possible because everybody is talking about oh UA is dead oh I didn't ask that question but I will ask I will ask it so how is that even possible uh well first of all I think that um because it's because of the great product I do not want also to say only the [ __ ] but this is true yeah well remember this is not [ __ ] podcast so yes yes so this is true and um if we are talking uh about user acquisition and of course it was really very hard time and you already mentioned all of these um like um new sources alternative sources uh App Store optimization and so on but uh you didn't mention about good and strong marketing analyst team and for for us it was really very very important

and I think that uh with the help of these guys we actually solve all of the problems and we found our work around how to work with traffic in this difficult and challenging uh interesting marketing world yeah I will not share all the secrets and I want to underline Everything is Everything is legal yeah no no of course yeah uh I mean that uh it's um it's really very good and very helpful when you have these data scientists who actually can gather a lot of data we have still and to compare it somehow and uh to give us advice whether we should go or whether we not should uh go yeah question so just so I understand it because I I've never run a UA campaign in my entire life right I do alization can you give me an example of a problem that you gave them to Sol solve like can you look at this xyc data and tell me uh

you don't have to give me a real example but just something I know yes but I know it's not only about this xyc data as you said it's also for example this data from the consoles developer consoles yes what we what we see there it's also about their researches in uh organic traffic and for example if you want to test some new source for iOS campaign we definitely can choose tree some or set of GEOS where our analyst team can um highlight us that actually this is good to go because for example we see that the Baseline is very stable and we can try and see if something will go up or down or something like that so it's not uh when I say when I'm talking about the data I'm I'm not talking only about this you know spreadsheets with a lot of of numbers it's actually a lot of uh ad hoc researches and lot of um real time

advices about like okay we actually see on that exactly this country doesn't show any result that there is no impact of our campaigns but we're still like spending their money so maybe we will we we can try to cut them off and to allocate budget to another us well something like that I hope that my answer I can translate that to the like by the way very good question you might be becoming a second best UA manager on the podcast by the way it's start running my first UA campaign yeah yeah you should definitely start uh so I would translate that to kind of let's call it uh identifying a baseline of revenues maybe downloads as well before you start kind of a UA campaign and then you start spending I don't know let's say 10K per day and then you see almost minimum kind of effect on the increase on the revenues you might see increase on

Organics but not revenues so it's afterwards I mean I'm not sure like what kind of pay periods you have but at least with iOS and all these like 24 hours SC conversion schemas type of data which is I guess a little bit technical you can see the impact of the UA quite immediately so you ran the campaign for two days and you don't see any increases on basically Organics or or anything then you just cut it off because it's not money spent it's in iOS world it's quite um logical you you look at the Blended kind of level of data because yes but uh it's logical but uh I want to add that it's logical and it's okay when everything is okay when you see the good numbers but when something is wrong the main question is like what should we cut yeah and uh at that moment like we have actually in our team uh we have this Wednesday day which is dedicated only

for all of our questions regarding user acquisition campaigns with marketing analyst team and actually we have sometimes our meetings for two hours for three hours when we are just discussing like what should we do but still as you already said that war robots are definitely very in a very good position still for these three years for us uh everything is really very good and uh it is also because uh when this idfa apocalypsis starts in it was April 2021 I suppose something like that yeah I don't even remember anymore well I I do remember because yes and uh we have our really big budget and u i noticed that that time a lot of uh like medium companies or small companies they just allocated all their budgets to the um Google ads or or Android bills so for us it was also very a bit helpful because

we were brave enough to continue spending and amazing to hear finally someone someone else is talking about the same thing that I did before Oh really guys listening to us we were it is not prepared we're actually like M just supporting yeah no honestly because yeah sorry to interrupt just go on no no no no I let's Okay because I I always said when this idfa apocalypse happened the iOS kind of landscape was almost like during covid because it was like almost nobody was spending so the competition was really low so you could actually spend quite a lot of money profitably I mean obviously you couldn't measure it properly yeah but like you said like a lot of advertisers just pulled the spend and then just started spending on Android which created higher cpis more competition exactly so for us it was actually um we see that it could be our opportunity our actually point of of growth somehow and

I can say that uh we've got back to our like usual daily spans on iOS quite quickly and still it was also because the auction was really very low and sry ah there you go so we are prepared for this yay guys first time first time okay let's count and uh and actually for us uh it was uh even I mean that it was like back into this uh back to 90s as I say like when you were see only the blinded results but still you understand that you're on a good level and that's why and I'm very helpful that in my games we were as I already said brave enough and we have the had this like card Bunch from the management that we can go on and um during this period we actually were able to create this like let's say work around around and uh we all know about

this probabilistic method and actually it um it impacted on the share of voice of like DSP and app networks and for us it was also the opportunity but still like the main uh know as Ren sources like Google and Facebook are still in our media mix and top position and we are quite okay with this which is a very good uh kind of Segway to any any kind of like non-traditional performance or UA channels that we maybe want to talk about but also like all of what you mentioned and what I mentioned is kind of like still like a bottleneck or challenge in terms of the UA I'm still getting loads of like direct messages on LinkedIn like hey we we don't know how to you know go about this idfa thing we don't know how to set up a conversion schema which you mentioned kind of you definitely had to work with like analysts I mean it's still super complicated and with scan 4 coming God

knows when it's going to be even more complicated on the other hand we might get a little bit more data still pretty much up in the air but you know uh sorry for Interruption it's a funny story about this conversion scheme that actually uh from the very beginning we were using like the um how to say this correctly like the one we were told like it was like a pretty sure it was yes yes yes and actually it works so uh of course we're thinking and we're doing our work with like you know trying to build different um type of this conversion uh scheme and so on but the first one was also very very good for us so it was really very funny I spent like three months to actually getting um good conversion schema for for the games I I managed obviously like the games that have very uh let's say short time to like purchase or like players like you can

basically see a lot of purchase happening in the first 24 hours it was kind of easy to use the revenue schema but if you don't have this type of game then you need to yeah try to find different quite a different solution yeah yeah totally agre here but I'm seeing these two guys are kind of like already bored no no no I'm not bored I'm actually you can ask some questions if I would love to ask a question because I'm actually looking inside of sensor tower on Ward War robe here we go please open also also s okay so it looks like you're pretty much getting back to growth on on war robots on iOS which means you start figuring something out on the schema I'm just a bit curious like from a nonua person like and if you're listening to this how do you start like I yeah how do you start with that except listening to M's podcast but yeah I'm just super curious cuz it looks like you're almost back to the Glory Days in 2020 which is quite

impressive on iOS well thank you and um well as I said it's uh actually really it's a mix of good product which continue to develop itself it's uh close work between user acquisition and marketing analyst team and uh despite of that uh our well we do have our core audience uh very strong with really um long LTV and it help us to be more risky so sometimes we can you know just uh of course we have all of the numbers we need uh but we can um we can run experiments or tests with big budget and uh actually it helps okay yeah and cool Felix you know like this is the ideal scenario if you are a small company [ __ ] because don't have enough data don't big

budgets true well uh of course well actually yes uh I think that when you have uh when you have enough money uh which you can risk and which you can um use uh into some kind of experiment you it is like 50/50 whether you will like roow a negative let's say so and or you will find the new source or the new way of how to calculate something or maybe you decide to I don't know make your um this window of returning the investment a little bit um longer because of your core audience so we we do not want to stop in my game so we always want to try something new especially when we have resources for that and but still it's not only about resources you definitely should have the good quality of your product because if your LTD is really

very low you can spend like millions and there will be no returning look guys you have sorry Sol just that the the guys have been telling pretty much exact the exact same thing in a couple of episodes ago I believe saying that if you are a marketing person in a big company uh you can't really allow yourself to do whatever you want right with the millions you have so well it's not like whever you want yeah that's exactly what I'm saying that's exactly what I'm saying you cannot allow yourself to do this right so you're basically just proving the point yeah but I mean that for of course for small small teams it's a bit difficult yeah and actually with um well I sound a bit strange but it is it is really it is it is really very uh difficult to see the result if you just spend well a little so but it's not weird it's true it's true because if you

don't have enough budget you won't pass the Privacy thresold which means you need I don't know like few hundreds thousands per day to pass the Privacy threshold means if you pass like let's say you have me to hit minimum 88 inst on Facebook then it's I don't know like 100 on Tik Tok and if you don't pass this threshold you won't be able to see the data so as I said you are not in a very good position can we uh like mat you can maybe answer this better if if solo doesn't want to but like you see here the numbers in early 2020 right that's when we still have the adfa and now today like can we name and shame some networks that don't work now that used to work back then ma can do it so you don't have to answer this don't worry well I mute by microphone yeah yeah well we can't hear you anymore you okay no honestly look uh on iOS uh Google disappeared basically uh it was just not possible to run Tas campaigns

anymore you could run tcpa which is let's say up event optimized campaign for those who don't know not exactly the same quality of users now they're kind of getting back with the Tas beta which is on some games performing really well on some games just absolute trash then Tik Tok back then wasn't working that well as it is working right now so it's really not like comparing Apples to Apples To be honest but uh Facebook worked back then quite well as well and it's still on iOS quite okay not anymore and that at that point so I mean like right now if we are talking about like let's call these like traditional UA kind of things Google Facebook yes but in terms of the ad networks like these days like apple is almost [ __ ] everywhere if we were like reviewing the games like a lot of games in the last year and applin was showing up like in on like like top two position for almost everybody and then

there is the question like oh well but UA is dead you can't run profitable UA on iOS anymore and then you see all these great games earning [ __ ] tons of money and then you also see War robots quite stable and then you ask like okay well and also we we talked about rash Royale how he is killing it it was like few months ago like come on so it's just like ah but yeah yeah anyway but yeah so in terms of these networks like I mean it's doing super well these days it wasn't the case like when the idfa happened and then uh what else like wangle disappeared basically at least my my rer yes yes definitely yeah Unity was great now it's not that great anymore uh well still you know I I I have the thought that several like different DSP and different Edward networks work differently for different genres sorry for so many words differently uh but still you mentioned Tik Tok and

yes now uh well even before the Ida I was actually I didn't believe in this platform as for yeah but then when we start like testing and we see the result it was really very good and now oh you can see the Tik Tok cap here and here's another one well I also have several well actually me too now me too and especially uh just because about the probabilistic uh um way of attribution now we we love them even more but yes Tik Tok is really cool and uh for us for war robots it was also a big question like um could we actually run the ad campaigns in this platform where most of the people are really very young and very quick and so on and so on and we have our war robots slow for these men who already passed their 30s but still

oh now I'm I'm s that's why would you be said about that man because I said about Yes Men above 30s but still I mean that when I'm talking about the product uh we were able to on boarding this new kind of audience for our game we can make the robots for them like good enough to way so and this is actually about this alternative sources for um for traffic and traffic is a blot of project but the project should be really very good to um have this cap capacity to actually gain all of this traffic and make the game for them entertaining and fun and so on but then okay you have these different types of sources and also like let's call it uh we have traditional UA and then we have dsps we have let's still call it influencer marketing which can

be so you need to kind of like uh put the traffic to the game and then there are like two things what what happens on your end uh and maybe on your end Felix as well uh when the UA Channel makes changes because obviously that can have a very big impact on the product kpis and admon kpis and then like how do you communicate like with each other in terms of the UA product and then analytics UA Adon UA like what's that all about yeah I understand but um I can say that still we definitely have our like let's say top five main um traffic sources and they quite stable for quite a long time so they're mixing their position uh can be changed inside of this top five so it's not like uh okay this is some kind of new DSP with let's let's call it I don't know how and we just spend their $1 million

dollar uh yeah and and we and we get some really new audience no that's not like that but when we see that the for example like Tik Tok was growing and we understand it and we came to our product team because we actually have uh like bi-weekly uh meetings with them where we're discussing what the product are going to do which can help us to buy traff and on this meeting we also share with them our like learnings or guys who are trying this kind of new traffic and we see the good results but we for example are worried about their retentions because maybe they will quit the game um quicker than our core audience so let's just check this and let's look at this um in a month or something like that and make our conclusion and after that we decided that okay we think that this audience is good enough for us and our product is good enough for them so let's

continue and let's scale up something like that so okay and when you you're talking about top five I usually have also like top three or top four that are the main Channel Mi and then I'm trying to add like let's call them can you call it top can you call your top five ma for iOS that you usually see yeah it's uh it's Tik Tok upin Facebook still and then um Unity a little bit like top four and then a Google starting to appear on on that list here and there uh and that's that's it basically Noob question before I let you go on so this is a podcast about post idfa UA on iOS right why the hell is no one talking about Apple search ads and why is that not working just because you didn't ask us okay is it working does it work um it's a tricky question uh because uh of course we're using it uh for our brand search campaigns

definitely you get this answer from everybody who is actually running the Apple searchs but I have also some some information yeah and uh we are trying and but actually you have to invite guys from Rush Royal because they have pretty cool results with the their apple search campaigns um but not branding but U let's say performance oriented we we are still looking into this uh because uh for us it's not the M the main source of course but we are trying to keep our position because as we said AB optimization and actually organic traffic are very important just this these days so yeah we're trying our best and mat what do you want to add about search ads yeah it's [ __ ] terrible uh that's very short answer the long answer would be I managed to make it work for one game out of 10 and now when I restarted the same game after six months of not working because it kind of died it's not working

anymore I do know one game which is uh kind of targeted for like female audience and it's working quite well on Apple search ads and it's actually the one that I saw across whole 40 games I ever managed before it's one are you talking about but are you talking about this branding compaign no no no no outside of branding obviously again like branding like the whole the whole like apple search ads kind of sort as a UA channel it's not scalable and if you kind of want to protect the brand which is basically your competition stealing your organic traffic yeah then you need to obviously run this uh yeah you have to spend money on this it's just as I say we have to protect our position because what would be what would be the game Sorry Sorry solo I can't say oh so you also have you can say guys but can you say roughly what spend

you're able to get there for performance just cuz the most I've ever heard is like 4k on performance no no this is like 30k per day on on us on different on different uh placements and it's only us there's also Japan Dak region um Netherlands and some other like uh pretty cool yeah yeah yeah let's let's call it the female oriented game uh which kind let's chat later M yeah exactly you know you know what I've actually heard and you know how uh Apple had this job ads up for a DSP so my theory what they're actually going to do in the end on Apple side is build an audience Network Audience Network an audience Network and never heard that before yeah never heard 100% well but most well a lot of people think about it and actually I was also thought about it like previously but still we're on the same position maybe later who knows yeah all right enough of

this [ __ ] about the the UA mix Let's uh let's actually talk about the creatives because that's the like the the important part and uh I think well we have some Trends we saw with Felix but then I know Al can you guys elaborate a little bit on this like uh the trend that you have seen for the past year just you know I would call I would call the best like biggest strength altered gameplay which is which is something think you are doing as well on rash Royale man it's it's such an amazing job that that you guys are doing because obviously you are using or not only you but like other companies and games are using the assets from the games but building levels or kind of scenes that are not directly in the game it's working so well and I use it also for uh Legend of slime we are using like Survivor IO type of creative which has nothing to do with the game and it's the best per performing best best performing and we have like six different

iterations and which each iteration it just gets better and it really the there is only the assets from the game the Slime is there and then obviously the enemies and it's just yeah it's just Survivor IO type of gameplay and it's you know it's idle RPG so there you go anyway so like this is definitely the biggest Trend I'm seeing um and also we have all these like hyper casual type of elements or not elements but mechanics there are these skates creatives whatever else uh I mean the noob versus Pro is not the trend anymore it was like 10 10 years ago gu but then history repeating you know that's true yeah that's true but we have this like we just talked about the blog gem 3D uh game which is basically like a tile casual game or tile matching game which it's very close to tile Busters or Zen match or any any other Tile game basically and they just copied one other game kind of mechanic which is just T

matching the tiles and then sending those tiles to like a bus and the game is called the buzz gem so it's basically blog gem versus bz Buzz Gem and they copied this mechanic used it in the creatives and then they actually implemented it in the game as a like a calendar event and that's perfect kind of like expectation flow and which is also like kind of connected to what I want to talk about later on which with fake ads but this is just and also it's it's not only fake ads but it's also like the kind of synergy that we touched at the beginning the ASO kind of UA and creatives you have something that you see in the creatives whatever it is if it's fake then you have that let's let's call it fake fake creative then you have in in it in the like in the screenshots and then you have it in as a mini game in the game so it's not fake anymore that's the biggest Trend but game industry always can find a solution U how to solve any problem I mean this even with this fake fake gameplay videos

yeah let's just put some mini games in our games yay no but like yeah it makes it makes so much sense uh I mean on one hand because then you kind of like setting up the the expectation and then the player kind of Meet the expectation and we know when we talked about the Hero Wars creatives and I was um looking into the the reddits and then all there are players that are actually still waiting until this day to actually see the the the pin mini game in the in the game because well they they asking like where's this uh level coming in into the game I'm already on level 300 and it's been a while since I saw the P the p and I'm still I'm still playing and still waiting when it's when it's actually happening again so yeah but that's the thing it's uh that's how it works now and I don't have any any objections for that well I can add uh some like Trends what I noticed it's uh definitely user generated

content and uh if uh I don't know maybe two three years ago the quality of such kind of creativ was really very high what I see now it's something like you just give it for oh this is a good game so please please this is the name of the game download ande so it's really like you know this um ad advertisement testimony as in like Big Marketing world world so and um it is also very popular to use live actors now especially for this uh platform also like for example Tik Tok and uh it's challenging for example if you have this again sorry War robots um and you have you want to hear all about war robots don't worry I'm not asking this time you brought it up I'm not asking okay I just I just wanted to do this yeah so you have to mix it somehow and we also trying to use um

what we also see in the trans this kind of humor in our videos because uh a lot of guys uh I mean when they do their trailers or some announcements for example like fortnite they they do really very cool stuff it's just very interesting to watch so we're trying our best to find like the level of humor which uh which will be good not not only for our team internally but also for the audience but we at the very beginning but yeah this ugc and live action yeah I just want to add a couple of things the first one is that uh the war robots creatives are super nice and you know the the game you can't say anything else Anon no I mean what I mean is what I mean yeah okay yeah what I mean is uh sometimes uh they we whatever yeah so the kind of game play that I would love to actually play right like the ones

that what you I don't know whether uh anybody has seen that hopefully uh the ones with a small robot just walking around the streets and uh you know uh hiding from the bigger robots and then you just walk around and collect XP yeah yeah XP and becoming bigger and big yeah yeah yeah I would love to play that kind of game and the second thing is that uh yes we call it metam mislead yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah basically altered gameplay there you go oh yeah yeah it is it is it's not a misled right it's just an alter it's just gameplay yeah and then the second thing that I've uh recently noticed and you guys have covered that I believe is the one that uh the white out survival does when they show the actual things like you know uh you know not not even live actors but uh things like you know uh doing something with Earth and then hooks are [ __ ] amazing they're super good very very good on

very this this is new this is one of the trends that I personally think is going to get extended no yeah the hooks are super important and they they started doing it with frozen City all like you know because there are like so many snow related videos out there in like real life like situations and they started leveraging that because it's the connection between that Hook and the actual theme of the game is Just brilliant it's a it's great it's so smooth transition and also like what you said like with and especially Century games guys like they are amazing they released the Frozen city did like they saw how well it's doing and then they took basically the whole game and they put it into the Forex game which is fight out survival as an on boarding so suddenly you play the game and then it's basically uh one second because the guys

are discussing if this is a live or it's we are they're watching pre-coded session no it's live but wait just yeah just wait until we kind of like cover two things and then we can we can interact with you guys afterwards as well so I want to say like you're playing the idle game and then you suddenly like zoom out and then you see the Forex viap it's like oh and if you don't know you just won't realize and that's like there like another level of uh the trends kind of we are seeing in the in the gaming industry because then it's not only like duct taping the fake ads into the game it's just like using the basically different game as an onboarding so you can you can you can then have this like Smooth transition so so when you're interviewing UA people you should ask them tell me a joke and what's your opinion on tricking people well actually fex you are you are quite right because this is this is uh almost my questions which I asked when I interviewing you people really really uh

yeah well there are also several and one what are the best what are the best answers yeah that you got um well I can't remember actually but well for me the best the best the most important answer is about last of us whether person like this game or not dislike or not like this game so that's how I make a decision whether whether the person actually gets to work for us well yeah easy easy oh we losing connection losing connection again uh by the way so regarding the like the live actors and you mentioned like you had Jake Paul in the game or you are still you still have like Anthony is that your job or like how the [ __ ] like that happened uh first and first uh the Jake Paul campaign is like finished has for several months I believe back in the summer and then yeah they there's an

internal marketing team like a huge team of people uh we of course know them but uh the idea and the whole thing was uh done by Russ team marketing nice all right all right so you can't talk about that no no we can't talk I mean that how did it even happen like it's just like it's it was so I mean they really much at the same yeah it's true yeah but when I was looking into the I I saw the ad on Facebook or somewhere like wow okay and then I saw the comments like oh man this is just [ __ ] like how can you even use this type of person like what I was very surprised I was very surprised to see this but and you were surprised in negative way or yeah I was no I was surprised like why people are just commenting like in the negative way because I was like okay it's well you know people people often uh often comment in negative way but what I can

add um to the Jack Paul history story with Rush Royale is that and it's actually some kind connected with our idfa post apocalypsis world that we need a lot of organic traffic now and we need to find this way how to reach to this audience and um I think that what's going on right now in the Performance Marketing world is a bit shifting not only to Performance Marketing but also trying to find our way to build Our Brands and to be visible not only uh through these ads on Facebook or Tik Tok but also some kind of oh okay this is Jack Paul somewhere I don't know in his for example Instagram just saying that oh I let's play with me in R so for us it's um a way of finding um the method of uh how to get get to the bigger audience or how to get to the new audience and uh actually inside my games

we really dig deep into these brand forance branding campaigns how to calculate this what should what can we get from this and uh that's why this is actually our like let's say first steps yeah but we continue to developing our calculations and so on and so on so stay tun there's a little there's a little spoiler ahead like we are actually the team is going to show something else very soon nice because this also like kind of like let's call it non-traditional UA kind of thing definitely it's not a UA at all actually it's brand formance well it's I mean yeah we can just throw these key Q Q5 man Q like this brand format in Q5 would be amazing like no what I mean that for example all of these um video games not mobile version video games this is their

strategy marketing strategy while they are Dev they can't measure [ __ ] you can't measure [ __ ] like well I think that they can measure but in a different way I mean that while they are developing uh their marketing team and PR and brand team they are developing the brand for for the purpose that uh when the game is launched everyone just go and buy it so they already have this uh experience it and we are from the Performance Marketing world we were very uh used to see the numbers right away and we were pretty confident like what we do and especially at the very beginning we can run ads with I don't know some shitty banners and the CTR was like amazingly high and so on and so on but now uh we are also data driven and so on and so on but still all of our um like um uh instrument tools they are turned off we do not see anymore and wow

M just leave leave the room so uh I mean that uh for for for us please come back please come back like it's justand performance you don't have to be so visual about it yeah so I mean that for us now for all of the industry I think that we have to um move towards this mind shift that sometimes we will be not able to calculate everything just right away that we will be not able to build our forecasts but still we have to somehow solve this issue and use this in our marketing mix this kind of we could yeah we could potentially have another talk about this uh at another time because there's also like also Manu in the in the chat mentioned like there's pedop Pascal type of campaign that we saw and like oh this super successful I'm not very sure about that and I like I don't know like like how you we just

do not know the level of success exactly for these uh campaigns because everyone uh could have different goals so yes yeah that's true but also the thing is like uh you you use Pedro pasca in the creatives and then the num the numbers of downloads there just won't change and they stay flat so I'm not sure like how that is even close to successful but then like that's my point of view which obviously I don't know the kpis but op exactly that's what I talk about about the goal yeah because maybe it was some kind of another another goal or in some small country I don't know because do you remember I forgot the name of the game who were this collaboration with Neymar the football player neyar yeah neyar there's there was a number of collaborations with Neymar well I mean that I'm not sure also kind of robot based game Mech Arena or something M Arena yes yes but what I saw when um I checked some numbers uh

and I think that they're great yes uh that in Brazil the number of downloads were really very high yeah because yes he's Brazilian basically yes and I mean to like we have to keep in mind all of these things because maybe if you want to of course it I I'm pretty sure that it was expensive but still you can use some kind of these type of things to if you want to I don't know lift up your organic traffic well like that but still we have to think about it but I get I get this point but eventually like you know like it's money in money out so I mean yes definitely yes you speak to my heart yes I know this but I think that we still have to think towards this H topic definitely all right so uh should we move towards like uh interrogating Felix a little bit maybe uh about like uh instead of UA yeah payback for the war robots craft yeah again yeah yeah so I think we can we can ask like each of us at least like one

question uh maybe I will start like how do you choose like a mediation platform for for different games and is that like is there like any rule of time so for example you use max for strategy games but you use let's say level play for I don't know merge games so um it's completely different depending on what type of game you have so it's if it's if you're ad Revenue driven game uh then usually you go either with level play or Max and if ad quality if you're high on iaps is your number one priority you always go with admob uh however how the market is structured right now about like 60 65% is on Max maybe 20% is on level play 25 and then very small percentages on admob and then uh the rest of them are uh yeah the other ones uh which mediation do you guys use on my games Max correct uh no level play no no your own

mediation um Noe no then I have I'm R then mop in that case well uh I mean that uh no it's I I'm no I'm just uh you know I'm not this ad monetization person to go so I just do not want to say some [ __ ] just because we we agree that this is not a [ __ ] don't worry it's okay it's okay oh but I'm not gonna say guys okay yeah that's fine oh just say like you know you know yeah anyway anyway so there there's pros and cons with all all the mediations right and you see to know that going in there's kind of a weird thing going on right now that Google like we know it's moving away from placements and Adon placements and moving to bidding uh Google has only announced support for Google bidding on

four mediations meaning that when they transition out of uh bidding which will be probably April that's when we're going to have everything on Google bidding that there will be only four mediations that have Google and Google for ads is usually 30 to 60% of your Revenue depending on if you're on Android or iOS meaning that this Market will be a solidified in like five main players which will be Google admob max level play uh chart boost uh I don't know what they call it now they used to call it helium but I think they call it chart boost now again and digital turbine yeah uh so those will be the only mediations that have support for Google bidding so those are the only ones you can really realistically choose come q1 unless uh Google actually updates and uh supports more mediation so those are the only ones there's pros and cons with all of them uh but most of them are are either usually on level play or Max yeah so that's the truth

okay well what's like how hard it is to change the mediation it's okay so when when should you do it when should you do it essentially usually you do it when you're tempted with better offering at another one that's usually a business case so if that is in a form of a financial incentive or some kind of product features that are available so for example I have a client that they were on admo mediation and they have a lot of banner revenue and then they found out that you can actually so in admob mediation Banners are set on 30 seconds for refresh rate automatically and uh on level play and Max you can go that 10 seconds so in theory you can triple your banner Revenue just by switching mediation and when they found that out they're like okay we're leaving yeah byebye byebye yeah exactly so yeah there's small things like that but usually if usually when you get to 50K A Day In AD

Revenue that's when you get to be kind of a midsized uh ad Revenue mediation client which means that that's when you can start work as a monetization manager to negotiate before then you don't really get that far with negotiations because you don't matter to them yeah okay that's what do you what do you think what what do you think would be the best time to hire a separate person to handle this you know um to it's super simple right so it it's it's a math calculation right so how it works is that you say that usually Adon manager by doing a lot of testing and suggesting you can improve your setup if you have a good mediation setup by 20% so when that 20% is more than how much money you're saving than salary that's when you hire that person assuming you're going to grow in the future so yeah easy easy yeah makes sense yeah and then uh so let's let's say you have an Ado mediation you want to switch

to Max but then you get the offer from Level play that they will get they will pay you 100K and then you can use the level play so that that's that what would you do mean like take the money or just uh go to to uh Max um I would do any I no I would do an a test so basically I would take half of my user base put it on Max half of my user base put it on level play take the money from Level play while you're doing this say you're running a test and then if you're losing the ab test you basically pay the money back or and you work it out like a math problem right uh yeah you can pay back these sums as well like it does happen like just because you're locked in a deal doesn't mean you can't pay it back and then go whatever you are right like it's your job to get as high of an adarp out as humanly possible so you need to test that to make sure what you're getting that's actually a very good way how to how to solve this problem because okay interesting yeah but then it's a math problem as well

like you you can have like the 100K which can you you can use for whatever else maybe developing a new game or just reusing it on on a different um uh so usually what happens is that gets a little bit complicated usually what happens is admon managers get these type of sums and then CEOs get it uh and then they hear that they get a big number and then that's usually what decides it so yeah yeah money upfront is also worth more than money later right so you got to take that into account as well it's always a good thing money up front yes yeah true but then then if you lose like an advantage on the UA side then it's again like a math problem because you get you get the money up front but then you might have um earned a little bit more in the future but again like still it depends on goals on yes yes that's true strategic or tactical or just right away or in long term I once worked for a company where a CEO uh chose the bonus because they essentially gave him gave him over the

revenue Target so he got paid a big bonus and then it screwed us up on both the monetization side and the UA side but another it's a story for another day okay yeah yeah yeah that's that's a different podcast it's which is actually actually 4 a.m don't give ideas man yeah yeah yeah but then then you have this like you said that you have to kind of maximize the AR as much as possible why not ecpm so ecpm is uh the layman term so if you're having a discussion with someone who does ADS if they talk only about ecpm then you know that person doesn't really understand how advertising and mobile ad monetization works so if someone keeps talking about ecpm you're like okay you don't really understand what's going on here because what you should care about is revenue which is ecpm plus Phill I would gladly take a low ecpm if I get higher fill and fill at different price points so ad arpa which is Revenue per daily active user is the only metric you should really care about and if you speak like

that in the admon community as well you'll also be treated with a bit more respect because if we only talk about ecpm you're going to get a bit of an like idiot stamp because it doesn't matter W yeah just you know writing ex I don't have to care like yeah good advice yeah no okay um and we talked about the the cmps uh which I still have no idea like what's what is it and when is it coming uh yeah why is it important why is it important CMP is important if you are earning I still call it content management platform which is Con consent consent management platform consent yeah uh so consent management platforms are important if you're earning a lot of AD revenue from Europe and the UK so essentially in the 16th of January but whisper num is the 16th of March where it's actually implemented from Google that's secret though because I'm not supposed to share it but okay so 16th of

January I said that uh they will stop replying to ad requests that are targeted uh if you don't have a TCF string which you get from CMP attached to their ad request so all the ad requests in Europe and the UK will be non-targeted so essentially cop ads so assuming that the user are below 16 and they can't be tracked so they're getting branding ads so you will get a lot lower like level of money from Google if you do this and that's why you need a CMP to keep getting yeah inventory from Google in the UK and EU so just new challenge for the next year yeah exactly like every year something it's super boring it's like government regulatory work and it's so boring yes yes what can what can you do it's like you never get board anyway right so it's it's all good yeah okay now we have like few maybe few questions and like

comments here besides from our listeners yeah yeah besides this is super insightful thank you very much and and also manual mentioned like this is actually true also for the UA managers because if what you mentioned about the the cpms ecpm like if you're talking about cpis and nothing else it's also like quite not uh let's okay yes yes because usually like you look at like at least like multiple kpis and also you don't also look at like day one Ras because it doesn't say anything it's like okay well day one Ras can be 50% for one game and then 2% for another game which eventually they both turn profitable just different payback period and just like you also need to look at day one day seven maybe day 30 and how the actual LTB Cur kind of evolves over time then what do we have here I mean uh quite where do you get the best CPA from

that's a good question CPA from networks well okay so I can I can talk about like my games well well you definitely can I don't think you can I don't think I can talk about my games but they can talk about the games I manage clever yes B I can use that actually in the podcast in the post production afterwards I can't use can't use it on live life man yeah I know I know I know uh so it comes from Tik Tok at the moment and then um Google for uh Android but Tik Tok for iOS let's let's let's let's end there because I would I talk about the depends and all of this [ __ ] but yeah let's let's talk Tik Tok iOS and Google Android basically then we have uh what else anything you can add that

[Music] latest that latest question I would kind of want you to answer as well can you read that one m i mean on which ad platforms for UA yeah should use detail targeting and just keep it broad okay so I can tell you the detail targeting I don't use it anymore except like few exceptions where I use look likes only on Facebook I don't use it on Tik Tok at all I keep it broad as much as I can to be honest uh and use creative for targeting different types of audiences and I I usually talk about how I don't use personas because it's [ __ ] and you can prove me I'm wrong but I use these different kind of games as Creative Concepts so that's why I'm I was talking about hyper casual mechanics used in in creatives which is again like very broad appeal and that's something that kind of targets different audien for example custom ization on in the creatives yields into very different

audience than let's say progression in which you kind of Showcase in the creatives so Broad and then do do the let's call it automation machine learning magic let it let it work for you so I'm getting question as well from Joe uh question Google says that they will send non-personalized ads if you don't use a CMP but I'm hearing that in practice Google will not really send any ads uh essentially it's just because there's not that many non-personalized ads comparatively so it's not that high fill I've done admon for games that are 50/50 you under 16 and the networks for the under 16 the non-targeted ones it's just really hard to get good fill there so that's the issue right they're not not sending you ads it's just there's not that much pull of inventory and that's the reason you kind of need to do this we have a question if you if we use adust on top of adiation I don't think this is very much related uh so yeah I use different types of mmps for

different games I use edust tenin well not anymore uh but then upser and then Singler quite a lot and we we were in South Korea we found out that there is another MMP which is airbridge it's like okay good for you guys and they're actually very big fan of of the podcast so those to kudos to you for for growing that like I was very surprised yeah then uh there is one more question from Nikita which says what is the approach that you use to run first UA tests of a product to assess its perspective on the market are you building any new games guys I I I can answer that but I just don't want to talk about the yeah talk all the time my game talks about this uh well definitely we have our R&D uh teams and uh just because we do understand that we have to make uh another hit uh to maintain our profit and revenue that's pretty obvious that uh we want to

as I always say bring not only joy but also we want to earn money it's business and uh exactly but uh music to my ears we will be friends definitely and uh I mean that uh we are testing uh for example our prototypes with a like small Budget on different networks we are I I I I do not believe in this kind of thing like oh let's check with check the settings or with the creative because we'll actually we still have this audience which just uh like the creative it doesn't mean that this audience likes exactly this setting so but still we have some kind of you know our test when we want to uh um test the build for I don't know we want to test day seven

retention for example for our prototype and uh it's only you know this um made very quickly but we have this like mechanic we believe so let's try to do this and we create some creatives sorry create creatives and uh we have our like simple App Store optimization for that and uh we try to figure out what our final is where we have uh the numbers which are not good for us because we actually can Benchmark with also our games in my games because we have huge portfolio we also have I don't know some benchmarks from our um Partners when they do some qbrs for example for our main titels and we have benchmarks for for example for these genres we have common sense uh and uh we have gut feeling as well yeah g definitely because I do believe that games are art and you have to do this with your soul still and uh we have a

lot of reports from different uh platforms uh analytics uh dat AI sensor to apps SL and so on and so on so actually you can gather all of this information run some tests with not very big budget gather the first numbers and then to decide like okay we it seems like uh we're good on this level let's try to make this prototype a bit better and then we will decide like um are we going or not to develop the game like to develop the game which can be to go on with it with the launch with the global launch and yeah and uh what Sol has mentioned uh I would like to stress it out that we have huge database internally like apart from the from the reports and the qbrs and you know the partner feedback and whatever also huge of data uh internally from uh you know projects launched several years ago to to you know partner Studios

and all of the studos are constantly communicating with each other you know marketing teams and yeah we see all the numbers yeah I I like to say that for us transparency is not uh just a word because you actually can open our internal system like okay I want to see these numbers and you just compare for for marketing team it's very very useful so like can you share the screen and open up the internal database are you are you in my gam team are you in my gam team I already said we can talk M we can talk about working for my games maybe you know Felix to yakob you know buying the podcast maybe yeah that's there you go can we go on to this uh one of the last questions here because you know I think dark here ask a quite good question so besides being [ __ ] what can you do if you're a small Studio because you paint a very dark picture I can tell them what to do or them to do what to do on the admont side but on the UA side like that can't be the honice yeah I know I know I know I can't

I can I can definitely talk about uh it's I I touched touched this point I think in one of our podcasts as well like I think it was like a year ago when obviously you don't have like a lot of budget uh when but you still need at least like few hundreds per day or let's call it 100 a day uh if you don't have more than that it's just it's very hard to run anything uh like at this point in the current market uh condition not conditions but like how it the UA kind of looks like but also Market condition you're totally as well yeah yeah but it I don't just want like you know kind of blame the market conditions but let's let's say you don't have a a lot of budget so start on Facebook group the top let's say tier one countries into one campaign R try to run a low funnel optimization as you can possibly think about so either purchase or the value optimization right away

just to try to find these like value players and then maybe when you kind of grow from there then just you know you get the money from these high value players it's going to be a gold small golden cohort which usually is the best players you can get then expand from there so it's us it's yeah let's say tier one countries 100 day per day budget uh and then go from there step by step and they just get until you hit 500 1,000 per day which is ideal and then you can like Branch out to different UA channels but I would still even with this like small budget use Facebook don't use Google we I mean it's good but the CPI campaigns are just terrible quality you need to go to purchase and then tias which is value and it takes a long time until you get this data so on Facebook you see the kind of results almost immediately with Google it takes a long time I had a call today and we were just like joking around like let's

just put 1,000 daily Budget on Google leave it for three months and then afterwards you can you can actually start optimizing because then it it gets really better because you have more data but it's but it gets better yes it it gets better but if you have small budget then you won't even see the get gets better face yes I I totally agree that for testing for with small B small budgets I think Facebook is the right way to go just because you you you have more more tools to you know optimize your your your budget there yeah but still it's for now it's really very very difficult just because as I always say uh in this auction there are all of us not only you but also I don't know Coca-Cola so and sometimes you just oh Monopoly you know this game they just launched it all of the UA people like m it was really pretty tough so and then you see um like approximately you can

approximate their spend that it's like for God sake yep exactly but still yeah and what I can add if I may to mat words is that uh it's uh very important to maintain this like ongoing long-term campaigns just to have traffic continuously not to cut it of and if you of course we always know about this gold cohort but still instead of putting all of the money just for the first week and then just waiting the money from this cord I would suggest to run to run these campaigns like every day ongoing process without like stop okay with smaller budget but still ongoing I think let's let's just uh go with last question with Manuel that asked about like the custom product Pages last but not least last but not least yeah yeah yeah if we if we use them and how much attention should we

give it versus new Creative Concepts you want to answer I can as well well actually yes no no I can say that we use the custom optimiz uh product pages product pages yeah uh sorry and we are running the campaigns with them on Google uh but still uh I can and we see some pretty good results uh with yes but not so big as like okay this is rocket science it's not yeah it's not Grand breaking I think that this is also the way which we can uh actually investigate and develop so yeah we're we're trying our best and uh we're trying to to look into this and uh what our colleagues do so yeah we're working with it very closely especially even even the last week I do remember there were some problems with that but we we solve it and already the campaign today they

launched my guys yeah nice because uh so custom product pages you can uh you can alter your uh uh your app store basically with the different screenshot so basically you you then get the link so you can re change the visual Styles F of the whole app store and then you use the link for uh just to connect the creatives with that different custom like product page so you can have fake ads then build a fake ad store and then just send traffic to that I used it for uh for multiple games didn't work that well so I was like okay well maybe I can use these resources and all these testing and all of it like more efficiently just building new Creative Concepts around the visual style that I already have which is you know more efficient than I would say like you could obviously like expand this and explore like different variations of the store and custom product pages but efficiency more

good well but but this is but this could be like um a quicker test of actually C custom page because when you running some uh AB testing on for example Google app store Google Play yes sometimes it takes time and that case you can see like okay maybe this concept is better for my audience and you see that conversion rate is higher and maybe you can make a decision that will change the main store exactly for this concept so maybe it can work also this way I mean it can definitely work it's just like when I when I try to balance the the time invested in like experimenting custom product pages versus like experimenting new Creative Concepts I'm I will go with new Creative Concepts for that's for like for me personally okay sounds good yeah should we wrap it up wrap it yeah think so how long has it been man is it longer than the usual

episode four long years well well depends no no no depends if if yakob is at the end and just starts talking about the game then we never finish this we never finish that is true that is true but it's I mean this is not like the longest yeah it's not the longest uh episode and it's live so you know we said like we could be one and a we haven't covered ative stores and uh you know uh Community Management so guys come come back and do that another time how about it yeah another maybe next year the second part yeah there you go yeah that's perfect nice so uh thank you very much guys for coming to this live session really appreciate it there's like a a bunch of people also the live chat amazing we were actually live so it wasn't pre-recorded uh thank you Anon and Sola for for making this happen and also the your team for making this happen as well because it was a hard work and it's going to go live on Spotify at some

point maybe next week but this is live and it's going to sit in our um YouTube channel so if you want yes we can we can share this thank you guys both so much for this thank you two and a half Gamers so okay two Gamers at this time and uh thank you thank you to all the viewers cuz this has been a experiment as I've said in the beginning and uh I believe it turn turns out to be successful I hope so yeah I hope it was interesting thank you sol for you know handling this handling this wait a minute I will do this I should yeah someone handling some um some hard stuff especially in the first half of the yeah in the first half yeah of course yeah guys thank you thank you for having us have a happy holiday oh yeah happy holidays yeah thank you much bye bye bye bye

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