Unlocking Global Growth with Google Play's Robbie Hopkins & Romain Mardot

one two can you hear me yeah hi everyone sorry for yeah for this late start the event was a bit uh scheduled differently than what we have seen uh I also would like to thank my personal support group there's a group of people that follow thanks for making the track all the way over from uh long long journey so my name is Roman I work as a playbd partnership um in the playbd partnership uh here with me Robbie hi yeah Robbie from the play Partnerships team as well I'm based in London and Raman is in Dubai so we are working with uh play Partners we basically try to help you guys to grow globally and this is the main goal of the today's session we will

share some insights and data points they might be useful to you uh we also know that is pretty hard to create content that is relevant to all type of your businesses so we'll try to be broad we left some uh time for Q&A uh at the end of the session and even if this is not enough please feel free to come and see us at the very end we'll be more than happy to to talk to you uh I would also like to start this session by thanking you all because without you the success of Google Play wouldn't be possible uh my background comes from game development and it has been 18 years that I work on games of different types and I know how hard it is to succeed in this environment how hard you work and Google Play has done a long pass with you we are currently available in 190 countries and count a billion of users so thanks a lot

uh as I said the we'll be providing you with some insights price strategies and uh launching strategies on the global level feel free Robie great thanks ran so um yeah again Robbie uh nice to meet you I'm originally from Australia but I've spent a lot of time in uh China Spain so actually International expansion and helping businesses developers like you to expand to New Markets and capture audiences is something that's really been a kind of Cornerstone of my career so it's great to be in Turkey for the first time TOA for the first time in Istanbul um meeting some of the amazing developers in this ecosystem and uh hopefully to learn more about Turkish Gamers as well um so as Raman said uh we recognize that uh growing internationally is increasingly important for developers so a lot of the developers at ran and I work with with are almost hyperfocused

on or have been previously almost hyperfocused on us Gamers and US users as a market but as I'm sure all of you in the room already know as competition increases as costs around UA start to uh become more competitive um and as regulation starts to come we know that expanding internationally is more important than ever so today we wanted to give you a few tools that can help with that and we'll start from launch and go all the way through to monetization so these tools might be familiar to you but I think they're really important tools in the kind of Google play uh toolbox um which is our pre-launch tools so our engineers and product teams have spent a long time trying to fine-tune the way that we can help you support uh any launches that you're having of a new game um and I think we've got a really great product here so we allow internal testing the starting from just testing

uh with your kind of friends and family and colleagues all the way up to open testing where you can actually test um across markets um and test kind of real life metrics um in that pre-launch period but I think a Cornerstone of what we've done is to provide the developer to provide you with a lot of control of how you're testing these things because we know that every Market is different if you're launching a game in Turkey your metrics around monetization around engagement are going to be very different to your metrics in the US or in Australia but you want to get confidence before you actually launch that those metrics are accurate so what we do is you can access open testing Clos testing pre-registration you can even be fully published in a market but in a in another Market you're you can be in a very different state so concurrently you can test a couple of different hypotheses and really build up confidence internally before you um launch your game and make that big upfront investment to try to get players

in on day one um but then the question becomes once you've got a game in the market um how do you gain the business intelligence and the data that you need to keep making you know good decisions data and evidence-based decisions on the Fly um so obviously there's a bunch of different tools and ways that you can um accumulate this data a lot of third party platforms as well but I did just want to highlight one tool that I think is quite underutilized um in the Google Play console that's available to all of you in the room today um which is strategic guidance so uh this is kind of Hidden Away in in the play console uh right down the bottom under Financial reports but the Strategic guidance module um is actually the revenue tree so you can see here um average revenue per monthly active user the monthly buyer ratio the average revenue per monthly per the monthly user um and all of this can

actually be benchmarked not only from for your games and in your titles but against peer sets as well um so you can see peer conversion rates um by a category we don't actually allow you to curate the P set but you can actually see a category so a genre um of insights and then you can click down into one of those metrics to actually see deeper data um on what your competitors are seeing compared to what you're seeing so I think this is a good kind of daily weekly if not monthly destination um for your kind of strategic teams to go in and and just get a bit of a pulse on what some competitors are doing in the same space um and we're also at the moment uh this is still in beta um but we're also trying to use the intelligence that we've built around Gemini and AI to actually provide recommendations to you based on that data so if we see that you're compar editors um are performing

or outperforming you uh in a certain metric um our hope is that we can then proactively make recommendations to you as a developer to help you address some of those gaps or opportunities so the second topic that we want to talk about is reach so uh once you've launched and once you've got all the insights to actually grow and launch your game how do you increase your reach um and how do you increase your reach in a way that is also delighting um and exciting the players that you've already got and hopefully bringing new players in with that excitement as well so this is uh a tool that many of you I hope would be familiar with which is stor listing experiments again this is available to every developer on the Google Play console um and it's really just an AB testing tool that allows you to test elements of your stor list testing on the Fly um so you can uh run

these uh tests against certain elements of your store maybe the tagline uh maybe the app icon um and create control groups uh put the test live into a market so you're actually testing with live data and Live players um and be able to very quickly um and very consistently make small tweaks to your store listing that hopefully attracts and delights new players when they do actually land on your store so you've done all the hard work getting them there with your brand marketing or your Performance Marketing the store listing is all about trying to make that conversion and get them to install the game for the first time or or maybe reinstall it um so we think that making those small adjustments is really a good strategic uh way that you can help grow your presence and Delight those players but then we've gone one step further so you can test all the store elements um but now we're actually providing developers with more uh uh

freedom than ever to actually customize elements of the store listing so we'll start from the kind of basic example that's been around for a couple of years which is custom store listings this is an app example that we've got on the screen not a game but I think it really kind of illustrates a point very well which is this is the same app uh recipe finder that we've made up um at uh the same time so around October the 31st but the left one you can see is a user that's actually accessing that store listing from the US or maybe a market that has Halloween on the right is a user that's accessing it from India where I think at the time that we made this Dali was um on as well so the same store listing um the same kind of uh sorry the same app but a very different store listing to kind of Target and customize um what your users seeing and hopefully incentivizing them and encouraging them to install your app to find out

more and we've seen that developers using these custom store listings are seeing on average I would say at the very low average I've seen some numbers much much higher than this but on average we're seeing over 3.5% increase in MA for developers who are using custom store listing compared to those who don't and out of the box um every developer in this room you have 50 custom store listings on each app that you can make and then then you have Lang I think it's up to 10 languages per custom store listing as well so up to 500 different variations of your custom store listing uh to attract delight and retain those players but then we've taken it a step further so I was listening to Elena from U my games uh this this morning this afternoon talk about uh talk about how um the time before a user comes into your app or game is crucial so creating

that user Journey creating that story creating a compelling narrative to bring um your player all the way in from awareness to conversion and that's why um last year we actually announced um and this year we're going to make even more announcements on it uh custom store listings linked from Google ads campaigns so in the example here I've got Ducks but let let's make this a little bit more relevant tomorrow is international women's day um and thank you for all the uh developers in this room as well I think there's more and more and it's great to see more at this uh event as well but um uh I'll I'll use an example from International women's day instead imagine you've got a campaign targeted at women for international women's day um and you've got a really great event or a really good feature in your game that you're trying to show off and you've got your UA campaign running Google ads with a message about International women's day or women's empowerment or or something like this from the ad creative um to the store you can

actually create different Pathways for people so a woman men seeing um the international Women's Day creative on the ad would actually land into a different part of the store a different store listing that's highlighting those features and highlighting the the the messages of women's empowerment that then deep links into a certain part of the game so maybe there's a a new mini game that's focused on women or a new offer but I think the message here is that with events like International women's day um and with all of the different seasonal events and campaigns and live Ops that you run you can actually now create a seamless narrative all the way from ads through to someone actually converting into your game um through custom store listings at the moment it's only available for Google ads but we are looking to expand this year I think there's going to be some announcements that come um on YouTube um other Google platforms and hopefully more um uh third

party tools beyond that and then the last part for me and then I'll hand over to Raman is about reaching buyers so you've done all of the work to bring players to to to build a game to launch it successfully to gain insights on the players that have installed it um and to get players into your game and excited in your game but then comes a crucial point of conversion how are we uh speaking to these players in their own language whether that be a verbal language or a monetary language to make sure um that they're able to convert and that the conversions that they have are valuable um and useful for them um and so we've actually put a lot of investment into expanding our forms of payment this is the the first important Point obviously um in places like turkey I'm sure that there's lots of local forms of payment that people use um that might not be Visa or MasterCard and this is the same all around the world so um

we've actually uh integrated 300 or over 300 I think it's about 320 at the moment local forms of payment into Google Play billing so that players no matter where they are can make those transactions in the form that speaks to them um and it's the same with things like direct carrier building so uh billing through the the the the phone retailer 165 direct carrier billing retailers um globally and we're looking to expand on that even more and we found before I hand over to Raman to talk about localized pricing which is a really interesting topic we have found that developers on average are seeing three times faster consumer spend outside of their home markets than in their home market so the time is now the time is more important than ever to think about expanding out um from Maybe the smaller markets or the core Market

that you're in and looking for other opportunities but I'll hand to Raman to talk a little bit more about localized pricing thanks Ry uh support group please your Club I can count on them you see I'm also checking if they're not sleeping uh so yeah as I mentioned it during the first part sub inide just to help you actually I was surprised that um o over the time I was working for Google I had from 54 to fewer Partners uh and before coming here I actually make a kind of scienic wisma guys on who is using the localized price experiments some people do some people don't so just to make it useful uh it slipped a bit okay uh what it is about so we all know that the purchasing power of all of our users uh vary greatly from one country to another uh also please allow me just to tell you a small story as I said uh

I'm coming from a gaming background and I was a part of a support group who was launching the biggest MMO project of all times up to now as I believe and uh we were designing FAQ for a subscription based game and there was a question that was always coming from the players is like why I do I have to pay a subscription whereas I already pay for a premium box and the best explanation we found back in time was that uh listen you pay a price of two coffees for one full month of entertainment why not you already played your full three months now you just need to pay and the most important Point here as again as I mentioned at the very beginning we all do hard work and spend our time and energy to create products that have significance significance in users or players eyes right whether you on up developer or a game developer now

tailoring your prices to Market needs is important because this is one of the best ways to meet your players you make your prices accessible users can test your product in the best way and get more engaged to it you launch uh price strategies it's not only about getting it cheaper it's also about getting the best results from your user acquisition campaigns right um as all our Tools around AB testing I would just also like to make sure that everyone understand that AB testing is really about two different type of audience and comparing the results so it gives you better overview over your performance then you can compare different uh primary and secondary monetization metrics one with another which allows you to take Better Business uh decisions and also it help you helps you to better see how the user behaves

why uh well you probably know that this index it's pretty famous the big ma index or the Spotify index here again it just stresses uh what I'm saying is that depending on the country you come from you have different purchasing power and this treat this entertainment that you get in exchange is not available the same price for everyone so you are like you could tell me why you are showing us one product point uh whereas we have a lot of skus different in UPS well because at Google we compared the average uh spend that the user may makes inside a game o up and basically it applies to the same Trend you have some countries that move down the line like turkey with currently what happens to Lia in exchange rates uh all the way up to South Korea we are where people are capable of spending much more money when they Chase something you just need to

make sure that you align the value of you what you sell to what are uh players or users paying you an exchange also to help you out we grouped uh some countries by clusters uh where here again you can just follow the trend line and experiment with uh different prices depending of which in of five categories is your users allocated in if I just if I may just add one point here Raman when I was talking before um about testing this is a great way to look at testing as well so if you've got uh the core Market that you want to launch in is Germany um on day one you might not want to be doing testing in Germany you you want to go in with a full launch so if you're testing monetization you could think of Germany as a cluster and test things like pricing in other markets to remove the risk in your core Market of

doing that kind of test so sorry exactly no you're right it's a more living strategy that is applied to your users to different countries totally agree so why here again not uh like a secret information we all know that people who pay their user more engaged because they spent some time already with your product now they added money to it so we know for sure from our data that it increases your uh number of sessions the time spent it it retains the users more uh it creates a link between you your product and uh the users uh so here again we are here to talk about our tools because we provide tools that help you to grow on International level uh as I just mentioned it the whole tool is available in the Google Play console since last year it's not in a beta phase anymore it guides you actually when you try to set it up it's pretty straightforward easy user friendly it's a self-service tool so you basically your user acquisition

manager your marketing people can can do this it's a seamless process so once you applied your new price strategy uh to your in inup uh products uh subscription whatever uh it takes some time to process but then the users can see their results directly it has actually a really cool uh reporting uh section where you can see the comparison of cohort uh compared by people who converted into paying users and the ARP PPU that they have generated it helps you actually to take the right decision and we have a dedicated policy team that tracks uh uh the abusers of of this maybe not always perfect but with the number of users and attempts we we are trying to do our best yeah so this is actually the the tool in question you can find it under the price experiments uh we know show from internal data again

that it uplifts your uh Revenue just give it some time uh try to be really close to your markets to your customers when you set it up it shouldn't be just something that is uh not taken on some research that you are making there are a lot of tools that are available on the internet and then if you not happy results you can start stop it at anytime here again it went it goes through smoothly through the AB testing so depending on how you will configure it uh certain amount of people in percentage will see one price the other amount will see the other and it's up to you to compare it uh there's one other important detail and here I'll talk more about like the countries that like sub dollar pricing is the tool also allows you to apply sub dollar pricing manually where you can just go and change your prices and to see the results uh here it's it is

important to choose the packages that um can have this price applied uh I'm not saying that saying that you should go and uh decrease the price of your most expensive package to$ the doll here again it's just a matter of taking uh right decisions and in some cases uh going with the S share pricing it can be a shorttime experiment or something that you will apply to your product uh universally we actually see some really cool things happening in India where everyone knows you have huge installs coming from that country also works for Indonesia and Philippines for example then it will obviously be toed to the type of product and the game you guys are publishing uh as mentioned again don't forget to check the Strategic guidance tab because everything you do is reflect reflected there uh improved performance

will be seen so the both tool combines will help you just take smarter decisions in shorter period of times uh uh there is a quotation of space ape he's here somewhere actually is here I saw that he told me he'd come and watch but uh he he he isn't here but he's here at the conference so you can go and talk to him yeah basically I'm not going to quote it myself it's just again everything I as I said it's right ma manner of combining uh your strategy and the prices to get uh the best results out of uh your your users and again it uplifts your spend and your performance uh on the global level basically this ends it up I think we yeah we covered everything we wanted to cover today as promised feel free to ask any questions that you may have if questions become too personal just meet out let's meet outside we will also try to if they become person ask him no

because I know that especially now in the M with the European regation times we might have questions that we might not be able to answer public we'll do our best and someone can tell us when to stop cuz we'll we'll go until you tell us to get off the stage or as many questions come thank you very much yeah thank [Applause] you than you might let us off easy Raman hey there we go great could you start just again sorry oh sorry one more time okay one more time as you know apple is reducing store commissions because of the digital Market X markets act within the European Union what are your plans on complying with the dma within European Union that's the first question question the second question do you have any plans to

reduce overall commissions around the globe because of that uh DMI me or you I can go so um Yes we made our announcement on um our approach yesterday um it's all uh on our website now so we've got our full submission and our full program um up there uh I'm not sure have you seen it yet yeah you had to look through yeah so all of our fees structures um and everything is up there at the moment um I think we're looking first at the EA um and then we'll make a decision on uh working with governments globally to um see what the response is in other markets but our focus on everything and the reason why we wouldn't just take one model and necessarily expand it um immediately our focus on everything is trying to help developers to make better businesses whether it's on play or on other platforms um um our goal is to help developers to drive success to grow

their businesses internationally around the world um and hopefully your interpretation when you see our our fee structures and our response to the regulation reflects that as well thank you thanks hello thank you for the presentation one question for me about the localized uh prices based on the markets um um if we're talking about a more competitive game with a Forex strategy for example where players would benefit a lot from a purchase they make if we change these prices per market and players uh simply use VPN so that they get uh a discounted price and they get they get very benefit very many benefits in the game like how does this affect the analysis afterwards um first of all when you're running experiment uh it's pretty

actually hard to catch uh for instance the decreased price range so like within the experiment it's pretty hard to abuse this system now if you apply the price range only to one country uh then yeah the people might be abusing your game economy with changing the regions but we have a lot of uh abuse and fraud protections that are in place in our back end as well so from a policy perspective um we make it not not not friction but we do add friction to the process to change your place to Country so I know you talked about vpns but if we get a user without a VPN it's not like they can just change country and currency whenever they want they have to have a local form of payment enabled in the country that they're moving to so a local credit card or or another kind of card and they can only make the change once every 12 months so we actually see instances of fraud without vpns and without um kind of the overlay technology it's a lot lower than I think developers that I've talked to at least

suspect um and the second thing is that with our fraud protection and automatic Integrity protection um there are tools and apis that we have to detect fraudin inactivity um I think it includes things like use of VPN but one of the one of the more common use cases that you see when people are fraudulent is that they'll make a purchase in another currency and then sell it on a secondary market and our fraud prevention tools are actually pretty good at detecting those um and stopping them so if you have an integrated automatic Integrity protection that's a really good place to start as well hello hi uh one question about custom product pages on the store have you seen its uh practical applications for games uh I I see the point about having different product pages for different countries especially during

special Seasons but other than that have you seen them customized in games where they made made a significant difference in conversion rates and such yeah we have Partners who applying them to some particular events that are happening in one given country like Robie has given the example of the uh we have for instance the Indian merch team who is in charge of uh collecting all promo I mean India is an easy example for me but I mean you you can extrapolate it to to other cases we have a dedicated team who makes a list of events and partners who are involved in celebrating the Val with events that create they create for uh players from India with uh price reductions or in in game items being given in such a cases the Bonners that are relevant to the region make drive more conversions because this is an event that is celebrated mainly in this country I've also had to develop a this kind of like an interesting application that had good success for this developer but you know

like behaviorally colors mean different things in different cultures so red might be angry in um in Australia but it's luck in China right so just with that simple experimentation of um some of the overlays that were being used on the screenshots um some of the characters that they chose to put on the screenshots even with those tweaking and saying like Okay in Hong Kong we're going to put that that in red and in the US it's going to be blue even though those things um are leading to incremental increases in conversions as well so I think the message there is use your custom store listings but do it in a way if you can with stor listing experiments so that you're testing um and understanding the market at the same time it's going to be different for every game and every different category but I'm sure that there's a way that'll make sense for you so the most common application in your experience was customizing per country per country is is the most common but um again we think that's just the very ground level like

that's the most basic thing the most basic thing we see is uh an English store listing that's different in Australia with Australian English compared to us English but that's just a localization you can do so much more with it thank you we had a nice case actually with barners that were applied uh to noric countries where you know that the winter is long and uh they were getting incredible conversions with picture with sun oh because was increasing the mood of players they were more likely to click on barners where you see some like yeah Sun sand and beach pictures you know what we hate in Australia is when um we get snow snow themed Christmases when a developer is just like got a image of the sun with Santa Claus in like a speedo or something um that that's a really good example as well with Norther North and southern hemisphere so there's lots of things you can do with it thank you oh thanks

good I it's not over oh I sorry a little question from the fan group we were happy with ourselves the the the the support group is now challenging us Robie sorry I just read the recent articles about how Google reacts to the according to the dma ACT and one of the things I actually intriging about its external office program it's like starting on March 6 you're launching a progress that allows developers of play directly lead users outside the app in the in Europe to promote the offers yes can you please expand it a little bit because I thought it was already like allowed like a long ago uh do you want me to take it no you I prefer you but you want to take it like a offline we can we can talk in more detail offline but uh no this is our response to the regulation so our external off office

program is something that's new for game developers there are too many nuances when you Le yeah so we can okay let's talk later yeah yeah but um no the external offers was yesterday's announcement yeah okay thank you thank you just wait for the mic to come Ray it out the back uh we are currently destroying CSL campaigns uh I think uh most of the campaigns companies that's already doing it but I do really wonder about your experiences or the any feedbacks that you are coming from any other companies that what are they feeling about the CSL campaigns because the the only way that we check in the Google ad site and it's kind of manual checking not the Google Play console so uh what the experience or any other feedback that

you heard from other companies as well yeah the main feedback we're getting is uh we want more campaigns that can uh lead into it so I think at the moment it's only on uh admob uh and that's the biggest feedback we get more channels um uh in terms of the reporting I'd have to talk with my ads counterparts as well cuz I'm not what you actually see on the ad side in terms of the attribution um h on the play console I would be the first to admit our reporting on it is probably Bare Bones but I do know that our Uh custom store listing team is building out uh even deeper reporting um that'll hopefully be available soon yeah so we have a message it was the last question we can ask oh that was the last question oh yeah we did thank you thanks very much um for your time and we're here after as well so thank you thank

[Applause] you