User Acquisition reports and market data
Documents
Session: The Perfect Player – Research Results & Characteristics Of High Value Users In Rewarded....
The mobile gaming industry is experiencing a significant shift toward rewarded user acquisition, a strategy where players receive incentives—ranging from in-game currency to real-world cash equivalents—for completing specific actions like downloading, testing, or making purchases within a game.
- Rewarded user acquisition (UA) market share more than doubled in the last year, establishing it as a significant channel for mobile game growth.
- High-value players (those spending over $500 monthly) prioritize reward-based platforms as their primary method for game discovery, whereas low-value players typically rely on standard app store recommendations or in-game ads.
- Campaigns utilizing rewarded UA can generate an average revenue per user (ARPU) nearly three times higher than traditional UA sources, as evidenced by comparative data between Almedia's Freecash and Google.
Session: The Science Of Success – Driving Growth With Prediction, Incrementality, And Scalable....
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of heightened competition, characterized by market saturation, rising user acquisition costs, and the erosion of traditional data tracking due to evolving privacy regulations.
- Gaming companies must transition from simple attribution to a tripartite framework combining predictive analytics, incrementality testing, and marketing mix modeling (MMM) to combat rising user acquisition costs and privacy-driven data loss.
- Predictive analytics, such as modeling day-30 lifetime value, allows marketers to optimize campaigns and segment high-value users immediately, bypassing the granular data restrictions imposed by iOS SKAdNetwork.
- Incrementality testing identifies organic cannibalization by using synthetic control groups to determine if paid campaigns are generating incremental installs or merely capturing users who would have installed the game organically.
Session: Conquering The Multichannel Battlefield With Wargaming & SplitMetrics.
The gaming industry is increasingly defined by a multichannel and multiplatform landscape, where success requires a unified brand strategy that bridges the gap between mobile, PC, and console environments.
- Nearly 50% of gamers now play across at least two platforms, making cross-progression and cross-play essential for maintaining long-term engagement.
- Wargaming increased user engagement by 30% for World of Tanks Blitz by implementing a cross-platform strategy that balances mobile volume with the higher monetization rates of PC and console.
- Restructuring campaign architectures from broad global models to segmented geographic groupings reduced cost-per-install (CPI) by 22% and improved predicted ROI by 27%.
Session: Cutting Through The Noise – How To Get Your Game Noticed In A Challenging Market. Markus...
In a saturated gaming market where nearly 200,000 titles were released across major platforms last year, achieving visibility requires a shift from traditional, high-budget marketing toward creative, strategic, and audience-focused engagement.
- With nearly 200,000 titles released across major platforms last year, developers must abandon traditional, high-budget advertising in favor of creative, audience-focused engagement strategies.
- Marketing success is driven by platform-specific content, such as the technical community-building on Reddit seen with Kerbal Space Program or the viral, quirky short-form content used by Cult of the Lamb on TikTok.
- Creative, low-budget campaigns—such as the puppet-themed marketing for Resident Evil Village—often outperform high-production-value trailers by prioritizing emotional resonance and humor.
Curated Panel: How First-Party Data Creates More Valuable Players In-Game.
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a fundamental transition as privacy regulations evolve from mere legal compliance requirements into essential pillars of performance marketing.
- Failure to implement proper consent signals, such as Google Consent Mode, can result in revenue losses of up to 50% due to poor ad attribution and inability to run campaigns in the EEA and Switzerland.
- Proper implementation of consent signals and TCF strings can drive significant financial performance, with some large publishers reporting up to a 400% increase in ROAS and others seeing ARPU uplifts ranging from 10% to 200%.
- Privacy compliance has shifted from a legal-only concern to a critical Performance Marketing requirement, necessitating collaboration between legal, product, and marketing teams to ensure data-driven growth.
Session: AI x UA – Redefining Creative Strategy For The Next Decade - Robert Huynh, Reforged Labs
The integration of artificial intelligence into user acquisition (UA) and creative strategy represents a fundamental shift in the mobile gaming industry.
- AI agents are evolving from simple conversational chatbots into autonomous systems capable of executing complex marketing tasks, such as generating high-volume creative variations and analyzing performance data.
- Generative AI is not replacing human artists but is instead serving as a critical tool for rapid prototyping, storyboarding, and conceptualizing new game marketing assets.
- Reforged Labs utilizes a proprietary tagging system for video game ads that categorizes sentiment, narrative structures, and emotional hooks to train AI models on what makes specific creatives effective.
Session: Embracing New Technologies – A Must-Have For Ad Monetisation And UA Managers - Dan Bowen.
The mobile gaming industry faces significant challenges in ad monetization and user acquisition (UA) following the widespread implementation of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and the subsequent rise in user opt-out rates.
- Publishers can achieve a 20% to 30% increase in eCPM for opt-out users by leveraging first-party data to restore value to audiences previously obscured by ATT and privacy restrictions.
- Combining first-party data with machine learning and AI allows publishers to create actionable behavioral insights, such as churn prediction, conversion modeling, and real-time bid optimization.
- First-party data serves as the foundation for modern ad monetization, enabling publishers to group users into behavioral cohorts that increase the value of inventory for advertisers.
Curated Panel: How To Maximise Your ROAS & Retention Advertising On Rewarded Platforms.
Rewarded advertising platforms have emerged as a significant, reliable, and growing component of user acquisition strategies for mobile game developers.
- Rewarded platforms are a reliable scaling source for user acquisition, typically accounting for 10% to 15% of the total marketing spend for the participating companies.
- User retention metrics from rewarded platforms are often superior to traditional channels, making them a valuable data point when presenting performance to investors.
- To maximize return on ad spend (ROAS), advertisers should implement separate reporting and analysis for rewarded traffic, as user behavior differs significantly from organic or standard paid acquisition.
Session: AI Video Ads – Built 90% Faster & 80% Cheaper - Athar Zia, BLKbox
The integration of artificial intelligence into performance marketing is fundamentally shifting the creative landscape, enabling teams to produce video advertisements with significantly higher efficiency.
- AI-powered creative platforms can accelerate video ad production by 90% and reduce costs by 80% compared to traditional manual workflows.
- Modern UA strategy has shifted from a primary focus on bidding, budgeting, and targeting to a creative-first approach where identifying winning ad concepts is the key driver of profitability.
- The BLKbox platform utilizes five core pillars—analyze, ideate, create, test, and scale—to automate the generation of video ads by extracting the 'DNA' of successful competitor creative.
Session: From Players To Profits – Leveraging The Value Triangle For Enhanced ROI -Vishal Mahtani.
The value triangle framework serves as a strategic model for optimizing rewarded advertising by balancing the interests of three core stakeholders: the user, the advertiser, and the publisher.
- The 'Value Triangle' framework balances the interests of the user, the advertiser, and the publisher to move beyond purely transactional rewarded advertising toward higher user retention and engagement.
- Leveraging rich data from Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs)—including in-app purchase data, recency, frequency, and time-on-platform—allows for more precise targeting and personalized user experiences.
- Machine learning and AI are essential for optimizing the 'Value Triangle,' enabling platforms to dynamically segment audiences into micro-groups and tailor rewards and timeframes to individual user habits.
Session: Bootstrapping Formula – Gamelight's Path To Success - Günay Azer, Gamelight
Gamelight, a rewarded mobile marketing platform, demonstrates the viability of a bootstrapping strategy in the competitive mobile gaming and ad-tech sectors.
- Gamelight maintains full autonomy and avoids equity dilution by bootstrapping, requiring a disciplined model where profitability cycles are restricted to 30–60 days to ensure liquidity.
- The company utilizes a lean startup methodology that prioritizes rapid MVP launches and real-time AI-driven optimization over founder intuition to minimize resource waste.
- Leadership enforces a strict 'no-calls' policy for founders, mandating written communication to maximize time spent on product development and scaling rather than administrative meetings.
Session: Why Focusing Only On New Users Is Holding Back Your Mobile Game – Vera Manhoso, RTB
Mobile game developers often prioritize user acquisition (UA) at the expense of retargeting, a strategy that limits long-term growth and profitability.
- Only 1.83% of mobile game users typically make in-app purchases, making the retention of these high-value players through retargeting essential for long-term profitability.
- Retargeting is more cost-effective than user acquisition (UA) because it leverages existing data on player value, whereas UA requires spending to identify the value of new, unknown users.
- Retargeting campaigns can be initiated with an audience as small as 2,000 to 3,000 high-value players, and they do not need to run year-round to be effective.