Mobile App User Acquisition Strategies - Launch & Growth

Editor's Notes

• #2 Good afternoon everyone. Let me tell a little bit about myself before I jump into the topic for the session. My name is Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury, I have more than 12 years exp. In the digital marketing space, leave alone apps, phones were just phones, they were not smart during those days I started in that age of eye-jarring flash banner ads and sailed myself through to this day of mobile, user centric, contextual marketing. Today I work as VP Marketing for [x]cube LABS and also head the User Acquisition practice at [x]cube. So, for today’s session, I will talk briefly about a few important aspects of launch and then jump into the details of user acquisition , along with some real data and experiences from one of our games.
• #3 Now first thing first, how many of you believe that you can think of marketing your app after it has been developed ? Hopefully, not many, I will be happy if it’s none. While developing a game requires immense passion, we all know at the end of the day it is big business and like every business activity it requires prior planning and preparation. If you want a good launch, don’t wait for the product to be ready, start planning your launch and marketing strategies well in advance.
• #4 While the eagerness to get your app out in the market as soon as the last line of code is written is understandable, planning a release date in advance will help you coordinate all your marketing channels to fire at the same time, to get some coveted press coverage. Also, keep track of major tech announcement or launch of already well-known big branded apps – you probably don’t want to launch your app the same day when Clash of Clans does it’s next release.
• #5 As you launch your app, you would ideally want all your guns to fire at the same time. While Ads are probably your biggest channel for user acquisition, at launch, you have the maximum possibility of getting some PR coverage.
• #6 Yesterday, there were couple of sessions that dealt with the details of getting press coverage, so I will just give a top level overview. Creating a media kit is one of the most important aspects in increasing your chance for getting coverage. Also, do through research on the publications and specific journalists you want to reach out to, are they the right contacts ? Make sure your emails are personalized, the journos get thousands of emails a day – your subject line could play a crucial role on whether your mail gets opened or not.
• #7 Now a PR tool kit is probably already on your bucket list and you have taken good care of it. So what else can help get some press ? Your game is important to you but not so mcuh to a journalist, what would make it stand out is the story behind it. Tell them the backstory, how the idea evolved, something interesting that is worth sharing.. Also make sure your pitch is in line with the type of stories they typically do. The higher the alignment, the more is the chance of getting covered.
• #8 Every developer wants their game to be featured in the app store but there is no sure fire way to get there. Well known IPs and games from major studios that have delivered major hits before seems to have a higher chance of getting in there. However, if you think your game really deserves a spot there, don’t be shy to reach out to Google and Apple and give them a nudge. But the key here is “if your game really deserves” – so build a great game !
• #9 Try to get in touch at least 3-4 weeks prion to launch. Meet the reps, build relations. Talk to them and see if they can share your game and put in a good word. You can always submit through App support.
• #10 It’s definitely good to get reviewed by some of the appreview sites but not all of them are made equal. There are probably a handful that can actually drive traffic and few installs for your game, so focus on the ones that matter rather than submitting your app everywhere. Also, don’t spend money to get your app reviewed, I would rather spend that money on Ads.
• #11 Talking of ads, well they are expensive, but they work!
• #12 We will dive into the details of user acquisition advertising but before that a quick snapshot on the launch ..
• #13 Now we said Ads work, yes they do but with a caveat “if done right”. Everytime we are doing an ad campaign it is important that we have as much clarity on the various aspects – starting from campaign objectives, channels, expectations, measurement all of that. Here are some questions that we typically try to check off before initiating any ad campaigns..
• #14 Now that you are planning your ads – do you want to do a burst campaign or a sustained campaign ? Ideally do both, with proper planning and time them right. They work best when they work together – burst gets you the volume and rank, sustained campaigns help retain the rankings and also average out your retention metrics
• #15 This is what happens when you burst without a follow up plan for a sustained campaign – you go up fast and you come down faster..
• #16 A sustained quality user campaign can delay the drop, help you stay on top for longer, giving you more organic users thus a lesser eCPI and improving retention and engagement
• #17 From the burst campaigns we ran, here are few things that I can tell you..
• #18 I prefer to look at user acquistion as a function of precise targeting, wise buying and effective measurement..Targeting – use as many options that are available to youBuying – depending on you campaign objective, decide which model you want to go afterMeasurement – ensure you have proper integration to track all the necessary metrics, and you have decided on your KPIs
• #19 Knowing who your target audience could be is half the battle won and rather than talking theories here is an example of how we did it for one of our games Star Trek Trexels. Star Trek being a well known IP, it was relatively easier for us but then the point here is to illustrate the thought process…. Identifying the core audience and then slowly expanding the user base in a logical pattern. Also, in most cases you will notice a direct correlation between your campaign performance and your targeting relevance.
• #20 We also used lookalikes on Facebook to expand the user base which worked out extremely well for us, in fact it perfromed better than the core Star Trek Fans campaigns. Also, we were able to gather audience insights on users that converted and then funnelled the same into DSPs to widen our net for those paying customers..
• #21 So here is how it went.. Look at that 43% conversion rate on Lookalikes… not sure if it would happen the same for every game but definitely Lookalikes are a powerful audience targeting feature to try.
• #22 We talked about audiences – now how to reach these audiences ? Through networks. Broadly, networks can be classified under the following..
• #23 These are sopme metrics we look for when selecting networks
• #24 And even after selecting the networks, you should ideally run them through a test framework to decide if you want to continue with them. What you see is a very simple model that we use to test networks.. We start with multiple networks, look at publisher level data and cut off each publisher once we have received a predetermined number of installs from them and go into a 7 day watch & wait period.. That gives us enough insight in terms of the install quality, - look at multiple factors like retention, engagement, IAPs etc and based on that decide whether to continue or not.
• #25 Coming to creatives, the only thing that is true & constant about it is TEST. It’s a perpetual process : test > measure > change . Test everything..don’t test on hunches, test on data.
• #26 I think we all are mostly familiar with these models, CPE, CPI, CPC, CPM etc. While CPI and CPE are the most commonly used and preferred model for most game developers, what we have seen is that if you are able to invest enough time and skill in optimizing CPC campaigns, the performance of CPC campaigns could actually be better than CPI campaigns – particularly , considering the fact that on CPC you will have higher control on the quality of users you target and the average install quality is better than typical CPI campaigns.
• #27 Now how can we talk about ad buying and not talk about Programmatic… that’s the buzz word right ? Other than the big studios how many of you are currently using programmatic buying ? Honestly, programmatic buying if done right is a beautiful thing. It’s a complex system that simplifies the whole media buying process and makes it more effective and efficient. While most of you are already familiar with how it works, this picture perfectly illustrates the same..
• #28 So the big question is , Is programmatic right for you ? Let’s look at the pros and cons..Lack of human control – not possible to always monitor where your ads are getting placed, could be placed on sites that hurts your brand – McD ads on an article talking about ill effects of ObesityIdeally you need to have some budget to play around and experiment. While it is not mandatory and often contested, we have noticed that buying through DSPs is not really effective if you have small budgets
• #29 Now coming to measurement, the questions are how to measure and what to measure ? I think most of us are familiar with this guys – pretty reliable and well known tools that can give you in-depth analytics in terms of your campaign performance. There are also many other that are not on this list.. While selecting an analytics partner- look at the integrations they already have in place The ease of integrating the SDK Their dashboards and data availability cost
• #30 So with all these tools, we have access to tons of data, which is supposedly very helpful but tell me honestly, don’t you feel overwhelmed with the data that is thrown at you from every angle ? The key is to look at data that really matters. Why do you run an ad campaign ? To acquire Quality users, Who converts to paying customer- so what do you need to track? Quality and Revenue. These are some metrics that will tell you just that..You can always deep dive later for more analysis
• #31 Though the session is about user acquisition I feel it wouldn’t be complete if we are not talking about Retargeting.. Yes that 30% number is what we actually saw when we used Retargeting on StarTrek Trexels. I am assuming, courtesy, all our ecommerce sites, all of us are familiar with how retargeting works, right ?
• #32 So how can we use retargeting as part of our mobile marketing strategy ?
• #33 While it all sounds exciting, before you jump on to start your retargeting campaign, for it to be successful, it is extremely important that you..
• #34 Once you have done that..The smaller your segments the more precise your targeting would be , however, if your segments are too small that will limit the reach and increase your CPI – so you need to strike a balance here
• #35 So here’s one example .. We saw a very high churn rate on Level 1 of the game, which we later analyzed to be because of an extremely lengthy tutorial. We fixed the same and retargeted this segment with new release messaging with some offers.
• #36 This is another map on how we approached retargeting..- for users who have not done a IAP > we looked at whether they are on the old version or the latest version. The ones on old version were retargeted with content centric messaging & free in-game currency prompting them to get the latest versions and start playing. The ones on latest versions were given discount offers on IAP…- for people who have already made an IAP, were given discounts on other complimentary products, as well as content centric ads, ensuring they are aware of the latest content and continues to play
• #37 So here’s the data from another of our retargeting campaign and if you notice, it’s not just bringing back to idle users but we are generating revenue from those regained users.
• #38 You can use either Push notifications or advertising to do retargeting, however, with push notification, chances are users have turned off the notification and you can’t reach them.
• #39 The biggest challenge in retargeting however remains in terms of Reach. You can only reach a certain percentage of your total retargeted audience. The more number of channels you use and the more IDs you have the higher would be your reach %
• #40 So, if we look back at the STT retargeting campaign, what are the things that we did right ?- spent a lot of time in understanding drop off points and analyzing non converting user behaviour Segmented user base on multiple aspects to dig down to root cause and understand what would motivate them Highly customized messaging and creatives Deep Linking Leveraged multiple chanels at once to increase reach and maximize impact Having talked about the role of retargeting in engagement and conversion, I must mention that nothing beats an awesome app that has engagement tools built into it, that can deliver contextually relevant experience for the users. There are some tools that really help you to do this and I will take this opportunity to do a shameless plug –
• #41 at [x]cube we have developed an prorietory platform called Upshot – that could be a plug and play solution for all your engagement issues. It has a behavioral analytics engine a segmentation engine and a smart CMS that cantalk to both these components and create a highly customized and contextual experience for each users. We are also building some highly intelligent machine learning for churn prediction and other cool stuff into it. I will leave it at that and request uyou to visiti Upshot.ai to find more details.
• #42 Now that I have come to the end of the session, let’s try to summarize into some bullet points..