Level up your app marketing game with Apptrove, which gives you tools to attract, retain, and engage high-value players. Learn how you can increase your ROI and maximize your marketing budget.
What can Apptrove for Your Gaming App?
Attribution
We deliver accurate insights into media sources and channels that convert the best so you can acquire high-value players.
Monetization
Apptrove gives you a look into which in-game ads and purchases bring in the most revenue while protecting your budget with robust fraud protection.
Retention
You can gain a deeper understanding of player behavior with our reports so you can plan exactly how, where, and when to engage them.
Audience segmentation
Reach new audiences through segments based on your current best-performing players to maximize your LTV.
Why Your Gaming App Needs a Mobile Marketing Solution?
More and more gaming app owners are realizing that the only successful strategy is to channel their money into user acquisition. Data shows that marketing-driven app installs have been on the rise since 2019, and app owners can no longer treat marketing as a side character anymore.
Every successful gaming app has synergy between its developers and marketers, which is the holy grail of achieving low uninstall rates and high retention. In today’s data-driven environment, you cannot afford to lose the key ingredients of mobile attribution and marketing analytics as they apply specifically to gaming.
Let’s talk more about it!
Challenges to Overcome
The gaming ecosystem is growing like weeds and mutating faster than the coronavirus. Every day, we see new genres popping up, creating UA strategies, bizarre monetization methods, and bolder prediction models.
Although this means immense growth for the gaming vertical, marketers are left scratching their heads over which trend to follow. Here are some challenges we think you, as a gaming app marketer, could also be facing:
No room for “good enough”
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out in the gaming world with the number of mobile games skyrocketing, making the landscape hyper-competitive. Marketers need to get aggressive with their user acquisition strategies to stay afloat in the app store.
The audience always demands more
Gamers will jump ship in a heartbeat for something new and exciting, and today they have a world of options to choose from. Apptrove data shows that the player uninstall rate can be so high that if you are not delivering, it takes users mostly a day to uninstall your app.
Which data string to follow?
There is a data overload on marketers with them monitoring a handful of segments, campaign types, creatives, in-app events, and more. It becomes a challenge to build predictive models, which can often be solved by a third party.
Now let’s talk about the solutions!
Measurement, Set-Up, and Attribution
Let’s learn the exact data threads you need to pull on to make your marketing strategy fall into place.
Key Performance Indicators
Marketers struggling with user acquisition need to focus on these KPIs:
In-App Event Measurement
Now that most games are free to play, user activity post-install is the only way to determine revenue. This is the information that helps you to optimize your UA and re-engagement campaigns.
What to measure
The following are the most popular events that game apps should be measured frequently to establish their performance goals and guide their marketing strategy:
- Purchase
- Level achieved
- Login
- Registration
- Tutorial completed
- Create role
- X days retention
- App open
- Checkout
- Achievement unlocked
- First recharge
- App installed
In addition to this, you should also consider measuring the event funnel conversion rate when planning your in-app events to help determine the sources that drive high-value users. Armed with this info, you can understand the areas that are lacking in your funnel and plan your re-engagement campaigns.
How much to measure?
The amount of data you need to collect and analyze depends on the size of your game and its genre. You can see in the graph below that apps that measure more unique events have a better performance rate.
How deep to measure?
You need to measure rich in-app events to start making smarter marketing decisions. For this, you will have to determine the right parameters for each in-app event. These deep analytics enhance your knowledge about the players and allow you to segment granularly and enhance targeting with networks that can deliver an advanced audience with targeting campaigns after receiving data in real time from you or your attribution provider.
Here is the data comparing retention levels of apps based on whether or not they measure their rich events:
Ad Revenue Attribution
In-app advertising (IAA) and in-app purchasing (IAP) are integral parts of many monetization models, specifically for hyper-casual games. IAA, specifically, is generating more and more revenue for developers by monetizing even the non-paying users.
You need granular data advertisers to optimize IAA to its potential.
The main challenge is that different mediation platforms have different data points about how users interact with these in-app ads, making it hard to understand user-level data when the info is not standardized.
Networks also fudge the numbers by sending you revenue data by simply dividing the total revenue generated on a specific ad placement by the number of users that clicked or saw that ad.
Apptrove steps in to provide granular revenue based on accurate user-level data down to the device ID and impression level. With this level of data, you can tie revenue data back to the actual attributed source of each user. Now you can plan better UA budgets andan effective re-engagement campaign
Uninstall Measurement
With so many competitors popping up for each game, uninstalls are skyrocketing even for the best app. To minimize your churn, you have to focus on understanding why, when, and which users uninstall apps.
Here is the data showing uninstall rates based on platform and install type:
If you look at this data on how many days it took after installing to uninstall the app, you will see that day 1 is the most crucial, as this is the day on which most uninstalls occur. This can happen due to a plethora of factors, but we have pinpointed such a high uninstall rate to be because of unmet expectations or false promises.
To avoid the same fate, you must focus on creating a superior onboarding experience to retain your users for the longest time.
Deep Linking
Deep linking has made running retargeting campaigns fairly easy for mobile marketers. However, you will need an attribution provider to successfully configure deep linking since it uses attribution data to route the user appropriately.
Gaming app marketers can especially take advantage of this technology through the “share their achievement” or “invite a friend” options within the game. A deep link is generated when a user shares anything on any channel. You can use the data collected through it to measure user behavior, understand which users share achievements or invite friends, and what channels they prefer for these activities. This can further be used to optimize future marketing efforts.
Re-Engagement Attribution
High churn causes the death of most gaming apps, and this can only be eliminated by acquiring new users as well as continuously re-engaging existing and lapsed ones through both owned and paid channels.
Gaming app marketers still lack a lot when it comes to running successful re-targeting campaigns, specifically because of a lack of the right measurement tools that can help analyze retargeting performance and interpret their incremental value.
UA costs are at an all-time high, and it will cost you five times more to gain a new user than to re-engage an existing one. We implore you to use advanced segmentation tools to drill down into your app’s unique audience segments to see which users deliver the greatest revenue and which are most likely to churn.
Revenue Uplift in Retargeted vs. Non-Retargeted Paying Users by Category
Predictive Modeling
Predictive modeling holds the key to unlocking the future of a more sophisticated mobile gaming advertising strategy. It uses historical data and makes accurate predictions if you know what you need it to do.
When are prediction models useful?
- Re-engagement: Predictive models can save you from wasting resources on users who have no probability of ever bringing in money. You can completely exclude such people from any future re-engagement campaigns. More than that, you will know where to focus your efforts.
- User Acquisition: Setting accurate UA budgets is no easy task. It would help you immensely if you knew beforehand what separates users that will bring you profits from those with low potential.
Audience Segmentation
Wouldn’t it be a blessing if there were a way to know exactly who to target so you never have to waste resources on engaging people who have no chance of ever converting into a paying user?
Here is how you can effectively segment your gaming app audience to push out a more targeted and effective advertisement strategy:
- Demographics: You can make segments based on gender, age, income, etc.
- Geographic: Geographic mobile data is a gold mine when it comes to segmenting audiences. You can choose from data as wide as country, state, and city to as specific as zip code.
- Technographic: Drill down into the tech stack of users’ mobile devices. For example, if you want to target only audiences that use an Android phone with over 4 GB of RAM.
- Platform: Target specifically according to iOS and Android.
- Psychographic: Have a video app? You can find people who habitually download similar apps and interact with videos, and target them specifically as they are highly likely to convert.
- Ad placement: Your budget will have to make adjustments based on the spaces you want your ads to be displayed. Some premium spaces may cost more than others.
- Behavioral: You can track user behavior to gauge things like people who spend a significant amount of time engaging with a mobile game, or those who like to make in-app purchases.
Marketing Analytics
Now that everything is up and running, you need to know how to actually read the results to know whether or not your marketing strategy is a success. What are the reports that are crucial for a marketing person?
- Ad Revenue
- LTV Report
- Cohort & Retention
- Ad Spend & ROAS
Let’s take a look at each one of them:
Ad Revenue
You need to be able to analyze Ad Revenue reports as they show a full view of the return on ad spend of acquired users when investing in in-app ad campaigns.
Here is an example for better understanding. Let’s assume there are three users who install an app on January 1, 2022, and are attributed as follows:
- User A: Network A
- User B: Network B
- User C: Organic
The app is integrated with five different monetization platforms. Each platform uses a unique in-app event as follows:
- Facebook Audience Network: fb_ad_view
- Mobile Game App X: MobileGameAppX_ad_view
- Mobile Advertiser: MobileAdvertiser_ad_view
- Software1: Software1_ad_view
- Software2: Software2_ad_view
After the install, the users are shown ads for a period of four days, as follows:
Looking at this data, it is clear that User 1 of Network A engaged with ads and generated $4.
This data will help you budget for your UA campaigns and in selecting your UA sources. You have to be mindful of the fact that different users on different media sources generate ad revenue differently. So, keeping this data in mind, you can stop targeting users that will never engage with ads and save your ad budget while rewarding the ones that help you generate revenue through ad engagement.
LTV Report
Lifetime Value helps you understand the exact revenue each user has generated throughout their lifetime of using your app. This data informs major marketing investment decisions like user acquisition, engagement, and retention. You can analyze this data to determine whether or not your ultimate ROI was positive.
Use the LTV report to single out your most valuable users and understand which channel helped you acquire the most so you can allocate budgets accordingly.
Cohort & Retention
These reports will help you analyze user behavior over a period of time. This data is paramount for gaming apps, particularly for accurate monetization and prediction models.
Retention reports are simpler to understand as they basically just show you how many users reopened the app after launching it for the first time on their phone after downloading within a set time frame.
Cohort reports are more complex as they group users with common characteristics to measure specific KPIs over different time frames.
Ad Spend & ROAS
ROAS is best calculated by an MMP as it will match media cost data provided by hundreds of media sources with the revenue data of multiple revenue streams.
Rather than manually pulling data into spreadsheets and comparing them, marketers can now compare processed data and sort by filters like Campaign, Ad Group, SiteID, etc.
Conclusion
So you have built a great gaming app, but is that enough in today’s mobile-first environment? The competition alone is enough to drown any great app in a sea of a million other similar Apps. The game of being a profitable gaming app can only be won through smart marketing, catchy advertising, and deep analytics. But don’t just throw money on the problem; make data-driven decisions for everything from budgeting to targeting. Now, take this guide and unlock new achievements for your app!
About Apptrove
Apptrove uses advanced technology and a customer-first approach to help marketers across the globe build great products, create exceptional experiences, and preserve customer Privacy. Apptrove is a global B2B SaaS company offering multiple Ad-Tech Solutions. Their Mobile Marketing includes measurement, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, and marketing automation solutions. Apptrove has made marketing easier, smarter, and more secure for the apps working with them.
For more information about our company, products, and solutions, visit us at www.apptrove.com.
