Next steps

Wow, what a journey! Here is a quick summary of what you learned about Monetization and User Acquisition to help you gather your thoughts and recall what you have learned in this course.

After the summary, you will find next steps and extra resources to help you on your journey to keep growing your game.

Player experience as your northstar

Your players are your true source of revenue. They are your primary customer, so ensuring you deliver value to them is always most important. Determining how you monetize that value can come in a variety of ways, specific to each and every game, and validated through ongoing testing and experimentation.

Knowing your monetization options

Between ads, IAP, subscriptions, or an up-front cost (premium), the earlier you have a sense of which models make the most sense for your creation the better. Most mobile games will focus on ads and IAP. Hypercasual games are more likely to have only ads while hardcore games are more likely to have only IAP, but you should always do a little research on similar games to understand what is most appropriate for your players.

Embedding monetization into game design

Avoid one of the most common missteps in monetization, where revenue generation is not even thought about until after a game is live or close to being live. Monetization as a native part of game design is most important for free-to-play games because all streams of revenue occur within the game itself. If that experience is forced into the game design after the fact, you are at far greater risk of clunky gameplay, and players will notice.

Balancing ads and IAP (if you decide to use both)

Ads and IAP are long staples of mobile games, but most publishers and developers don’t focus on how to deploy them concurrently while maximizing both revenue and player retention. While players making purchases in your game is a great thing, even the best games have a very small percentage of players who do so. Showing targeted ads to the large remaining base of players while using ads more sparingly to your active purchasers is critical for maximizing your earnings while preserving quality of gameplay.

Measuring what matters

You probably know you should measure revenue, but you’ll also need to analyze some of the drivers that impact revenue. Some of the common ones are player engagement and retention, time spent per session, points of gameplay that cause friction for players, untapped engagement opportunities, and any technical issues (i.e. crash rates).

Key partners and knowing how to choose them

You don’t have to do everything yourself. There are a variety of solutions out there, between IAP plugins, ad networks, ad mediators, and analytics providers, to name a few, which can help you get off the ground or get to the next level. Knowing which to choose from depends on variables such as your budget, your internal resources to manage their capabilities, and the value they can deliver based on things like your game category and volume of players.

Figure out your brand identity early on

It’s important to establish what your game is about, who your target audience is, and what kind of messaging resonates with them. You can then develop your strategy of how to most effectively reach your audience and grow your player base.

Understand the marketing channels available and your campaign goals

Knowing the ways in which you can reach your audience, and what you want out of a campaign (e.g. broad awareness or specifically acquiring new users) will help you isolate what channels to use and where to invest resources.

Don’t think a good marketing strategy is all you need for success

While your marketing strategy will be fundamental to building on your success, the most important thing to remember is your actual game. Pay attention to user metrics and make sure players have a reason to continue with game play.

Measure what matters and have a testing mindset

Set your key performance indicators early on and measure your campaign effectiveness. Figure out your game’s pay-back period and closely monitor return on ad spend. Always have a testing mindset and be willing to try new tactics to achieve your campaign goals.

Make sure you have the right technology implemented to track performance

Adding attribution technology to properly manage your holistic marketing efforts is crucial to measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. This often requires implementing third party technology so make sure you factor this step into the process.

Key partners and knowing how to choose them

While you might have limited resources and don’t want to stretch yourself too thin between multiple ad partners, there are a few things you can focus on to find partners who are right for you. Look at the scale of users you can reach, whether the inventory skews towards gaming or non-gaming and what the platform offers such as the ad formats you can use and tools to effectively set up your campaign and manage it. It’s also a good idea to utilize three to five ad partners, so you can try out a variety of offerings while monitoring performance.

To conclude, let's ask Cathal and Illya, both Unity monetization experts, a final question:

• What are the easiest Monetization techniques for a small team to implement?

You now have a foundation of knowledge to help you move forward in growing your game. However, as with learning any new skill, advancement comes from doing.

It’s important not to delay getting started and making progress. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes or get discouraged when you do. It’s all part of the process and is a journey that is never completely finished.

That’s it! You’ve achieved a lot: you can now confidently apply the fundamentals of mobile game monetization and user acquisition you’ve learned in this course to develop and implement your own strategies.

More than anything, you have explored the mindset that is required to balance monetization with gameplay experience. You’ve worked on practical examples, considered the theory behind monetization, and should have a good understanding of how to acquire the right players.

The team that worked to create this course took all of the knowledge that they had from decades of combined experience, and thousands of customer conversations, and identified the key essentials.

Further resources

If you’re curious to learn more, here are a few helpful resources to help you develop your understanding of monetization and user acquisition, and to help you set up Unity Ads inside the Unity Editor:

• Player LTV Webinar
• The 2020 Mobile Game Monetization Report
• Tutorial: Implementing The Unity Ads SDK
• 7 steps to growing your game with paid user acquisition blog
• Busting user acquisition myths Unite session