Deeper Dive into User Acquisition

1. Overview

In Monetization solution providers, you examined and evaluated the different Monetization 3rd party solution providers, investigated what to consider when selecting ad networks, compared different ad mediator solutions, examined what to consider when measuring efficacy of analytics providers and recognized how developers can make more money than they spend.

In this tutorial, you will explore User Acquisition topics such as:

• Types of user acquisition

• Different marketing channels

• Important metrics that can help you analyze your efforts.

Once you know all of the different channels available to you and what kind of goals they help achieve, then you can determine which ones you want to incorporate into your strategy.

You’ll explore the different channels in detail in Organic Marketing Channels. First, let’s define each of these methods.

2. What are the primary types of user acquisition for mobile games?

This can be primarily broken down into two categories:

1. Organic user acquisition: Marketing efforts to promote your game to drive app installs without paid marketing dollars.

1. Paid user acquisition: Marketing efforts to promote your game to drive app installs with paid marketing dollars.

Why do you need both paid and organic?

It might be easy to think you can just rely on organic efforts or your game going viral. However, the app store is a very crowded place, with over 2.6 M apps available in the Google Play store and 2.2 M available in the Apple store, making it hard to guarantee discovery.

You also can’t predict if and when your app might go viral and paid marketing enables you to have a predictable business where you know roughly the amount of users you will acquire based on how much money you spend.

3. Organic sources of user acquisition

Let’s explore different types of organic marketing channels and tactics efforts to promote your game:

App store optimization

Elements of your store listing such as your app icon or a visual preview

Castle Fusion's app icon

Store featuring

Featured by the Google or Apple stores. While this can provide great exposure to your game, it is not something you can guarantee or predict. If you know for sure you will be featured though, you can try to plan around that and time other various marketing tactics around the feature to support and amplify that exposure.

Reviews

Reviews listed on the app store or in trades/media publications

Content marketing

Blog posts or content on the studios own channels

Guerrilla marketing

Partnering with game websites, social posts, etc.

PR and Media

Press coverage within media publications

Word of mouth

Other players/users promoting the game to their friends or on social media

In app growth

Natural growth within the app

In Organic Marketing channels, we will explore these sources of UA in more depth.

4. Paid User Acquisition

Paid user acquisition can be divided into two types of ad campaigns:

Performance:

Performance campaigns are focused on getting users to take a specific action and paying when that action is completed.

Awareness:

Awareness campaigns are focused on getting your message out there and getting users familiar with your brand/app. You will often hear about a marketing funnel which refers to how you go from getting a user familiar with your service through to actually converting them to be a user. Awareness is considered top of the marketing funnel and the idea is to create air coverage of your game/app. These campaigns help provide familiarity to your app or service and are meant to ultimately help support efforts to actually convert users to become your players.

Stages of the marketing funnel

5. Pricing models for paid user acquisition

We will now explore two types of pricing models:

Performance campaign pricing models

These models ensure you are only paying when the user takes the specific action you want them to take, such as:

• Click on an ad

• Install the game from the ad

• Take a specific action or engagement within your game

Technically, this is what you will be looking at:

• CPI (cost per install)

• CPC (cost per click)

• CPA (cost per action) or CPE (cost per engagement): Cost per action or engagement could be something like not only installing the game but also completing the first tutorial.

You can select from these different pricing models depending on where you choose to advertise and what you want to achieve.

Typically, when focusing on generating installs CPI is the most common method to choose from. If you are interested in Unity’s UA offering you can refer to this example where you can see that the average CPI for this example campaign is $3:

Example campaign snapshot on Unity

Awareness campaign pricing models

Awareness campaign pricing models are typically on a CPM (cost per mille also called cost-per-thousand- impressions). CPM pricing is the price you pay to have your ad shown 1,000 times (also known as 1,000 impressions), regardless if someone clicks on it or not.

The good thing about CPM pricing is that you are guaranteed to have your ad shown 1,000 times, and if you target the right audience, you could generate a lot of clicks for a low cost.

The downside to this model is that you could pay for 1,000 impressions, but have no one click on or visit your app. It’s worth noting, however, that this is the highest risk to the advertiser. That refers to someone viewing the ad rather than taking an action like clicking on the ad or installing the game from the ad.

6. Case Sudy: Awareness Campaign

Brawl Stars launched December 2018. They hosted a series of pre-launch gameplay live streaming videos with ten mobile YouTube influencers and gamers. The goal of this campaign was to get registrations before the actual game launch.

They focused on influencers who were already playing Supercell’s other gaming personalities . Some key influencers in this video were Orange Juice Gaming, MOLT, and Powerbang Gaming. One of the videos got 391k views!

You will explore partnering with influencers and other awareness campaigns in more detail in the Paid marketing channels tutorial.

Now that you have reviewed the benefits of various paid UA campaigns, let's explore how you can measure your campaign results.

7. Measure your results- KPIs

Defining what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are and how to measure them will help you understand how effective your marketing campaigns are and if or when you can add more budget or should make changes.

There are also specific metrics to pay attention to when your campaign is running as well as metrics related to your users and revenue as follows:

Key Performance Indicators

Payback window

How long does it take to recoup your marketing spend. If you spend $5 to acquire a user, how much time does it take you to make back that $5 from the user. Depending on how long that is (7 days, 14 days, 30 days), use that amount of time to let your data mature before making major changes.

ROAS

Return On Advertisement Spending. For example, if you spend $1,000 on advertising within a month and that campaign leads to $5,000 in revenue, that would give you an ROAS of 5:1, or $5. For every $1 you spend, you can generate $5.

Takeaway: It’s important to also understand your payback period, so you know how long you can expect your return on investment to pay off and ensure that amount of time passes before jumping to make changes.

Retention

(D1, D3, D7) The number of unique users who came back to your app on the next day of installing/opening the app, three days, 7 days etc.

Takeaway: While retention can sometimes be used as a proxy for revenue revenue, this metric can be a key indicator of your game play and player progression.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

Lifetime Value is the amount an average player will spend over their entire time with a game. This figure is very directly linked to your retention, because the longer a player stays, the more money they put into your game, be it through IAP or viewing ads.

Takeaway: Acquiring a new user is just the first step. There are many factors that go into making sure the user continues to be engaged with the game and continue session after session.

8. Measure your results: Campaign health metrics

Campaign health metrics

You will now explore different campaign health metrics and how each one of these can help you measure your user acquisition efforts.

Pricing

This is how much you are willing to pay per user whether that is per install, per click, per action or per impression.

CPI: Cost per install

CPC: Cost per click

CPA or CPE: Cost per action

CPM: Cost per mille (cost per thousand impressions)

Takeaway: You can flex this number up or down depending on the volume and quality of users you are getting in return to help manage the return on your ad spend.

Impression or start

A single ad that appears on a web page/in app when the page arrives on the viewer's display

Takeaway: Impressions can help you understand scale. The more impressions an ad network or platform can serve, the more likely users are to see and engage with your ad.

IPM

Number of installs per thousand impressions.

Takeaway: IPM can help show the full picture of the user journey when targeting new users. Additionally, a high IPM can reflect high performance of a specific ad creative.

CTR

Click through rate (clicks divided by impressions)

Takeaway: CTR relates to installs. This is the percentage rate of users who saw your ad and then clicked on it. The more users who click on your ads, the more users who are taken through the journey to ultimately install the game.

CVR:

Conversion rate (Impression to install conversion)

Takeaway: CVR can help you understand the volume of installs you get based on impressions served. If your conversion rate is poor, then you may not be able to scale. In this case, many users might be seeing the ad but not choosing to install the game. You can raise the CPI (cost per install) that you are willing to pay, but then it might be too expensive to acquire those users based on the return you will make. If your conversion rate is high, then you know you can pay a lower price to get more users and still be competitive.

eCPM:

Effective cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions. (Within Unity’s platform this metric helps determine how competitive an ad placement will be in the network. Calculating the eCPM in this capacity is eCPM = (CPI x CVR) x 1,000.)

Takeaway: Understanding this metric can help you evaluate how competitive your ads are. The higher the eCPM means the ad is more likely to win and you might be able to manipulate the cost you are willing to pay, or make improvements to the creative to improve CVR.

9. Measure your results: User and revenue metrics

User and revenue metrics

These metrics are directly related to your users. Let's explore each one and how they can help you measure your efforts.

ARPDAU:

Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (daily revenue divided by the number of active users)

Takeway: This metric helps you understand how much revenue each of your players generate daily. The revenue earned will depend on your monetization strategy (ads, IAP or a combination of both). This metric looks at all users, not just those who make purchases via IAP. This metric can be helpful to evaluate your marketing efforts.If you are acquiring new users and the ARPDAU remains consistent or increases then it’s an indicator that the users you are acquiring are adding to your revenue. If your ARPDAU decreases and you are actively paying to acquire new users it could be a sign that the quality of users you are acquiring is not what you expected or need to continue growth.

ARPU:

Average Revenue Per User (lifetime revenue/lifetime users)

Takeway: Similar to ARPDAU, this metric helps give an overall picture to the health of your player base and revenue in a longer term view rather than just daily

ARPPU:

Average Revenue Per Paying User

Takeaway: This can help you understand your loyal, IAP paying customers.

10. Balancing marketing efforts with gameplay

While your marketing efforts are important to the health of your game business, a marketing campaign will not make users stay engaged and want to continue playing your game.

Once you acquire the users, how those players continue to be engaged is key. Yet player engagement is tied to the design and logic of the gameplay, the core game loop, and player progression.

You might start acquiring users but then realize these users don’t remain engaged in your game. This lack of retention of the new users you have acquired signals that you might need to go back to the game design and try to determine where and why the dropoff is occurring and see if there are changes you can make to improve retention and make your users come back session after session.

Your game needs to be able to keep players engaged and want to progress. Marketing can help grow your user base, but marketing alone won’t keep players wanting to stay in your game.

Now that you are familiar with how to measure your results and the importance of gameplay, take some time to reflect on what metrics you would like to use for your game and what kind(s) of campaign(s) you would like to run.

11. Ask the experts!

Would you like to hear more from an expert?

In the video below, watch Cathal and Illya, both Unity monetization experts, discuss:

1. How do we make more money than we spend? Is it a zero sum game in the end?

12. Summary

In this tutorial you identified different user acquisition channels available to you and what kind of goals they help achieve. Let's explore these channels in more detail so you can determine which ones you want to incorporate into your strategy.

In the next tutorial you’ll identify organic marketing channels and explore how to:

• Optimize your App store

• Build your list

• Build your audience

• Use content marketing to stand out from the crowd

• Grow your app