Intro to User Acquisition
I always looked at the mobile UA as navigating through the maze while trying to find the shortest way to the golden egg. In our case the golden egg is a cohort of high value users and maze is a complex world of performance marketing including channels, strategies, campaign & creative optimization.
In order to do this process successfully, it’s crucial to combine a knowledge from several fields such as marketing, data analytics and creative production.
Sources of UA are pretty much the same as in any other media buying. Owned, earned, paid. In my opinion, it’s actually good to consider all three sources as paid. To get users from any sources, we need to spend time of our team (money) directly or indirectly.
Direct spend
means that we are acquiring users through paid advertising through the major platforms such as Meta, Google Ads, Unity Ads, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.
Indirect spend
means all other resources such as time that the team needs to spend on supporting the organic growth of the app. Those activities would be primarily focused around owned and earned media. Creating content such as blog posts or videos, managing community and boosting word of mouth, etc.
Why to run paid User Acquisition?
The moment we release the game on the store, we compete with all the apps in all categories on that store. We are all trying to get the user’s attention and in the end the most valuable currency in the world – user’s time. There’s a lot of ways how we can optimize the store to get more visibility and more users organically, but that’s a theme for ASO article here.
Long gone are the days when it was enough to publish a game on app stores and just watch users flow into the game. It doesn’t matter which stage of the game development we currently are at, we are going to need to run UA.
Main reasons to run UA
- Understand if the game will be marketable,
- Find out if and how the game will monetize its users
- Measure effects of specific update or live ops
- Grow the game’s user base and revenue
Channels and placements in paid UA
When talking about ads in digital space, it’s similar concept to billboards, flyers or TV. There are specific placements with specific ad formats shown by advertisers seen by people (in our case potential users). Main difference is the evaluation.
As majority of direct paid user acquisition happens through various social media channels and they offer extensive range of data sets, it is still the most measurable and precise source of user acquisition that we can use. Digital marketing (performance marketing) has always had a great advantage compared to traditional marketing channels when it came down to how much learnings can advertisers obtain from the acquired data. Thanks to those learnings, we can optimize the campaigns.
When people scroll their feeds or search for something online, ad comes up once in a while in a format specific to that placement. What kind of ad user sees the ad is determined by multiple factors which we can control directly in that platform to some extent (Creatives, bidding, targeting).
There is a lot of digital marketing channels, which are being used in UA besides other marketing activities. Channels such as Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit Ads, Twitter Ads are used to show the ads in ther feeds, messages and other placements directly in those platforms. Then there are mobile ad networks like Unity Ads, Applovin, Ironsource, etc., which show the ads in other games or apps, in placements such as rewarded videos.
The way these marketing channels operate is on auction basis. Advertisers are fighting bidding wars for the users and highest bid wins. What makes this process more complex are the ads, campaign optimization and targeting.
Bidding & Auction
The bid can be set up too low, too high or just right to acquire the user. In case the campaign is acquiring the users on regular basis with the cost per user close to the set bid, it’s optimal. In that case, our job is to find the lowest possible bid at which campaigns are still able to keep acquiring users.
Setting up the bid in these networks is a tricky process which takes a lot of practice and deep understanding of the specific UA channel. In many cases it might be even better to leave it on autopilot if there is that option and focus on optimizing creatives for specific audiences. There’s a couple of reasons for that.
Value of the bid varies based on the type of the user we want to acquire
When setting up a specific bid, we’re telling the algorithm what we’re willing to pay for acquisition of one user. Value of this user is calculated based on several criteria, but most important one is the campaign/ad set goal optimization and country. The goal of the campaign varies based on the UA channel that we’re running. It can be an event from a funnel (app isntall, purchase) or it can be % of ROI we aim to get.
Creatives directly affect how expensive the campaign will get
Variable that affects if we win the user in the auction with a specific bid is the creatives (ads). I would argue that quality of creatives is the most important variable in the whole digital marketing ecosystem. With great converting creative and its iterations for geos and audiences, it’s possible to dominate auction in any market. It’s important to mention that Creative optimization is long and expensive process, which takes patience, budget and skill to run. It can take weeks or months until the winning creative is found. That’s why it’s so important to think outsite the box and test out anything that the team is able to create. We never know what will blow up.
Autobidding optimizes the bids on continuous basis on it’s own
It’s more time efficient to control the amount paid for one user through other variables such as creatives, campaign goals (optimization) or targeting.
Setting up the bids will vary from game to game, channel to channel, OS to OS. If manual bidding is the way you’d want to go, there’s platforms out there such as smartly which can help automate a huge portion of the manual bidding.
What to evaluate in direct paid UA?
I want to set the expectations straight away. Evaluation of UA can be super simple or freaking hardcore. It will become what we make it to be. In the end, it all comes down to a simple equation
LTV > CPI.
This means that the lifetime value of the user must be higher than the cost per install. Now, getting this equation right should be a priority of UA team. Tricky part is, that in mobile games, LTV of the user accumulates over time.
UA managers search for patterns in campaigns that would show signs of acquisition of high value users in specific cohorts. Such patterns might be purchase frequency of the users, unique payer accumulation over time or high value purchases from users. It happens to be that catching such pattern happens in later stages of UA once we already know what geos perform the best, what targeting to use, what to exclude from the campaigns and most importantly what creatives to use. Creative optimization it self is a topic that has it’s own slot in my heart as I love playing around with various weird ideas and angles in UA and finding out what converts people the most.
In the end there’s dozens if not hundreds of various KPIs that UA managers can evaluate and draw conclusions from, but unless it’s necessary, I wouldn’t take that path. I learned over time it’s more efficient to make evaluation more simple rather than too complex. It’s more about setting the goals of the UA properly than try to find an answer to why the results do not follow the goals.
If you made it to this point, thank you very much and see you at the next one!
