Vungle, the leading performance marketing platform for in-app video ads, recently released an in-depth mobile advertising benchmark report for 2017, providing insights for how advertisers and marketers can engage with their most valuable mobile consumers and increase their mobile return on investment (ROI).
Here are a few of the key takeaways from the report.
Video games certainly have evolved over the years and are different from one to another. However, there is one thing they have in common: the players. We all have a different experience while playing, as well as different emotions: frustration when losing, happiness to successfully finish a mission, angriness over an unfair or puzzling situation. Players all react differently during their gaming adventures, and it’s a major challenge to understand what makes the audience vibrate or, on the other hand, abandon the game. We wondered how to address this issue and be able to see what is on the other side of the screen; with the goal to create an engaging, long-term successful game, while understanding perfectly the audience’s expectations.
Gaining users for games is a tough business according to Barak Levanon, mobile UA Team Leader at Plarium. Despite the challenge Barak loves being part of the fast-moving game industry where every day brings new challenges and decisions. They especially enjoy the intensity and action, in addition to working together as a team. Plarium is their first entry into the game industry and, after five years learning the agency business, it seemed like the perfect new challenge. As user acquisition is getting tougher every year, Plarium decided to partner with Hollywood actress Megan Fox - “which performed great to acquire new users, although didn’t effect revenues dramatically”, Barak shared.
Firebase is a mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps, grow your user base, and earn more money. At the heart of Firebase is Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics solution to gain insight into your users from ad click to app usage. Firebase Analytics works with other features such as admob, so you can make smart, data-driven user-centric decisions to grow your revenues by displaying engaging ads to a global audience.
Sebastien Borget is the COO and Co-Founder of Pixowl. They manage the operations of the studio and supervise the production and marketing of all the company’s titles. This includes the popular creation game The Sandbox, its sequel The Sandbox Evolution and also Peanuts: Snoopy’s Town Tale and Garfield: Survival of the Fattest.
“The Sandbox entertains almost like a love story with its community and many times in the past we have been involving the community into deciding what would be the next update or what ideas they wanted in the game,” they said.
By Connie Hwong, global content marketing director at Verto Analytics
Whether you’re a big-time game publisher or indie, the challenges that every mobile game developer faces are the same: acquiring users and keeping their attention well past download. It’s simple to say but hard to do: less than 20 percent of all game downloads result in active users after 30 days.
Even with real-time data and sophisticated mobile analytics, how many mobile gaming industry insiders really know what’s working well? Almost all game developers struggle to answer these questions:
With China’s console ban lifted and the growth of Android-based set-top boxes, TV games look like the new blue sea for games publishers and/or developers. However, due to younger players and SARFT censorship, sales are not encouraging. The exception in China is VR which has sparked a new industry passion for TV games. In this session from Casual Connect Asia, analyst for IHS Chenyu Cui discussed the VR market in China and shared IHS’ forecast of installed headsets and sales value. Chenyu explained, “The future Chinese VR market will be relatively small. Most of the future market will be made of adapter headset which doesn’t give good quality or a good experience. The lack of good hardware for the Chinese market is the main problem.” To learn more about VR in the Chinese market, watch this video of Chenyu’s complete session.
At GDC 2016 King presented the Defold that is now available for anyone who wants to make games, pointing out its advantages as being lightweight, cross-platform, highly optimized and aimed on cross-function teams. Gamesauce tried to define the niche Defold is aiming to occupy in the settled and competitive engines market, with known favorites for both aspiring and experienced devs, and why King thinks their engine has high chances for success.
King’s CTO and co-founder Thomas Hartwig explained his vision of why Defold has its specific audience to engage.
Nordeus is now providing their clients with an enhanced user experience using powerful push notifications, resulting in improvement of all key performance indicators, especially early retention. In a session at Casual Connect Europe Miloš Milošević, Data Scientist at Nordeus, described a messaging system that opened up a new channel of communication with Nordeus users. Learn how they have tackled the problem of generating personalized notifications for each user, and then sent them in the right moment, based on their daily in-game behaviour. Miloš introduced best practices, as well as knowledge about message optimization, iteration and testing that can be translated to any game. Miloš explained that “personalization really matters” and advised developers to “really listen to your users”. Since Casual Connect Europe, Nordeus has opened, sourced and released the tool for push notifications called Pushkin.
In mobile game marketing, the importance of distribution channels beyond classic user acquisition is increasing. Join Julian Runge, head of the analytics team at Wooga, as he described in his Casual Connect Tel Aviv 2015 lecture that users that are not coming from user acquisition are key for marketability of a game in light of the struggle to keep lifetime value above effective cost per install. Unfortunately, data on these users is sparse. It is mostly unknown why they download an app. How did they hear about it in the first place?
This talk focused on what is widely regarded as the most important source of organic downloads in the mobile app ecosystem – word-of-mouth. Looking into the share of word-of-mouth in organic downloads and the quality of the resulting traffic, this talk will help you understand and utilize this powerful tool. Tune in below and also learn about the drivers of word-of-mouth for mobile apps are identified.
