11 Tips for Killer User Acquisition Operations Q3 – 2022
In quarter 3 of 2022, mobile game user acquisition has seen rapid advancements and evolving trends, reshaping how developers connect with players. Our ongoing series of quarterly UA Tips have explored the latest strategies, technologies, and industry shifts in user acquisition providing insights that help mobile game marketers stay ahead of the competition and maximize ROI more effectively.
This article explores effective strategies for optimizing mobile game campaigns, focusing on various aspects of user acquisition, creative testing, and scaling. It covers optimizing Meta’s Advantage+ App Campaign setup, managing allowlists, and source-level bidding to achieve successful ROAS. It also includes approaches to creative testing for mobile games, collaborative scaling strategies, and addressing privacy requirements for iOS campaigns. Emphasis is placed on leveraging personas and proven creative strategies, avoiding common pitfalls during the soft launch phase, and enhancing ad reach and engagement on social media. The content underscores the importance of balancing budget, LTV, and campaign planning for scaling user acquisition, including key considerations for planning a global launch budget.
Here we go again! The previous article was so successful, so I decided to write a follow up. Keep reading the tips to improve your UA. Simple, practical & efficient! That’s it, no bullshit!
Optimizing Meta’s Advantage+ App Campaign Setup for User Acquisition Success
I know facebook, ehm Meta changed the AAA campaign setup to Advantage+ App campaign and instead of easy setup, it’s just pain in the ass. Well done FB, thank you!
- AAA campaigns (aim to have ~25 creatives not 50 as FB suggests – mix of all resolutions and static images)
- you can still run the old AAA campaigns, just find some old one you have in your account and duplicate it. VOILÁ!
- AAA – if 25+ age segment works (update the age segments for app in the business manager)
- Aim for 5 creatives in 1 adset when using regular campaigns
- applies to new AA+ campaigns
- Refresh Lookalike audiences on monthly basis
- Mix broad adset & LAL adsets with CBO
- Leverage regional targeting
- EEA vs NA vs APAC
- Use automatic placement
- Ideal creative length 20-25s
- Use all 4 resolutions for creatives
Managing Allow list and Source Level Bidding for Successful ROAS Campaigns
It is a necessary evil to chew through the CPI campaigns, but the ROAS campaigns are worth the pain. You can ease up the pain in two ways.
Launch an allow list campaign (speak to your account manager to get best performing subids for your allowlist) or source level bidding (speak to your AM to get these bids)
Once you get the xlsx file with bids, country codes, and source IDs from your Unity rep, upload it to your campaign.
Everything looked at first sight according to the Unity template. Still, after importing the file in the Source bids section you got an error message “Uploaded document does not contain “Source bids” sheet.” don’t panic.
- Just go on the campaign page, navigate to the Source bids section, then click Export template.
- After exporting the template, copy-paste the bids, country code, and source IDs into the downloaded template file.
- Then click Import to upload your modified spreadsheet.
- Magic happens the Source bids section will display a list view of the countries you are targeting, and the bid amounts imported from your spreadsheet.
Spent few hours to figure this out.. Enjoy!
Creative Testing Strategies for Mobile Games
What is your creative testing process? I have used multiple ways for different games. In my opinion, there is not only one universal process that fits everybody. Let’s take a look at what I’ve used in the past:
- IPM based
MAI campaign in Tier4 country (ideally India, but depends on your game genre) winner->BAU
- Multistep
MAI campaign in Tier4 country (ideally India, but depends on your game genre) winner->Tier1 AEO, winner->BAU
- Value optimisation
Worldwide VO campaign, new creative concepts tested on adset level, winners->BAU
- AAA BAU
Facebook AAA BAU campaigns, remove underperforming creatives and add new concepts
What is your approach?
Collaborative Strategies for Scaling a Game
Scaling a game is not an easy job. You need to involve a lot of departments into this! It’s not only on the marketing side of things. You need to work very closely with game team, data analytics and ideally liveops as well.
Scale/budget is always dictated by your game’s LTV. Marketing = UA + Creatives + ASO can help you by 10-20% here and there. But you won’t be able to scale your game only with marketing tricks & hacks. That’s impossible.
Sit down with your game team, look into the product pipeline and create a scaling plan together.
Meet Privacy Thresholds and Get SKAN Postbacks for iOS Purchase Campaigns
You are running an iOS Purchase campaign on Facebook, but you can’t really see any postbacks. Right?
Let me tell you this -> 0 SKAN postbacks on FB = not passing the privacy threshold! But this is not issue only on Facebook.
Let’s take a look at different UA channels:
Facebook – min. installs per day per campaign 88 (it was 128 before, but now FB guidelines say something different)
Unity – min. installs per day per campaign 30
Snapchat – min. installs per day per campaign 75
Google – min. installs per day per campaign 100
Tiktok – min. installs per day per campaign 90
What could you do to start getting postbacks and meet the privacy threshold?
- increase budget (DUH!)
- add countries
- change campaign optimisation
- decrease CPI with creative optimisation
If you want to learn more about how to solve this issue, check out this article!
Common Pitfalls When Expanding User Acquisition in Soft Launch: Avoid Wasting Budget in Unavailable Regions
You know this for sure. Running UA in soft launch in limited countries. But you want to open up more for whatever reasons. (Creative testing, liquidity, CPI challenges, new localisation, new channel, you name it)
So you fire up those campaigns and suddenly you see:
A) super high CPIs
B) comments under your creative saying the game is not available on the store
What the f…. oops! We should check the countries before we spend money in it. Happened to me multiple times in the past and I keep forgetting about it!
Leveraging Personas and Proven Creative Strategies for Marketing Success
It’s really sexy to talk about creatives based on personas these days. All the agencies talk about it like it’s a new thing.
Personas have been here since the beginning of the marketing!
The best performing creatives are the ones taken from the hypercasual or casual genre. Look what works elsewhere, adapt to your game. Full stop!
Oh, one more thing. Don’t forget to use static images in your (Facebook) campaigns. They work super well!
Challenges of Using Proxy Events for Purchase Optimization in Campaigns
Using proxy events for purchases to optimize your campaigns looks pretty good on paper. The hypothesis is clear. When players do these proxy events, there is higher chance of making a purchase. It should be less expensive to target those.
Yeah, looks good on paper. But the reality is different.
Example:
Optimising for “level 25 achieved” because there is a correlation between level 25 achieved and purchase. This optimisation might bring only players that reach level 25, but don’t pay.
9/10 times it doesn’t work. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test it out. It’s really good exercise to try and learn from.
Effective Strategies for Enhancing Ad Reach and Engagement on Social Media Platforms
Discover trending hashtags daily and use them in ads (to multiply reach)
- Use 1 – 5 hashtags to get closer to your target audience.
In creatives use real-life people and situations to look like native content
- But you can start with what is working the best on FB or Google
- Ideal creative length 9-15s
Use vertical format (in high quality – 720p)
- but landscape & square format works well too!
Add background music to your ads to make them more enjoyable and native
- Use TikTok music library if needed
The ad copy is important, the words are metadata for the platform.
- The CTA is essential. It is better if it is simple and direct: Download now!, Play Game, Install
Start with lowest cost bidding and then switch to cost cap to control the CPI/CPA
Rotate creatives frequently – every week
- Minimal changes needed (different button colour, background music, length, etc is enough)
Scaling User Acquisition: Balancing Budget, LTV, and Campaign Strategies
Reiterating again the same point you saw earlier!
You can only scale your budget until the LTV allows you to do so.
Scaling a game is not only a function of a killer user acquisition operation. It is also a function of a LTV.
Eg. If your LTV is $5, you can run profitable campaigns until you hit $4.5 CPI (or any other CPI that you calculate based on your margins)
This is very simplified, because you need to take into consideration a payback period of your campaigns = when do you want to see your money back.
Is it D30, D60, D90 or D365?
What can we do from the UA point of view:
- Creative optimisation
- Channel diversification
- Ios14 campaigns
- Campaign optimisation diversification
- Depends on game monetisation
- 50 50 split IAA vs IAP
- ANDROID Purchase + VO + AdROAS
- IOS VO + purchase (adroas only adnetworks)
- Depends on game monetisation
- ASO (conversion rate optimisation – store asset testing)
- Create seamless expectation flow
- Creative -> store vidial design -> game
All of this is hard work and can help you maybe improve your numbers by 20%. Full stop.
Planning Your Global Launch Budget: Key Considerations and Strategies
Big splash global launching is over. This was the case few years ago when you spent a lot during the first 2-3 weeks and then scaled back to catch up with the revenue.
Some companies still have this mentality from the past even though they don’t have enough data from soft launch. Because “someone said this is how it should be done”
So, how should your global launch budget look like? What to take into consideration?
- what is your CPI in different countries
- how did your CPI increase through the whole soft launch period? (create a coefficient)
- how steep is your LTV curve?
- what is your D1, D3, D7, D30 ROAS?
B) cashflow situation
- how much money do you have in your bank account available for UA?
- could you scale rapidly right away based on your funds?
- don’t forget about NET30 ads revenue and NET45 IAP revenues
C) team experience
- is your UA team experienced enough to handle the high volume (+ stress)?
- is your team big enough to handle multiple channels
- how many winning creatives do you have from the soft launch?
- how many many new creatives concepts can you produce weekly?
- can you produce playables?
With all this in mind, do you know what kind of budget you can spend? No? Yeah I thought so. Create a budget plan A,B and C:
A) minimal
B) adventurous
C) STFUTG (scale the fuck up this game)
What are the Challenges for User Acquisition Operations Q3 – 2022?
Privacy and Data Regulations: Stricter privacy laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and changes in data collection practices (e.g., Apple’s App Tracking Transparency) have made user targeting more challenging, reducing visibility into user behavior and limiting advertisers’ ability to personalize ads effectively.
Increased Advertising Costs: The competition for ad space has continued to increase, particularly on popular platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok, leading to rising costs per acquisition (CPA) and requiring UA teams to optimize budgets more efficiently.
Platform Changes and Ad Attribution: Major updates by platforms like Meta, Google, and Apple have caused shifts in how campaigns are tracked and attributed. Accurate measurement of campaign performance has become harder due to limited attribution windows, delayed data, and incomplete conversions tracking.
Economic Uncertainty: With economic uncertainty, potential customers may be more cautious with discretionary spending, making it harder to convert users and impacting the overall return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns.
Creative Fatigue: Users are bombarded with ads, leading to creative fatigue. Regularly refreshing creatives while maintaining effectiveness is challenging, particularly with increased costs for content production and influencer partnerships.
Limited Access to First-Party Data: Due to privacy concerns, first-party data is becoming increasingly critical. However, many companies still struggle to gather and leverage this data effectively for user acquisition strategies.
Channel Diversification: Diversifying user acquisition channels has become crucial to spread risk and capture audiences across different platforms. However, it presents challenges in allocating budget effectively, managing multiple platforms, and ensuring consistent messaging.
Algorithm Dependency: Increased reliance on machine learning algorithms for ad targeting by platforms such as Meta and Google means marketers have less manual control over targeting, and success depends on providing enough conversion data to train algorithms effectively.
