Top 3 Videos on Mobile Growth #1: October 2016

Mobile App Growth

November 1, 2016

Some of the video content on mobile growth being put on YouTube contains incredible insights for app marketers or user acquisition and product managers. But let’s face it: some of it is also quite useless.

So what are you supposed to do? Spend hours to find relevant video content and then invest the time to watch it?

Introducing the Monthly “Top 3 Videos on Mobile Growth”

Good news. From now on, we’re doing the heavy lifting for you.

Each month, we share the 3 most interesting videos we can find. Even better, we bring you the insights you should care about. Want to learn more about that one tip? Just watch the corresponding part (or all of it).

The idea is to make it easy for you to get advices and tips from the mobile growth experts of the industry. While giving more exposure to mobile events, speakers and producers of great content.

Now that the intro is done, let’s get into it!

 

[ Video #1] Games monetisation trends in 2016

Summary

This is a presentation by William Grosso (@wgrosso), CEO of Scientific Revenue, at PGConnect Helsinski (organized by PocketGamer). He talks about monetization design as a discipline in gaming and gives advices on how to use rewarded videos, virtual currency annuities and daily login rewards.

Digging in

Monetization designer, testing different price points & repeat purchases

Someone in your team should be looking very early on at the game (when building it) and how the monetization parts fit together. Monetization designer should become a more common responsability, with an expected 25% of game companies having someone in charge of this next year.

In addition to testing different price points for users to see what works best (still not done by a lot of game studios), do not forget the importance of tracking the repeat purchases rate. Once people are convinced to buy once, they can buy again and again. A 50% repeat purchase rate is pretty good, and if you’re close to 0% then something is obviously broken.

How to use rewarded video effectively

A best practice is to offer a rewarded video to a player when it encourages him to keep progressing in the game. A chance to recover.

You want to tie the rewarded video to the user experience. It is also interesting to sometimes deny the video ad option, in order to either encourage in-app purchases or to use randomization as an effective call to action (leveraging the fear of missing out).

People who buy tend to stick around longer in the game, at about a 2X rate. And spend more as a result. So it is important to get that first conversion as soon as possible.

Virtual Currency Annuities

With virtual currency annuities, players buy something but don’t get everything they purchased right away: they get it delivered on a schedule. With of course a greater value and better deal for those playerEas purchasing “in advance”.

It allows you to target a different set of users than single In-App Purchases. A player purchasing an annuity is doing so with the goal in mind to enjoy the discounted purchase over multiple days, hence increasing retention. And this same player might not have converted for a single one-off purchase otherwise. So far this is very common in Chinese and Korean games, not so much in Western games.

A best practice when setting up annuities is to punctuate them with the most important item at the end of the annuity (a “baloon payment”), so the player keeps coming back.

How to set how much cash you give away on a daily basis? A good player should still have to spend in addition to the annuity, so you want it somewhere between (daily basis):

  • The minimally useful amount of cash for a good purchase
  • The daily spend of a good but not great player.

Daily Login Rewards

Daily login rewards are pretty simple and work great for mid-core games: every day you login you win something.

A good way to do daily login rewards is to use a lottery system. You can even add a way to “upgrade the lottery” by spending some money to increase the daily reward.

As a conclusion, all monetization techniques need to be thought of as a whole, making sure that everything is coherent and all techniques work together. You can not optimize just a part of it while disregarding the other ones.

Going further – You can get the slides here. Also check out Scientific Revenue’s resource page.

 

[ Video #2] Next-Generation Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Mobile App

Summary

In this panel from the Application Developers Alliance event in Berlin, 4 mobile growth experts share their experience and views on the evolution of user acquisition, success factors of a UA strategy and what the future holds.

Panel:

Digging in

Biggest Learnings from the panellists

  • Getting the qualitative part right and understanding churn
  • The importance of having an attribution provider to know what happens to your money and your ROI
  • Being careful about fraud, especially on burst campaigns
  • The importance of tracking everything, going deeper in your own funnel and what brings retention. Tracking things by segment.

What to look into when starting user acquisition

When thinking about user acquisition, it is crucial to put the user at the center and therefore to understand your different targeted segments. Knowing the segments, you can choose your channel when targeting each one of them. After having figured out your primary metrics apart from DAU/MAU, start optimizing your campaigns.

At 8fit, they look every month at what worked the previous month: 90% of the decision is based on the results of the last cohort.  If something goes well (on a deep level and following your key metrics), increase the budget. For the other 10% they factor in what amount of internal resources something is taking, or the impact of cash flow and when the money is coming.

Success factors of a user acquisition strategy

Success of an ad spend is mostly a combination of the right targeting with the right ad creative. If you’re smaller, you need more targeting and to focus on a small core set of users. If your app has enough virality built in, it’s a good way to grow the product. As you’re scaling the campaign, you’ll most likely have to broaden the targeting.

User acquisition in 2017

Acquisition will require more of a marketing mindset. Deep linking can allow to separate experiences with personalization, and should get bigger.

Additionally, retargeting already acquired users should be used even more. The focus will be on the entire product experience and customer journey.

Because of the rising prices of acquisition, user acquisition managers will need to continue looking beyond Facebook and leverage other channels.

What are the first steps when getting started?

Because Facebook is easier to understand and has less fraud, it is a good place to start. Start with just one network.

 

[ Video #3] Driving App Virality in 3 Steps

Summary

Mobile growth needs to come from your app itself as well. This video by Mada Seghete (@mada299) from Branch.io gets into how you can use referrals, ego and emotions to drive virality from inside your app.

Digging in

Mada talks about 3 ways to make your app viral: referrals/incentives, EGO and emotion.

Think about referrals as a mountain: to get someone to share your app is like to get them to jump from the top of a mountain. So everything you do is to create awareness and to get your users to the edge of the mountain. That’s why referrals need to be in line with your other marketing strategies so it comes as a complement.

2-sided referrals are better, but if you give to only one give it to the receiving end.

Using EGO is a good strategy because users like to share things that make them look good. Think about sharing mechanisms that will be ego boosters.

You can also use emotions, whether arounsing or passive. Here are a few ways:

  • Awe – think about user created content or something where you have very high conversion and use it in ads and on social media
  • Anger – get people to react about specific facts (like cats vs. dogs)
  • Anxiety/Fear – use fear of missing it or create urgency
  • Joy – find ways in your app to tag joyful moment to drive shares/likes
  • Lust – combine a discount with urgency and the fear of missing out. It works great to retarget someone that was hesitating on a purchase.
  • Surprise: look on how content could surprise users and their friends/contacts

Going further – Check out this post on app virality by Mada.

 

[Contenders] UA on a budget and App Launch Timeline

Here are some other really interesting videos that almost made the list:

 

That’s it for this month, hope you’ve enjoyed these great videos on mobile growth. We’re in touch with most of the mobile experts you’ve watched so if you have any question for them (or feedback on the format), just leave a comment and we’ll do our best to get you an answer!

You know of a great video we should feature next month? -> @sylvainww

Latest posts by Sylvain Gauchet (see all)

More about Mobile App Growth

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *