Top 5 User Acquisition Tips for Mobile Games

The mobile applications market has been and will be ever growing. According to AppAnnie, in 2019, consumers spent 3 hours and 40 minutes on mobile apps on average in 2019, grown by 35% in the past couple years. The more time people spend on mobile apps, the more businesses will spend on mobile advertising. Indeed, mobile ad spend in 2020 is expected to reach $240 billion, up 26% since 2019.

Mobile advertising is of utmost importance to mobile game companies as well. No matter how good your game is, if no one hears about it, no one will download it. Therefore, setting up the right user acquisition strategy and corresponding mobile ad campaigns is more than essential. But how do you cut through all that noise especially with the growing volume of ad spend by others? Here are five tips from our marketing experts at 1Up Capital to help you set up a proper paid User Acquisition strategy: 

1. Define your target audience

Identifying the right target audience is the first step in any marketing campaign. You have to ask yourself which users you would like to attract, or to which audience your game appeals the best. Depending on the genre or graphical style, the game may be more popular to certain gender, age group, or in certain regions and geos. If you are unsure, it is worth looking into some titles from your competitors, identify their targets and see if they apply to your game as well. 

Running a small test ad campaign on e.g. Facebook can also be used as a first market research as it helps you to identify how certain audiences react to your content that can be optimised over time. Using lookalike audiences can help to speed that process up. 

Targeting different demographic groups or regions could affect your budget and performance as well. The narrower the target group, the higher the advertising cost to expose the ad to a chosen group of users. In terms of regions, in emerging markets with large populations and increasing use of smartphones, you may be able to acquire more users at a lower cost. However, in developed countries with greater purchasing power, the average revenue per active users may be higher.

Defining target audience early on will help you spend your budget wisely and decide which channel to use to achieve your desired outcome.

2. Use the right channels

So what media channels are available for mobile app and game marketing and which ones are best for me?

Each channel has different reach, impact, and pricing mechanisms. Depending on your budget, and if you want to create awareness to your potential users or if you want to elicit call-to-action right away, the most effective channel may differ. 

Social media are definitely good channels for mobile app marketing as these are mostly being used on mobile devices and therefore suitable for performance marketing campaigns to drive a call-to-action (CTA) to your app game. Since e.g. Facebook and Instagram consists of user generated data, they offer access to a huge user base and can therefore help to make your ads highly-targeted. They are the biggest social media download drivers of mobile games alongside Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok.

You can also use search ads directly on distribution platforms through Apple Search Ads or Google Ads Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Apple claims that 65% of app downloads occur directly after a search on the App Store, and that Apple Search Ads can have a 50% conversion rate. Driving traffic with search ads first to scale up is a commonly used strategy.

Third: Ad networks. These are a good way to scale up your game with a limited budget, as with ad networks, you can pay only pre-agreed flat rates by setting maximum bids and a controlled budget. Ad format can be varied such as banner ads or video ads. This is a unique advantage of ad networks as other channels require varied costs depending on the reach and performance. Keep in mind that a cheap cost per player acquisition does not necessarily mean good retention or good monetised cohort data. The audience plays again a key role here. 

There are many more channels you can use and because of all these different characteristics, you should not rely on just one channel but use a cross-channel strategy to utilise multiple channels in a coordinated way. If your budget however is limited at the beginning, focusing on the above listed channels should be a good way to get you started. 

3. Track and analyse your campaign attribution

Now your campaigns are running in multiple channels, but it is imaginable that not all of them are equally successful. So how do you know which channel is actually driving growth, and which one is just taking up your budget unnecessarily?

Attributing game sales to the correct marketing channel is a key factor in successful mobile app marketing, as it can help measure the effectiveness of each channel and campaign. Using the right attribution methods is important to make the best use of your ad spend.

There are many third-party tracking platforms such as Singular, Adjust, and Appsflyer that deal with the technical complexity of attribution for you and provide transparent insight across multiple advertising channels. These tools can track which users came from which creatives on which channel by following every touchpoint of the user journey.

4. Optimise, optimise, optimise

More important than to simply track your ad campaigns is to analyse and optimise each campaign accordingly. By analysing the performance metrics such as the cost per impression (CPM), cost per click or click-through-rate (CTR) and of course your conversion rate: cost per acquisition (CPA) or cost per install (CPI) to properly understand the return of invest (ROI) of each campaign. You can optimise your advertising strategy and reallocate your budget to maximise growth.

By leveraging the insights from the attributions, you can understand your audience better and create ads that would encourage maximum engagement and conversions.

You can optimise not only how much budget to spend on each channel, but also how the ad should appear on the specific channel and each channel's individual campaigns. Test out various ways your ad is displayed, using different text and images, and see which one works best for your desired players. Do static images work better or videos? How long should the video be? Run multivariate tests. Continue tracking the performances of different creatives and CTAs to find the most effective versions, iterate this process, and you will be able to maximise the performance of your campaigns at a limited budget.

5. Remember that the real challenge begins once you have these users onboard

Once you have followed through with our top tips and have set up compelling user acquisition campaigns, that is amazing, but that is not the end. Driving traffic at a low cost is not the ultimate goal, but acquiring “good” players and having them stay and generate value is. 

In order to increase user retention and engagement, you need to continuously work on updates to provide fresh and enhanced entertainment. Utilising push notifications or rewards could also encourage in-app purchases or increase sessions and play time. 

By analysing campaign performances and attributes, you should be able to take these learnings to understand your players better and to satisfy their entertainment needs better. Don’t forget that if you want your players to create value for you, you have to provide value through your game first.

Final thoughts

A high number of installs driven by cheap-to-acquire users may appear like a marketing success at first, but high-quality, loyal players are those that really count in the end. That is why game studios need a well-designed marketing strategy to acquire valuable users from the start. This may sound overwhelming, but targeting the right users through suitable channels, tracking, and optimising accordingly will help you get there, step by step. Make sure to continue paying attention to what your users want and what they respond to. 1Up Capital is working with a team of over 40 marketing professionals across 5 offices globally to help game studios to acquire the right users. If you want to talk more about successful user acquisition for your game, get in touch.