The Future of Mobile Game Promotion and Advertising

The number of mobile games entering the market is increasing every year. It's a complex, highly competitive market, with many apps struggling for users' attention. One of the challenges that game developers and publishers face now and will continue to face in the future is the proper promotion of their creations. Because if no one is interested in the game, there is no point in developing it.

What will be relevant for mobile games soon? I've spoken to the guys in the Adsbalance agency media buying team and am ready to share my findings.

Intelligent creatives

Creatives are images or short videos that are posted on third-party platforms (such as social media) to attract a target audience to the app itself. The user interacts with the image for a short period. In a few seconds, he has to decide whether or not to click on the banner and go to the app.

What kind of creatives should there be that achieve their goal? When promoting games and attracting users to them, companies often make a lot of creatives, but not all of them turn out to be the right ones. The guys from Adsbalance invented 5 rules that helped them increase the number of unique visitors of the promoted application by 10 times, and the number of downloads by 15-20 times compared to the figures at the beginning of the promotion.

It's the 5EC rule. According to it, the creatives must be:

1. legible;

The text should be easy to read, have a clear font and not blend into the background. The creative should be adaptable for both PCs and mobile devices, and all details should be easy to view.

2. Engaging;

Creative should catch the eye and immediately stand out from the crowd of posts, pictures and videos on social media. The user should associate themselves with the characters in the game.

3. Elaborate in detail;

Characters should broadcast human emotions, respecting gameplay mechanics. The user intuitively understands what will happen after certain actions.

4. Clarity;

The user should know from the first seconds what genre the game is in and what to do.

5. Laconic.

Creative has only one centre of attention and it is not overloaded with elements. They work on the main focus: characters, objects, a group of characters, interface elements, or gameplay.

These rules will help you increase the number of installs by tens of times.

The correct result evaluation model

Why is it important to choose the right outcome model in mobile game promotion and what to do if difficulties arise as the task progresses? We're going to tell you!

There are several models for measuring the result of an advertising campaign which are based on the marketer's reward for a certain action of the targeted user. Game makers often enlist the help of mobile marketing professionals to drive traffic to their apps, and here we'll talk about the different payment models.

The CPA (cost-per-action) model is one of the most popular in the affiliate market. It can be called a universal model. CPS (Cost Per Sale) - reward for paid orders and COD (Cash On Delivery) - reward for paying for goods on home delivery are suitable for working with health and beauty products. CPI is often used to promote mobile games. This model is quite popular for dealing with traffic among large partners. The customer only pays for the installation of the app, which for a mobile game looks the most optimal. But there are nuances.

After selecting the payment model, the client sets the KPI for the contractor - the Internet marketer or agency. Сontractor gets a fixed commission for every installation and tries to keep the balance between CPI and KPI for payback. The downside of this model is that it is difficult to scale. If a bang outperforms the KPI, it gets paid as much as it is set to do so. This means that the performers lose money. But the team's goal is to provide the game with quality traffic, make the client happy, and earn money as well.

Why does this usually happen?

There is a difference between what the installation was bought for and what it ended up with. Because the cost of the installation was fixed, the KPI did not show real progress. It was not obvious what quality of lead was brought to the application.

In such a situation, there is a choice. Either meet the one-to-one KPI, which in this case would mean having to pour in cheaper installs, thus the figures would remain at the given level, but the quality of the traffic attracted would be lower. Or to work for over-performance, reducing your profits. The solution is to offer a different payment model to the client. For instance, here they’ve have offered RevShare to the client.

RevShare is a percentage payment from the advertiser's profits that they receive as payment from app users attracted through an advertising campaign. With this model, media buyers have been able to earn more and give the client the highest quality traffic with over-performance of their KPIs. With a floating installation cost that depends on ROAS, it becomes safe to buy more expensive installations.

As a result, performers have shifted their focus from the number of installs to attracting quality paying audiences. This was also the direct source of revenue for the client, from which they earned a percentage.

This tells us that it is important for the contractor to be able to build a dialogue with the mobile game publisher and for the client to listen to and trust the contractor. It is this kind of relationship that will lead both parties to profit.

Conclusion

The industry of mobile games is developing very fast. Those who learn how to adapt to the constantly evolving market and search for and find new solutions for promoting their games will get great results. If it succeeds, the games of this particular publisher will be played by people all over the world.