15 Top Strategies for Summer 2023 - from Mobile App Industry Veterans:

In the competitive world of mobile app marketing, simply having a great product isn't enough. Developers and game studios face the ongoing challenge of attracting and keeping users engaged, especially with the constant changes in privacy policies and technology.

At Appodeal, we know how tough these changes can be. We're here to help you understand and adapt to this ever-changing landscape. We're lucky to learn from industry experts who successfully share their insights on attracting and engaging users.

This article will explore key strategies that can help boost your user numbers and increase engagement. We'll discuss the importance of natural growth, using social features in your app, and adapting to new privacy rules.

These insights come from industry veterans who have been through it all. They aim to help you survive and thrive in this challenging environment. So, whether you're a big game studio or a new app developer, this article offers useful tips to improve your marketing efforts and take your app to new heights.

Let's dive in!

Holiday Season Mobile In-App Ad eCPM Report '23

Table of contents

Embracing the SKAdNetwork Framework
Creative Challenges and Loss of Hyper-Targeting
Shifts in Marketing Mix
The Importance of Schemas
Looking Forward to SKAdNetwork 4.0
Adjusting Attribution Models
Exploring Different Channels
Leveraging Social Features for Organic Growth
Utilizing Social Platforms and Influencer Content
The Role of Virality
Referral Programs: Unlocking Organic Growth
Deep Linking: Ensuring Smoother User Experience
Capitalizing on Apple Search Ads
Leveraging Google for User Acquisition
Prioritizing Creatives: The Secret Sauce to Higher Engagement

1. Embracing the SKAdNetwork Framework

It's no secret that implementing the SKAdNetwork framework has profoundly affected mobile app marketing. Many apps and games in the industry found hitting the scan conversion thresholds challenging, particularly concerning retargeting campaigns, especially on iOS. Nonetheless, the community has learned to adapt and work within this new framework.

Adjustments had to be made to how teams allocate their resources. The scan ecosystem changed the traffic mix, meaning not all ad networks and partners could successfully transition. Teams learned to be flexible, moving funds to where they saw the best return on investment.

2. Creative Challenges and Loss of Hyper-Targeting

The lack of visibility into the working creatives on iOS has made creative campaigns more challenging. Furthermore, the loss of hyper-targeting capabilities means that the audience on iOS has broadened significantly.

As a result, campaigns have had to be more versatile and creative in reaching the right audience.

3. Shifts in Marketing Mix

While the marketing mix has not drastically changed, some subtle shifts have occurred.

Budgets are now consistently being switched from one channel to another at a faster rate. Additionally, the focus has moved towards testing new channels quickly, adapting to the SKAdNetwork situation. This approach impacts how budgets are allocated and how campaign success is measured.

4. The Importance of Schemas

A key challenge and a path to success in navigating the SKAdNetwork framework is working on your schemas. This refers to building a schema of aggregated reporting data points without user-level data.

This could include binary coding around reporting to SKAdNetwork or tracking different events and user levels. Although the lack of user-level data might feel like navigating blind, optimizing schemas allows you to measure performance better.

5. Looking Forward to SKAdNetwork 4.0

There are mixed feelings about the potential opportunities and features SKAdNetwork 4.0 might bring. While some are optimistic about Apple providing more visibility and transparency for performance marketers, others believe it won't restore the scenario to what it was pre-SKAdNetwork.

Adoption rates of SKAdNetwork 4.0 have not been as high as anticipated, but it promises to offer a more extended measurement period beyond the initial 24 to 48 hours, making it easier for developers who optimize for long-term returns.

6. Adjusting Attribution Models

Navigating these changes has also required a shift in the preferred attribution models. A mix of SKAdNetwork and other models like probabilistic matching are used to gain as much data as possible. This dual view empowers performance marketers to make better-informed decisions.

As the mobile app marketing landscape evolves, so do marketers' strategies. Despite not offering immediate, actionable data for UA teams, media mix modeling, and incrementality are becoming increasingly crucial. In conjunction with other performance marketing tools, these models help secure a smoother transition into the future.

7. Exploring Different Channels

Expanding into new channels isn't a sprint; it's a marathon. The team at Appodeal discovered that venturing into areas such as CTV (Connected TV) posed measurement challenges. Even when direct response metrics aren't readily apparent, persistence is key. While these challenges may be more daunting for smaller companies, sustained effort is how you build momentum over time.

Not every channel will be a direct response gold mine, but diversifying your efforts can offer incremental growth and open up new user bases. It's all about consistent application and patience in seeing your efforts bear fruit.

8. Leveraging Social Features for Organic Growth

The discussion turned to an essential question: how to leverage social features to drive organic growth?

Firstly, social features within apps were highlighted. Some games and apps are built with a more social environment in mind, encouraging users to invite others to join the experience. This social engagement within apps has the potential to drive organic growth, with user referrals acting as a powerful marketing tool.

The conversation also pointed to plans for Player vs. Player (PvP) mechanics in certain games as a future growth driver. PvP can introduce a competitive edge to the experience, encouraging players to invite friends to join the competition and boosting user engagement and growth.

9. Utilizing Social Platforms and Influencer Content

The experts also discussed leveraging social features within platforms, such as collaborations on Instagram and Spark ads on TikTok. User-generated content (UGC) on platforms like TikTok is an invaluable resource. Brands that already have a presence or following on such platforms can capitalize on content created by fans to promote their apps.

The win-win situation is that influencers boost their engagement, brands get promotional content, and costs are minimal.

10. The Role of Virality

Lastly, the potential virality of games was highlighted. Some games, by their nature, have high virality due to their interactive gameplay, encouraging player-to-player interaction.

While not all game genres may be equally suited to this, incorporating social and viral elements within the game can significantly contribute to organic growth.

11. Referral Programs: Unlocking Organic Growth

One of the crucial ways to encourage organic growth in your mobile gaming community is through well-implemented referral programs. You can create a self-perpetuating growth engine by incentivizing current users to invite their friends to the game. These invitations can be trackable, allowing you to measure the referral program's success.

For instance, with Appodeal's advanced analytics and insights, you can monitor the conversion rate of referral invites and assess the overall performance of your program. Although the process of sharing can be as simple as hitting a share button and texting it out, Appodeal ensures that your in-app sharing feature functions seamlessly and tracks results accurately.

12. Deep Linking: Ensuring Smoother User Experience

Deep linking is another powerful tool that mobile game developers should consider.

It allows you to direct users straight to specific in-game locations from external platforms, thus enhancing the user experience and increasing the likelihood of conversions. These links can be shared through various channels, such as SMS or social media platforms, to invite friends to join a particular game or event within the app.

13. Capitalizing on Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads have grown significantly in recent years, and their use has become a cornerstone of effective app marketing strategy. They are a more premium and accurate channel, even if they may be more expensive.

Since Apple search ads are seamlessly integrated into the Apple Store, it allows you to track data more accurately, which can help you optimize your campaigns for better performance.

One approach to expanding Apple Search Ads' effectiveness is targeting specific keywords. This strategy can be particularly beneficial for games with famous IPs, allowing them to target relevant keywords and reach a highly engaged audience.

14. Leveraging Google for User Acquisition

Google also plays a crucial role in user acquisition. It has effectively mastered lower funnel event optimization, making it an excellent source of Android traffic. Its recent advancements towards supporting SKAdNetwork and introducing Quality of Service (QoS) bidding make it an even more compelling choice for iOS traffic.

One of the benefits of Google is that it can match your ad copy with the right people, making targeting easier. This advantage, combined with effective video content, banners, and text ads, can significantly enhance your ad's performance and user acquisition.

15. Prioritizing Creatives: The Secret Sauce to Higher Engagement

Finally, the most effective marketing strategy often revolves around creatives. Creatives are still the most impactful way of drawing in users. The conventional format of hook, gameplay, and call to action remains the winner of all ads.

Different iterations of this format, especially in creating a call to action or depicting gameplay, can significantly impact your ad's effectiveness. Pairing this with user-generated content (UGC) or influencer marketing can further enhance your creativity and improve its performance.

In Conclusion

In the dynamic world of mobile app marketing, the most powerful strategies focus on creating quality products, building and nurturing strong communities, and leveraging genuine, compelling advertising. A thriving, satisfied community translates into a successful product; engaging your players and creating resonant content fosters a sense of belonging that can encourage organic growth and virality.

Simultaneously, exploring new channels, maximizing the potential of in-app social features, and adapting to the shifting landscape are critical steps toward driving this organic growth. Indeed, as the mobile app ecosystem evolves, so should your strategies.

The current climate may prompt a shift towards more traditional marketing, but this can be viewed as a golden opportunity to get back to the roots of marketing and reinvent your strategies. Quality products, genuine ads, and user-focused methods reign supreme.

Facing this rapidly changing landscape might seem daunting, but remember: it's not a sprint but a marathon. Consistent efforts and the right strategies and tools can pave the way for your app's sustained growth and success.

At Appodeal, we're committed to standing with you—game studios and mobile app developers—through these changes. We offer the tools, insights, and support you need to thrive in this vibrant, evolving arena. While the path forward may be uncertain, we believe that together, we can navigate this exciting new world of mobile app marketing and unlock your product's full potential.

12 Tips for Bad Reviews on Social Media: How to turn Angry Mobs into Loyal Players

When struggling with bad reviews and toxic user behavior on social media, creating a friendly community for mobile games may seem like an impossible goal.

Managing a large, fully-formed community like that of the city builder SuperCity, with almost a million Facebook followers, comes not only with perks, but with some challenges too. Reducing toxic interaction on posts and among the players being one of the top.

Although it is a natural trend for large gaming communities to deal with trolling and even turn into angry mobs, sometimes, the community manager can set the proper tone for communication on social media.

Playkot's city-builder SuperCity started as a browser game on Russian social media platforms to be voted "Best New Facebook Game" in 2014. SuperCity quickly built a large community on its social media, and we have just celebrated our 10th anniversary.

When I became SuperCity's community manager, It was quite a challenge to fight the negative spirits of some players. But at the same time, it was an experience that taught me a lot about user behavior in videogames, and crowd psychology, in general.

The following 12 Tips boil down the strategy that we employed to improve the atmosphere in SuperCity's community:

Show that You Care
Keep your Communication Simple
Do NOT Wait to Reply to your Gaming Community
Find Out the Reason Behind the Comment
Never take the Comments Personally
Distinguish Between an Angry Player and a Regular Troll
Choose the Right Level of Moderation
Be Open to Feedback
Encourage Positive Contributions
Generate Positive Contests & Giveaways
Don’t just cover Online, go Offline too!
Try for a More Personal Approach

1. Show That You Care

It was not by accident that I have chosen this for the very first tip.

Care should be at the core of every interaction you have with your online community.

It's not enough to affirm it publicly that you care about your community. You must internalize it and keep it in mind in every action you take.

People feel when you genuinely care (or not) about them.

You show them that you care by approaching them nicely and positively.

When dealing with your community, try to approach your users the way you know they will understand you best.

Try to use polite, caring words. Be generous with the "Have a nice day" wishes and friendly emojis. These little things can really improve your communication with the players.

If you want, you can make someone's day better.

2. Keep your Communication Simple

Try to think of your players not only as customers but also as people: they could be your little sister or brother, not at all happy with the new update. Imagine your father or grandmother not understanding the new interface of their favorite game.

I tend to make this mental connection between my family and audiences with players over their forties. When my father bought his first smartphone, he had such a hard time understanding how to use it.

It's the same with your gaming community: try to explain your news and game updates the same way you would with your grandparents.

If your community is small, do your best to answer to all players. That will boost the engagement rates on your social media channels, and it will also show the players that you care about their comments.

As your gaming community gets bigger, it will become difficult to answer all your players.

Some companies prefer to respond when the answer is relevant for all the players to read. Or you can hire moderators or staff to help you keep answering all your players.

In this line of work, emotional burnout can happen very fast: too many contacts can feel overwhelming, resulting in low-quality work or losing valuable people.

3. Do NOT Wait to Reply to your Gaming Community

Giving a quick reply to your players, being there when they need you is also a way of showing you care.

You may have the perfect answer, but if it comes too late, there's no point in it anymore.

This is particularly important for reviews on App Store and Google Play.

Sometimes, players submit their issues there, instead of writing to support or on your social media platforms.

It's always a good idea to monitor your feedback on the App Stores. You will find there all the feedback of your latest update.

The best scenario is to solve their issue from the first message without asking them to contact you via support or email.

You can turn a bad review into a five-star rating just by answering promptly and showing that you care about their issues.

4. Find Out the Reason Behind the Comment

This means going a little further into the player's psychology.

The reason behind their anger may or may not be the game itself. This is something you'll have to find out and adjust your communication accordingly.

If several players come to you with the same complaint, something may be off with the new event or whatever might be the object of their messages.

However, that might not always be the case with individual complaints. Waking up to several angry paragraphs from one of your most loyal players does not always mean yesterday's update was a fiasco.

Take the time to listen to the person who came to you and determine what caused this emotional reaction. Based on the messages you have received, ask them about the issue.

Do it with empathy, in a polite and caring manner, and you might be surprised. It's not uncommon that, during the conversation, the player drops something along the lines of "Actually, yesterday I was really upset because of reasons" or "I couldn't sleep all night because my legs hurt terribly."

I don't know any Community Manager that hasn't received something like that.

Just keep in mind: the reason for anger might not always be your product.

5. Never take the Comments Personally

You may feel a bit frustrated by the loss of work time when you find out that the real reason was not work-related at all.

Don't take it personally!

My advice here is not to cut the person off. If you do, you may come off as rude. Listen to them for a while, and, if you can, say something nice.

This will not only consolidate the bond you have with that particular player, but you will also have one good deed added to your karma: everyone needs to be heard out once in a while, might as well be by an online game community manager.

You may even end up with a loyal user who will defend you and your game when other players rant at you.

6. Distinguish Between an Angry Player and a Regular Troll

If you've been on the internet for some time, you're probably familiar with internet Trolls.

They are the worst nightmares of every community manager.

Not only is it tiresome to see every new post you publish overridden with negative comments, but you'll soon find the regular players rally up against you as well.

Never let the troll loose. If you do, more negative comments will spring up like mushrooms after a rainy day.

The last thing you want is for the top comment on your newest post -Yes, that one with 600 likes and 90 replies!- to be a faceless profile solely made to have some fun at your expense.

There are many theories on internet trolling. Be it what some call the mob mentality or something else. Trolls are very good at finding weaknesses, real or made up, and presenting them in a way that will make others feel like they have a point.

Distinguishing between a player who is genuinely upset and a regular troll is not easy. You can only learn that by practice. However, if you want to get rid of your trolls, you must set the right parameters for communication on your social media.

7. Choose the Right Level of Moderation

To ban or not to ban? That is the question.

The topic of how strong moderation should be is often a sensitive one for community managers. Nobody wants to come off as iron-fisted. The flip side of this is a too relaxed approach and having your community infested with toxic behavior and trolling.

How should strong moderation be against a troll? As strong as necessary!

The level of moderation is individual to every community. Large communities, such as SuperCity, are prone to trolls and things getting out of hand quickly. Small communities can have more flexible policies that don't require such careful monitoring.

Trolling should not be tolerated on your social media. However, if a user genuinely sends you negative comments or reviews, you'll have to address it.

One of the main purposes of a Community Manager, after all, is to address all feedback. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, game developers have to learn to take critique just as much .-or even more- than praise.

But again, Do not mistake trolling for feedback. Trolls will never bring anything constructive to your community.

8. Be Open to Feedback

Another way of showing that you care about your players and the comments they leave is to be open.

Never stop asking them for feedback. Ask about your users' opinions in your posts, dedicated polls, or even player surveys.

Be mentally ready to accept both positive and negative feedback.

When you receive it, be honest about it with your team. If the latest event was not well-received, don't sugarcoat it. Describe the situation as it is: in a logical, non-emotional manner.

It's great for players when you put their suggestions into practice. It increases their loyalty when they see that you act on their feedback.

It also creates a feeling of belonging for your players. Their opinions are materialized in their favorite game!

When you act on your users' feedback, make sure to emphasize it when speaking with your community. Release a dedicated post, tweet about it, spread the word.

Players love to see when game developers take their feedback into account.

Depending on how close are your product team and your community managers, these magic moments will occur more -or less- often.

9. Encourage Positive Contributions

It is just as important to encourage & reward positive contributions to your community as it is to limit the damage done by negative comments.

To set an example of good behavior will offer players a new outlook on things. It will also help steer them in the direction you'd like the community to head to.

Find the silent players that love your game, and make them speak out.

For every successful project, there are supportive players out there. However, your supporters don’t tend to be as vocal as their polar opposites.

For SuperCity, we introduced something called "SuperCity Hall of Fame".

We gave the SuperCity Hall of Fame award to players that had meaningful contributions to our community: helping other players out with useful advice; writing creative stories about our game; helping us track down some technical issues, or simply having a consistently positive attitude over time.

The reward was a special frame for Facebook profile pictures that could not be found elsewhere. They had to be attached by us for each winner's picture.

The winners would also be mentioned on our page, and their pictures would remain in a dedicated SuperCity Hall of Fame album. Moreover, the award also came with a little bit of in-game currency.

10. Generate Positive Contests & Giveaways

People love having the chance of winning something.

Therefore, contests and giveaways are some of the most powerful tools in the community manager's arsenal.

Contests and Giveaways increase activity on your social media, while they set a more positive mindset inside the community.

Working together towards common goals, on a daily basis, has created strong bonds between the players and that was something we tried to encourage and promote as much as possible as the true identity of our community.

A big part of SuperCity's game strategy was being part of a friends' group that would help each other out.

Many of our contests revolved around the idea of online friendship, with one notable merch giveaway. Most of our contests involved tagging a gaming buddy and having them tell us why they consider them such a good online friend.

If they got lucky, we'd send them both an item of exclusive merch.

11. Don’t just cover Online, go Offline too!

Sometimes, online communities evolve to the point that online friendships turn into real-life, long-lasting friendships. This also tends to reinforce the online bond.

This was also the case for SuperCity. After a long journey over the years, some people in our community started to trust each other more and shared fond memories. This encouraged some of our players to meet in real life.

Observing that trend, we encouraged our players to organize meetups and form bonds in real life. We considered it a beautiful thing.

What starts in the virtual world may have a wonderful impact on people's lives.

A group of players from France had the first initiative of this kind in 2019. Sadly, no one from SuperCity was able to attend in person, but we supported the meetup with our merch and also got some souvenirs from them in exchange.

The meeting got an entry on our official SuperCity page and more people from other countries started organizing themselves too. The next meeting was, a few months after, in Canada.

The meetups had the potential to develop from local meetings to more international meetings.

I was also supposed to attend the 2020 meetup in France, but that was, unfortunately, postponed to 2021 and then to 2022 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

12. Try for a More Personal Approach

One of the challenges of SuperCity’s Community Management team, was to change the way the players viewed ourselves and our company.

Stereotypes, especially negative ones, have the ability to latch on very easily.

Sometimes it’s not easy for players to see game developers as people too.

Among our negative comments, there was a recurring theme of us being the evil corporation that was thinking of nothing else except our profits. Ironically, we are still very far away from being a big corporation.

If you’re a small developer like us, don’t let that kind of comment get under your skin. Let your work ethic and values speak for themselves with your hard work, your games, and the way you handle your community.

The key here was for players to see we are also regular people with personalities and dreams of our own. We love our game, SuperCity, just as much as they, and we care about them.

Some game developers and community managers prefer not to expose themselves. Therefore, they choose an impersonal approach. -in my case, I took the risk and chose the exact opposite.-

The players of SuperCity community know my real name and how do I look. I also created a Youtube channel. A place where I personally:

Explain the new events and features of the game.
Feature interviews with team members.
Filmed special moments from our office life.
And much more!

Moreover, we organized an event called "SuperCity Mail Time". This is a unique chance for players to send to us a gift and get something in return from us.

There are many big companies that would not feel comfortable leaving a postal address out in the open. In our case, we are proud to have a small museum with souvenirs in our office, that come from all around the world. And so far, not a single bad comment has been to my mail.

This has proven to me that, in most cases, negative comments were just online rants and nothing serious.

However, such an initiative does come with some risks, so If you decide to for it, first analyze if it's worth the try for your particular situation.

Turning Angry Mobs & Bad Comments in Social Media into Loyal Players

These are some tips from my own experience as a manager of a large online gaming community, I don't claim that SuperCity has a 100% hate-free, positive vibes-only community. Such things don't exist.

However, the above strategies did improve our game’s atmosphere. Some tips may be applicable to other cases as well, some not, it's up to every manager or developer to see what works best for their community.

This is perhaps the beauty in our line of work: there are no two identical online communities. Each of us has to be willing to accept the challenge of experimenting and finding new ways of bringing people together.

By Diana Craciun, Community Manager @ PlayKot.
Diana is an ex-pat working for the Russian gaming company Playkot for over four years now. She started her career as a community manager for one of Playkot's most popular games, SuperCity. Soon after that, Diana moved on to mobile games, such as the mobile version of SuperCity and the company's new project, Spring Valley Farm Adventures. Managing SuperCity's community of almost a million followers on Facebook provided her with plenty of experience dealing with negative comments, toxicity, and even downright trolling.

How to Monetize a Shopping List App Worldwide, with Listonic.

Last week we had an amazing webinar with Kamil Janiszewski, Chief Revenue Officer & Co-founder at Listonic. We discussed, among other things, How to Develop & Monetize an App like Listonic and turn it into one of the most popular and profitable mobile shopping apps in the world.

If you don’t want to miss the upcoming webinars, follow us on YouTube!

Here’s the full webinar on “How to Monetize a Shopping List App Worldwide”:

This webinar was hosted by Wing Poon, VP Marketing at Appodeal.

Listonic is a Shopping List App, available from over 50 countries, with over 1,5 mill. MAU (monthly active users). Every month, millions of people improve their shopping experiences thanks to Listonic.

Over the years, the app has grown a lot. At the very beginning, it was mostly used by geeks & early adopters, but, update after update, they become more popular. Now, their core-target are families with newborn children who have to adapt and organize to new routines. And Listonic helps to face their new schedules with tips and useful shopping tools.

The interview was mostly focused on Listonic’s monetization strategy. As Kamil says, Listonic gets “almost 90% of their ad revenue from banners”. This may come as a surprise for some app & game developers, even more on these days, where the whole industry only talks about rewarded videos & playable ads. But there is still plenty of space for all types of ads, and Listonic is an excellent example of a top app that thrives from a well-developed ad monetization strategy, strictly based on banners & native ads.

Kamil also told us about product management, user workflows, the ups and downs of their company, and even localization. Did you know that a top-grossing app, such as Listonic, needed up to three attempts to launch Listonic in the international market with success?

In the video description (on YouTube), you will find the timecodes of all the topics discussed during the webinar.

Here are the top insights from Kamil Janiszewski, that we encourage you to read:

1. Locate your App with Engaged Native Speakers

Sometimes, indie developers tend to use cheap translation tools and services due to a lack of time or budget. The final translation can be detrimental to the success of your app, and Listonic knows about that.

For a long time, Listonic was only available in Poland. However, the team put a lot of work and energy into making a sound localization of their app. One of the top lessons they learned is that “good translations for 40 languages are not about getting a translation agency and translate. It doesn’t work like that”, says Kamil. “If you do it with an agency, you’ll probably get mediocre translations. You have to work with native people, and it would be even better if those people use your app and know it well.”

2. Don’t Neglect your ASO (App Store Optimization)

Back then, when Listonic launched its app in the global markets, ASO (App Store Optimization) had a significant impact on your game’s success. As Kamil remembers, “the knowledge out there wasn’t public.”

Today the ASO ecosystem has evolved, and it’s easier to make a sound ASO strategy, but still, “It’s a tough job to do it well. You have to test things for yourself and talk to people who do it with big brands”. Listonic did it that way, and they still do. A/B testing all your ASO efforts is the key to make it work.

3. Are you planning to Launch an App? Analyze Everything!

When you launch an app, you want to get to 1 million users. It’s hard for some indie developers to set realistic goals when launching an app.

Listonic started with simple tools, such as Spreadsheets, to perform their market analysis. It took them a lot of time back then to list all the product categories inside their app. Kamil and his team asked themselves all sorts of questions, such as “how many downloads the main players do? Are the players strong or not? Do they use in-app purchases or ads?”.

Listonic looked at their metrics to find the answers. Once they interpreted the data, they were able to define their product goals. Listonic also did several benchmarks of the competition to define their user interface. Testing their prototypes with the users was the way to go before launching anything in the app stores.

4. Always A/B Test any upcoming Changes

As Kamil perfectly expressed during the webinar, “If you are very, very lucky, then you make an application, and it works, and it grows, and you’re happy.” But reality doesn’t always go your way, and “usually developers have to do a lot of changes and a/b tests in the application, in communication, in the way you acquire the users.”

If you’re not sure that a specific feature or an incoming change in your next version is going to improve your application, then A/B test it. There are plenty of tools to help you test your app. Even in your Appodeal dashboard, you will find an excellent feature to segment your user base & test your monetization strategy. As Kamil told us, “It’s a game of a/b tests.”

5. Find a good Ad Mediation Platform

“If you plan to monetize in several countries and probably will, you must find a good Ad Mediation Platform that fits your needs.”

One of the things experienced by Listonic is that “95% of the most popular ad networks in a country won’t make that much money” without an ad monetization platform. As Kamil says, “it’s worth to integrate a good mediation platform, like Appodeal”

We also asked Kamil to tell us what makes a Good Mediation Platform. From his point of view, “Customer Support is the key”.

One of the things that Listonic values most from the Appodeal Ad Mediation platform is that “Sometimes a guy from Appodeal ping us on Skype and tells us: look guys something is happening here, let’s fix or improve it. It’s awesome to partner with someone that cares for your business as you would”.

So, app developers should consider integrating their preferred ad monetization platform as soon as possible, and watching their revenue grow.

Do you want Appodeal to take care of your games and applications, just like we do with Listonic? Then sign up today and integrate our SDK!

Q&A with Newvoy's CEO & Founder, Yang Lu: The monetization of Cooking Voyage

Yang Lu & Jun Zhu have been developing mobile games for women and young girls since 2011. In 2018 they founded Newvoy Games, a studio based in Canada and China that employs over 20 people. They focus on creating fun casual games for mainly female audiences.

This March, in the midst of COVID-19 situation, they globally launched Cooking Voyage, a cooking mobile game that is growing rapidly in the app stores. In just a few months, 500K+ users have already installed this magnificent game on their mobile devices, and their metrics seem unstoppable.

To understand and learn more from the Newvoy Games’ success, Appodeal, has invited Yang Lu to share her story with us.

Yang, thank you for sharing your experiences with us! How did you come up with the idea for Cooking Voyage?

Hello Marc, the pleasure is all mine.

In all these years developing Mobile Games for women and girls, we’ve seen that cooking games have consistent metrics. We have acquired a lot of experience in a very specific target audience, and we saw that Cooking games have a good reception from them. It is a genre that allows us to develop and produce a lot of content, not only in our core-mechanics but also with other extra features that spice up the experience of our users.

I also must confess to you that I have been a super fan of cooking games myself for many years. I played them a lot, and creating a great cooking game has always been a dream of mine. Cooking Voyage is not just a business enterprise for me, but also something very special and esteemed for me.

In your opinion, what makes your game stand out from the crowd of other mobile "cooking" games?

Jun and I, the co-founder of Newvoy Games, have more than 10 years of experience in the mobile game industry. We know what a good cooking game should look like and, from the very beginning, we were very confident about how Cooking Voyage should look like.

As a game producer, and also as an avid player of the genre, I get to build a strong background in game mechanics. We know what we want to achieve. It hasn’t been easy, but the dedication of our development team was essential. We built the team from scratch and started developing from nothing. Cooking Voyage is our first game, and we have endured so many experiences, struggles, and emotions during its development.

It was such a challenging process, but we are really proud of our game now. Everyone in our team is very motivated and excited to make Cooking Voyage, and all our future games, even more successful.

Considering that you are an indie studio, your game has shown an extraordinary growth from the get-go. How much time did it take to soft-launch, test and tweak your monetization strategy?

In August of 2019, we planned to soft launch the game for 4 months. We already did a tech launch and we were expecting some bugs and issues, but back then, the build was solid.

However, once we soft-launched it, we became aware of stuff that we did not expect. We needed to still tweak some details on our game, and we decided to keep it longer in the soft-launch phase, for about seven months.

However, this was never a problem. We know unexpected things can happen. We were ready to extend the duration of our soft launch, and we did it. We wanted to be sure that everything was prepared before we globally launched the game.

Was your monetization strategy clear from the very beginning, or did it evolve after testing and getting user feedback during the soft-launch?

If we compare what we have now with the first release of Cooking Voyage, the levels are way more accessible now than we had initially.

In our earlier stages, we designed our levels to be challenging. We thought that the game levels were easy enough to give our users an enjoyable but still challenging experience. That turned out to be a big mistake.

During the testing phase, we realized that it is more important to keep new players engaged in the game, instead of challenging them too much. So, we spent much time and many iterations gathering data, adjusting, and balancing the difficulty of each level.

Even today, we are still tweaking our levels to make them entertaining to everyone. This strategy may delay a bit of the first purchase in our monetization funnel, but it improves our retention rates.

I imagine the Covid-19 situation may have had an effect on your global launch in March of 2020?

I heard from some industry experts saying the Covid-19 situation increased the time people spent on mobile games. In our case, I can't compare how much it affected us. Cooking Voyage is the first game developed by Newvoy games, and we have no other projects to compare with.

However, we got several player reviews saying that our game is entertaining them a lot during the quarantine lockdown. They even thanked us for making such a fun game!

I am glad that our game can provide people so much fun and help them fight the quarantine's boredom.

As soon as your game is on the market, it gets featured on the Apple App Store. Can you tell us more details and how did that help your growth?

Actually, at the time we were soft launching the game, it was already featured once in Google Play’s “Be the first to play” collection, which is a dedicated section to promote open beta games with great potential, and help them with their soft-launch stage.

After that, we decided to launch our game globally, and it instantly got featured in the App Store. We felt so proud back then. For us, getting recognition from the App Store is such an honor. The game got featured in most of our major markets: the United States, Canada, China, Australia, Japan, etc. During that time that we were featured, we got 100k+ organic installs. That was a great head start.

We know this is just the beginning. Not only for the game but also our team. Now we must keep working to keep this growth. We know we can achieve it, and we are on it!

With that wave of new users, did you detect new user segments, fluctuations in your metrics, or other stuff that you didn’t expect?

Indeed, when Cooking Voyage was featured, we were shocked to receive so many users coming from China.

This is something we didn’t expect at first. Then, when you look at our game more in-depth, even the style and mechanics we used, and compare all of them with what’s trending in East-Asian countries, it makes much more sense to get so many installs from China. It looks like there’s potential for us to grow there and expand our market there.

And apart from that, we also experienced some minor technical problems. Mostly due to the high number of users playing at the same time and the capacity of our servers. But we managed to fix almost all of them.

Could you tell me a bit more about what metrics are the most important for you (at least on your current stage)?

In our current stage, one of the most important metrics for us is retention, especially long-term retention metrics such as “30D retention”. We knew from the very beginning that retention was a crucial metric to the long-term survival of Cooking Voyage.

During the development stage of the game, we aimed to create a joyful and long-lasting experience, with lots of content. Our game has many features, scenarios, and improvements to unlock, even in the late stages of the game.

We are still working and developing new content every month to improve our retention rates. If our players have a sense of progression and involvement, they will come back.

When you aim for loyal users & long-term retention, you must be careful not to be overly aggressive in your monetization.

Yes, that’s absolutely right, but it is also tough to find the right balance. Games that have long-term retention rates are likely to survive longer and keep a steady growth in an ecosystem as over-crowded as the mobile game market.

You must find the perfect balance of your user’s LTV and your monetization strategy. If your monetization strategy is too aggressive in the early stage, that will increase your churn rate, and hurt your long-term retention. The average player’s lifetime will be shortened.

We, game developers, must always have in mind the ultimate value of our game: to provide fun to our players.

I also noticed you don’t push ads in the early stages of the game. Have you tested the impact that it has on your retention rates, right?

We didn’t test our Ad monetization strategy that much on Cooking Voyage.

We have learned a lot from our past experiences developing mobile games for women and girls. We know that, when aiming for long-term retention and user loyalty, we must avoid putting too many ads in an early stage of the user experience.

The FTUE (first-time user experience) and the earlier stages of the game are just too precious. We focus all our efforts to show the user the best stuff of our game. If we keep them engaged and retained, then we have more opportunities to impact them with ads.

What’s the greatest lesson you have learned after the global launch of Cooking Voyage?

There are so many lessons that we learned, and we are still learning that it is hard to choose one. Probably the greatest one would be to never take anything for granted.

We still need to continue working a lot on Cooking Voyage. We want to improve its stability, balance some of the levels that we currently have to make them more adequate to the level of the user, optimize our monetization strategy, and keep improving the long-term retention rates.

Overall, we want to create a great game that provides our players as much fun as possible!

Thank you for your time Yang Lu, and for letting us know your experience with your amazing game!

Q&A with Turborilla's CMO on Marketing and Monetizing Mobile Racing Games

How many mobile games developed and operated by a team of 16 people can boast a global offline presence, prevailingly organic user base and successful esports part? I know of one: Turborilla’s staple title Mad Skills Motocross, which was featured on 33 million Red Bull cans in the United States last summer. The company is also in the midst of developing a new sequel, Mad Skills Motocross 3.

We met with Turborilla’s CMO Bryan Stealey to talk about the incredibly realistic physics of their games, user retention and the marketing strategies that have helped it to perform so well since launching 10 years ago. Keep reading to find out more about the amazing journey of Turborilla’s Mad Skills series, its challenging esports, organic reach and future plans.

Bryan, what makes your game stand out from other action sports games?

Initially there were a couple of mobile side-scrolling racing games, like Ricky Carmichael’s games, but we were one of the first to really integrate with the actual sport and the real world. Other games mostly tend to be obstacle course style, where you try to get through a really challenging track with loops and bumps that you have to get over. More of a trial-style game. Ours was a hardcore racing game, not really obstacle. The elements of realism and physics are such that real fans of the sport understand and appreciate these features. I don’t think anybody connects with the actual sport like we do: we became a part of the culture of global motocross racing. It made it easy to target our core players, who are motocross fans.

Generally games soft launch, buy traffic, analyze users, iterate, launch, buy more traffic, hopefully get featured, and then build organic traffic. In your case the majority of your traffic is organic, how?

Well, it really started with the first game. We began to build our base, and once it was done we’ve always just been able to leverage that. In those days, it was all about getting featured in the App Store. Or having a good position in the charts, because it meant visibility. I don’t think that it works the same way anymore.

The way for us to make a splash was to make as much noise in a short time period as possible, like two days. I spent months and months working out a plan, working every relationship I had to get people to talk about the game in the course of those two days. And it went pretty big. It was a really aggressive marketing plan, focused on a very short period of time. It got us into 40s globally on the paid charts of the Premium Game. We were all pretty surprised when we got a note from Apple a day or two after our launch asking us for feature assets, we were like “WOW, OK”. The next thing you know, we were featured and installs went through the roof. It just worked. A lot of people played it. One racer plays a motocross game that he or she loves, they tell other people they race with, and then they want to race each other.

I don’t think at this point if you went to a serious motocross track, you’d be able to find a lot of people who don’t know our games. It’s mostly just word of mouth, excellent search, and App Store optimization. If you’re into motocross, or any of the relevant terms, we’re right up top. We certainly get a lot of installs from App Store optimization.

When it comes to having mainly organic users, retaining those users and creating new content for them becomes more important. What are your main tools for player retention?

We created a number of different bikes that progressively get faster. It created a reason for people to keep going, so that they could get these new bikes. Plus, all of them could be unlocked for free. Our monetization has never been super aggressive. You could play all the way through Mad Skills Motocross 2 without ever spending a penny. The only thing that you can buy is cosmetic stuff, you can’t buy a competitive advantage in the game. That helped retain people.

Back with Mad Skills Motocross 1 we also did what we called tournaments. We held them every few months. It was a one week round, that involved 1 or 2 tracks, and everyone in the world who wanted to participate could race together on the same track. It was all about everybody seeing who could ride that track the best, and work their way to the leaderboard. With Mad Skills Motocross 2 we decided to do that every single week and make them a core part of the game, renaming the event dimension jam. It’s been up for 5 years and we’ve had nearly 300 jam rounds in Mad Skills Motocross 2. We do jams in Mad Skills BMX 2 as well. That helps with retention, but it’s not enough.

We are trying to develop a metagame. The physics and competitive nature of the game are extremely good, so what we need to do is create the ability for people to race at series. We need better, smarter events, where people can compete against others at a similar skill level. Just like in real life.

In jam, right now there are 100,000 people playing in a week. If you’re in the top 1,000, you’re an elite player. Though it’s not very exciting to finish in the 1,000’s at something. You could be a really good player and you might still finish at 4,000. We need to figure out a way to subdivide people and let them play against others in a meaningful competitions. We need to work out a points system like a real racing series, where there’s a number of rounds and each round you can ride a certain number of points based on how you finish. Then we create a championship based on that. It’s astounding, we’ve made Mad Skills Motocross for so long and we’ve never done that properly, that’s one of the biggest areas for improvement in Mad Skills Motocross 3 for sure.

Esports in mobile is widely talked about, but not a lot of companies or games participate. You seem to be very effective in that context.

Even before I knew the phrase esports, I thought of our game as a sport, an online sport. I really felt like we needed to create the right metagame, so it behaves more like a sport than a game. Jam was an attempt to start moving down that road, and some of the things in Mad Skills Motocross 3 are an attempt to move further. Our games are a great fit for genuine online competition.

For our third world championship we flew 12 people to Stockholm, the best players in the world who made it through the qualifying procedure. We had some people from Bolivia, a guy from the Philippines, a guy from New Zealand, a number from the States, a couple from Nordic countries. We had pretty good representation when it comes to our global players.

And none of this would have happened without out partner G-Loot, who manage all of our cash-gaming stuff on IOS. You pay an entry fee and win money based on how you finish. These guys have produce our world championships, put them together, lined up the studio, dealt with all the travel arrangements and with our help come up with qualification systems for the competition.

How do you analyze your players and their involvement in the game? What metrics do you pay the most attention to?

We pay attention to D1, D7, and D30 retention rate, those are sort of where our big focus is right now. We’ve found that once we get a player to that D30 point, they tend to stay with us for a really long time. Our D7, D30 retention numbers are good, but we would like to improve those early days retention numbers. Our game is called Mad Skills Motocross for a reason: it’s not an easy game to play. It looks like what it is, but once you start - especially if you start playing with people who are a little bit faster than you - you really have to learn how to ride that bike to be fast. Some people probably give up before they learn. But there are others who, if they stuck with it a little bit, would love it long term. So a big part of our focus is figuring out how to improve those early retention numbers and create more long-term whales.

I tried to learn how to play and I can say it’s pretty challenging. But you’re also like, “No! I have to keep playing!”

Exactly! If you look at the restart button in our game, you’ll notice little symbols indicating swear words because frustration is such a big element. It’s a big part of a lot of mobile and video games actually. So if it could be just right from the frustration standpoint, it can make a person try again and again. We’ve been pretty good at that.

Have you tried paid user acquisition?

We wanted to, because we knew that it could work. We thought it might be a way for us to pull in users who we aren’t connected with through the sport itself. We wanted to but didn’t have anyone on-staff with the experience, so we outsourced user acquisition to a third party. We tried them out with Mad Skills BMX 2 and Motocross 2. The game just doesn’t monetize well enough for it to scale on those titles We’re trying to make sure with Mad Skills Motocross 3 it will work. It’s important for us to be able to successfully use monetization within the game.

Other than UA, what else do you outsource?

We used to manage our advertising in house, and that was frustrating, everything we tried never seemed to make any major difference. Managing our own waterfall or trying to change the order of companies, and it just got to be a little bit frustrating. It took a lot of time and it didn’t seem to make any difference. So that’s something that we outsource to Appodeal now. We also outsource a lot of our user acquisition stuff. We are still a small team, there’s only 16 of us in total.

Having a very loyal audience that stays with you forever, you want to be cautious about monetization. What are your main strategies here?

Traditionally, our big view is not to monetize a competitive advantage. That hamstrings you as a developer. It’s tough. Players can buy bikes if they don’t want to put in the time to unlock them in Mad Skills Motocross 2, so that’s a big source of our in-app revenue. However, the vast majority of players go through the achievements to unlock the bikes for free. We’ve always been careful not to sell a competitive advantage. If you can buy a faster bike and be a better player, because you paid for it, it kills the competition.

I also think we have an opportunity to monetize fashion more effectively. Fashion is huge in action sports. Skaters run in their Vans, and they’re wearing specific brands. The same goes for motocross racers and every action sport athlete in the world.We haven’t taken this idea very far in our game. But we’re trying to figure out what we can do to improve our monetization without ruining player experience, and that’s always a challenge. We have some ideas for Mad Skills Motocross 3 and I hope they’re right.

I guess no one has answers to those questions, you just keep testing. Why did you decide to try monetization and how did it turn out for you?

I can’t remember whether we first tried advertising in Mad Skills Motocross 1 or BMX 1, but it worked out well right from the start. When we integrated the first ad network in the game, right away we were making a decent amount of money every day. All of a sudden everything became about balancing how much and where we were delivering. How can we do this without angering or inconveniencing players, without them feeling something negative. Eventually we just did what so many other developers do: if you pay for something in the game, you won’t see ads unless you choose to. That’s fair as far as I’m concerned. You can play through the game and never spend any money at all. That’s fine, we designed the game for you to be able to do that. But there will be some ads.

We don’t go overboard with ads, we try to implement them at natural stopping points so we’re not interrupting anyone’s flow. We did recently increase the number of ads a little bit. We felt like we were not being quite aggressive enough. We haven’t gotten any complaints, and it pumped our revenue up 10% or 20%. And ads make up about 20% of our overall revenue.

Did you ever do something that didn’t work, something that you learned from?

One thing that we tried to do that hasn’t been a failure, but hasn’t worked out as well as it might: game subscriptions. I’m not sure how successfully most game companies have done this, but we thought we could do a sort of subscription that adds new tracks to compete on. We’ve done that, and some people liked it, but it wasn’t as big as we thought it could have been. It was definitely worth our time of course, we’re still pursuing it.

What’s the main lesson you’ve learned from launching and supporting your titles?

I probably haven’t thought much about that before. I’d say it’s sticking by our base, caring for acquirers who have put us in this position in the first place, understanding how they want to play this game and not compromising what has already worked out well for us. We haven’t tried to become something that we’re not, we haven’t tried to discount our player base, so that we can go after new players with new styles that our core won’t like. We stuck with what we thought our players would love, and it keeps working out.

We’ve considered different paths, even different styles of games, but in the end we know what our lane is. We know who our people are, we do something other people don’t do, and we’ve managed to distinguish ourselves in a pretty big niche. Motocross and supercross racing is a big sport. In the US, it’s the second biggest motosport behind NASCAR. These sports fill stadiums and have 50-60 thousand fans coming up to watch races. I think sticking by the fans and really respecting that our player base has paid dividends for us have both been important.

If we caught up a year from now, what changes do you imagine for your company and titles?

Mad Skills Motocross 3 will be out. There will be a robust system of events unlike anything we’ve done in the past, it will be very Liveops based, and I’ll be very busy! Another thing I would probably talk about a year from now is our move to consoles, which we’re working on for the Mad Skills Motocross IP. We’re not just gonna port the game, the goal is to create an original game designed for consoles. A year from now we’ll be pretty far into that project, but I think we’ll still be most focused on Mad Skills. We haven’t even touched skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, skiing, or surfing. There are always weird niche action sports too, the stuff that Red Bull sponsors. There are so many. People do crazy things.