GDC China: How cross-promotion for mobile titles can hit big

In a talk kicking off the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit at GDC China 2012 in Shanghai, Chartboost's Clay Kellogg discussed the sometimes surprising advantages of cross-promoting your mobile title, revealing some impressive statistics from the Mega Jump franchise. Specifically, Chartboost partner Get Set Games, which runs the free-to-play titles Mega Jump and now Mega Run, saw some spectacular results when they cross-promoted downloads of their newest iOS/Android smartphone & tablet game. The result? Over 10 million users for the latest in the Mega franchise, and a 45.1% clickthrough rate from Mega Jump to check out more info about Mega Run, with an install rate of 9.9% - extremely impressive. Alongside external advertising and cross-promotion (which Chartboost also helps to monitor or facilitate), Kellogg believes that cross-promotion within your own portfolio of titles is "fundamental" to strategy. He showed other examples of internal cross-promotion with click through rates as high as 15-35%. But the Chartboost exec also stressed that you need to have similar styles of game in order to cross-promote most successfully. In conclusion - a larger portfolio of self-created mobile games can help multiply your userbase quite swiftly. But if you're making abstruse styles of games that each target different audiences, then you're losing a big loyalty advantage that you might otherwise be able to leverage.