Marketing Viability: When Should I Consider Paid User Acquisition?

Start by creating a marketing plan to keep you focused and involved in accomplishing specific marketing objectives within a set time frame. A timeline will help make your long-term objective more achievable, as well as enable you to focus on the bigger picture when the day-to-day work feels tactical and menial.

Align objectives and KPIs with Production/Development before diving headfirst into a plan of action. Consider the following business metrics the game is expected to achieve within the period your marketing plan will cover. It could be player retention, monetization rates, session length, IAP transactions, events, and/or other metrics of success.

Identifying your target audience means getting the results you want, without wasting time and losing money on pushing the game to an audience with little interest in your game. If you don’t know where to start, take a look at your competitors to see where they’re investing the most effort, and do some quick market research on your potential players. If you run Facebook ads, Facebook Analytics will help provide more color about your users.

Research to determine your best sources of distribution. For those with considerably smaller budgets, decide on how and where you’ll acquire users utilizing all your owned and earned resources such as social media, email, and PR coverage before ultimately diving into paid advertising. Investing in the wrong marketing channel can be an expensive mistake, but secure channels to start are Facebook and video gaming networks where quality traffic and target audience are more aligned. Here’s a list of strongest performing networks to consider when testing paid marketing.

Before you start to execute your plan, you’ll need to set up the right tools and services to track, analyze, and report your marketing performance. For mobile marketing, it’s very important to have a good attribution provider.

Attribution analytics tools such as Adjust or Kochava will measure where users are coming from, what your highest performing sources are, what your users do in your game, when they pay for something, when they leave the app, etc.

App store analytics such as AppAnnie and SensorTower are platforms that give you information on what happens when users enter the app store and how well your game performs within each app store.

Get a head start with ASO, choose your keywords, write a compelling description, test icons and screenshots, and A/B test your app store page to find the best assets that bring in the highest conversion. Compare your page to other top apps in your space and keep trying out new ideas.

Creative assets are actually much more important than most people think, but often don’t get the needed attention. A strong mobile game marketing strategy should consider doing a lot of creative testing as early as possible. Here’s why: The appeal of your assets will determine your cost per install (CPI) in the market and your ability to grow your game when it comes time to consider paid marketing.

As you create assets for your game, make sure to A/B test them against each other to find the combination that drives the best results by running some ads. For example, if you have an RPG game with a core art style, consider testing them against a more casual style to see which variation has better conversion. Test everything from themes, characters, composition, to messaging. Often through testing, you’ll identify what creative types and characters people like the most and iterate on those. This process also helps weed out creatives that users may find unappealing prior to a release on a large scale, and ultimately lowers your cost per acquisition.

In general, your genre and art style will heavily influence your CPI and fall in these 3 buckets: casual, midcore, and hardcore. Identify where you are in this range and try to predict what the market expectations are for your game by running art tests with this general rule in mind: CPI increases as the game becomes more core themed.

Testing during soft marketing is key to figuring out if marketing your game is viable. In this stage, we’ll need to gather an upstream user acquisition funnel and connect it to a downstream in-game performance funnel.

Paid user acquisition works when the following proves true: The average lifetime value (LTV) of your users exceed the cost of acquisition (CPI) to acquire a user into the game. As a reminder:

You should have a solidified marketing strategy of all your planned activation channels at launch.

Update the app store listing with all your best promotional graphics, screenshots, and videos trailers.

If your game is featured, congrats! This will provide a strong push of installs for the first 7 days, but it's tough to count on. Allow roughly 4 weeks, though it can be longer before your game establishes an organic baseline of installs.

Hopefully, you’re confident of the game’s expected lifetime value (LTV) by now, and it’s time to set goals to acquire as many users as possible at or below that LTV. Begin by testing out networks without commitment to your full budget, then run a test campaign with each network and acquire approximately 1000 users. Compare the lifetime value of those users to your original estimates and revise your CPI accordingly.

Keep testing and iterating until you have the best possible marketing mix.