User Acquisition Insights with Michael Jessen

In this series of articles, UA managers will answer six questions to share their insights on UA and industry trends.

Socialpoint is a globally renowned game developer and publisher, specializing in social games. They’ve built their big hits, such as Dragon City or Tasty Town, over in Barcelona to connect a worldwide audience of ultra-engaged gamers.

1. How do you approach UA at Socialpoint?

Each game has its own strategy defined by a product marketer and several UA specialists. We at Socialpoint approach UA based on what similar games are doing on the market in terms of partner and GEO diversification – as well as what has been working for our games in the (recent) past.

2. Which target groups work best for your games?

Each game has its own audience in terms of players, and the same goes for age and gender. We see that our core audience is a bit younger, while the people that make transactions in the game are slightly older. We target these users by segmenting campaigns by age and gender wherever we can to get the best-quality players.

3. Can you share your biggest learnings of the past year?

I think during the whole COVID-19 situation, the biggest learning would be not to stop pushing UA. We analyzed metrics very early with our marketing analytics team and were therefore able to scale our marketing investment immensely.

4. If there is one piece of advice you could give to UA managers what would it be?

Diversify your partner mix. You want to have a healthy mix of partners and not depend on the big guys only (for example, Meta and Google). They will probably always be the partners with the biggest chunk of investment, but you need to have multiple partners to make sure that when Facebook and Google have a bad week or month, you are able to back up the performance.

Diversify your partner mix. You want to have a healthy mix of partners and not depend on the big guys only.

Michael Jessen

5. How do you think the UA market will develop within the next year?

It will definitely change next year, mainly driven by the iOS changes and potentially Google doing something similar. Privacy will remain the number-one focus for Apple and Google, which potentially will make targeting the right users harder for marketers. Rewarded ads on Android will continue to grow, as users become more engaged and this format is doing pretty well in terms of monetization. Hopefully, iOS will play a bigger role in rewarded traffic as well in the upcoming year.

6. And last but not least, what is your favorite mobile game?

By far Call of Duty Mobile — I play it every day with friends online since the beginning of March.