5 Ways to Revive and Revolutionize Your User Acquisition Campaigns

App store apathy is real. Consumer spend is on the up for mobile games at 116 billion US dollars – and is supposed to reach 138 billion US dollars by 2025. But enthusiasm for downloading new mobile apps is stagnating. Tapping into valuable high-retention users for your mobile games is trickier than ever.

Playtime – adjoe’s unique time-based rewarded ad unit – gives you intel on bidding strategies, winning campaign optimization tactics and options, and KPIs throughout the entire UA lifecycle. Before, during, and after launch. Craft yourself a campaign powered by Playtime and embrace a wide-reaching GEO network – a direct mobile-game-centric SDK network – advanced targeting, and creative testing.

1. Deliver Results with Demographics Targeting

Playtime’s power play is its first-party data and machine learning technology. With this, a robust prediction model was born. Playtime can predict a user’s age and gender in order to connect them with their new favorite mobile gaming titles. Targeting based on important demographics – age and gender – helps UA managers tap into the highest-quality audience for their game, leverage their user acquisition campaigns, and protect their profitability.

All it takes is the four following steps:

1. Developers launch a general broad campaign for a limited time targeting both genders and all age groups.
2. They analyze which segments performed better.
3. The account manager can break out campaigns to better target the right demographics at the right price.

Apps that hone in on the right demographics for the right price can help them successfully scale. You might see a trend that ROAS among the over 50s is soaring above other age groups; you know you want more of these users. That is exactly the time to kick-start a breakout campaign targeting users over 50 at a higher CPI to ensure that your campaigns capture them first. You may also look at optimizing your costs by initiating a campaign for your users under 40 at a lower CPI to increase your ROAS. 

Barcelona-based studio Socialpoint did just this. They leveraged Playtime’s demographic targeting and optimization – focusing on age, gender, and operating system – to boost loyalty and bump up retention. This resulted in the publisher scaling their partnership with adjoe fourfold.

2. Amplify Your UA with App Targeting

In mobile gaming, a one-size-fits-all strategy is rarely – if ever – going to work. Think about the UA strategy and audience you’d need for a hypercasual game. It would rarely double-up as your midcore game strategy. You could be reckoning with low performance and wasted budget.

That’s why Playtime prides itself on a special targeting feature, based on a users’ mobile interests – that is, their mobile app preferences (also known as “app targeting.”) When users opt in, this allows Playtime to reach users’ installed app data and their app usage patterns. Together with this data and machine learning algorithms, Playtime is able to predict users’ mobile behavior, meaning UA managers can then prioritize targeting users with similar apps. As a result, they can reach high-quality, high-conversion traffic.

“Playtime’s app targeting capability enables us to pinpoint the most relevant users for our app. For us, it performs much better than other traditional targeting options. We focus on some specific verticals, and it helps us reach and acquire valuable users efficiently. We’re really happy with it.”

Rovio

To cut to the chase, this means that Playtime provides users with a highly personalized ad experience. It only matches them with the most relevant game offers. So, you waste less time, money, and effort on the wrong users. And your users waste less time being bothered by ads for mobile games they would never dream of playing.

3. Tap into Your Target Traffic from a Direct SDK Network

User acquisition calls for constant optimization. What might work this week may not be the best move for you next week. This is precisely why the adjoe team constantly tracks real-time campaign data and reviews performance metrics to pinpoint growth opportunities and make scale adjustments with a multilayer optimization strategy. On top of Playtime’s demographic and contextual targeting, account managers can optimize your campaigns by the traffic sources driving the most value.

With this 360-degree view of adjoe’s direct SDK traffic, adjoe can identify multiple ways to find trends and optimize your UA campaigns by adjusting budgets or CPIs. To win more users from sources with high-quality traffic, our account managers might prioritize specific channels on adjoe’s direct SDK network – or with low-quality traffic, bids are optimized to ensure your KPIs are met. 

If adjoe’s account managers see that users coming from a certain traffic source are performing well, they can optimize your UA campaigns to ensure you reach even more of those valuable users. The key to success for our advertisers is taking their campaign analysis from broad to granular to reach the best results. Ensuring decisions are deep-data-driven rather than just data-driven.

4. Go for a Soft Launch before You Go Global

Whoever said you don’t get to pick and choose was not using Playtime for their soft launches. Playtime’s global reach is why our partners choose it for their soft launch. Its SDK network covering numerous countries and its strong presence in Tier 1 regions help UA managers test and optimize user acquisition campaigns in line with their own strategy. UA managers can test new markets and release their app to a specific and restricted audience of their choice before taking it to the masses. 

Doing this ensures they

• test campaigns in a smaller but similar market with overlapping user behavior
• test at a more affordable price before going global 
• gain insights for this new market and identify the right audiences for their app
• evaluate their monetization strategy model based on their soft-launch performance results
• Launch the broader campaign based on your gained insights and expand UA strategy with other channels

Take developers who want a user base in Germany, for example. They might opt for a soft launch with Playtime and then capitalize on their campaign performance data to develop a wider-reaching UA strategy for their app. Their learnings from the soft launch and Playtime’s insights into user demographics give advertisers a framework for success on both the adjoe platform and their other marketing channels.

The proof is in the publisher. Dragon Plus – one of China’s fastest-growing publishers with 100 million global users – expanded its UA efforts into nearly 30 new countries with Playtime for its puzzle title Makeover Master. Given the complexity of identifying and launching in new GEOs, Dragon Plus started with a soft launch and tested new regions with Playtime. During the test phase, the publisher gained insights into expected install volumes as well as a comprehensive bidding and targeting strategy. With these insights, the publisher not only expanded its UA efforts on the adjoe platform; they were the foundation for their overall growth on other platforms too.

5. Inject Some Impact into Your Campaign’s Creatives

A/B testing is used as a good gold-standard method for comparing creatives and analyzing their performance. The competitive mobile games economy still calls upon UA managers to A/B test and optimize their creatives. Doing so results in 80 percent fewer ineffective creatives, saving you and your team both human and financial resources.

Playtime allows UA managers to efficiently test different creative elements at once. It’s then up to adjoe’s partners to make data-driven decisions to extract as much success from their UA campaigns as possible. adjoe’s UA managers gain insights on which images and combinations will lead to greater goal conversions. They see that certain creatives perform successfully and others poorly, which allows them to figure out how they can leverage that winning ad even more effectively. Continuously testing and challenging your assumptions on the next-biggest creative for your app will boost UA efforts and deliver better performance.

Although this testing element plays a smaller role in Playtime’s overall user acquisition campaign optimization process, this is still a nonnegotiable step you should incorporate into your strategy to meet your UA goals.

Close in on Your Campaign KPIs with Playtime

A thought-out and well-executed user acquisition strategy just doesn’t always cut it anymore. Neither does efficient bidding. It’s a tough gig right now for UA managers, but volatility in the market calls for versatility. Don’t call it quits on quality users yet – you just have to know where (and how) to look for them. You need an agile approach when it comes to optimizing your UA campaigns and hitting your growth targets. 

Be crafty and clever about your UA strategy. adjoe’s unique ad unit Playtime connects partners with their core gaming audience and delivers long-term engaged mobile gamers. By throwing new targeting capabilities and strategies into the mix, adjoe partners have acquired their most valuable users and hit their goals. If you need to see it to believe it, here’s how some of our big partners have captured and connected new quality users with Playtime. This ad unit is a playground to test performance – and your route to reviving your UA campaigns.