Notes on a talk by Mike Gordon of Iron Horse Games
- Iron Horse has had 11M installs, mostly on Android, mostly paid acquisition
- Marketing in 3 phases on Google Play
- Google Play organic installs are significantly higher than Apple
- ROI tends to be better
- Open beta
- Don’t treat this as a test platform, because you waste users if the game isn’t stable
- If you need a test market, do a closed beta
- Keywords are critical at this stage
- Strategy:
- Choose and optimize your keywords
- look at what competitors are doing
- Use SensorTower to tell you which keywords get the most traffic, as well as how much competition you face for that keyword (don’t choose a 9)
- Choose 3 to 5 because most of them won’t work—hedge your bets
- Keyword bank is pulled from title, subtitle, description, short description, bundle ID
- Density is more important than raw repetition of keywords
- AppBank can tell you this, and compare to competition
- Market your game to increase organic installs from keywords
- With money: integrate AppsFlyer to attribute paid installs
- Spend $50 to 100 a day
- Start with Facebook and Unity
- Focus on Tier 1 markets (US, Europe, Australia)
- Without money
- Get an integration bonus for adding an advertising integration
- Get a line of credit from a marketing partner
- Monitor keywords
- Google Play dev console, user acquisition, search to see both volume and quality(want about 50% coming in from organic search)—if few installs for key search terms, make sure your icon and force that this is what the person is looking for
- Target the top 10 to 15 keywords
- With money: integrate AppsFlyer to attribute paid installs
- Use results to apply to early access to get featured
- Use KPIs to make the case why your game is worth being featured—support you’re giving the game, results you’ve seen, potential
- Choose and optimize your keywords
- Users from search, via App Store optimization, are super valuable
- Launch (first 30 days)
- Organic ratios will be the highest of the game’s life
- Market aggressively in this time
- Spend as much money as you can to increase visibility in the lists
- Learn from your open beta
- Need to know which keywords are the strongest
- Which channels had the highest ROI
- Which marketing creatives were the strongest
- Choose marketing partners
- Unity and Facebook are high volume
- Both will give you a line of credit
- Facebook: mind the first 2 months (the honeymoon period)
- Display ads still work just fine—don’t necessarily need video ads
- On Facebook, start with low cost bidding, then after the honeymoon period, move to bid caps once they start raising your CPIs; start new campaigns when the impressions tank
- Ironsource is low volume but high quality
- Slight creative variations help, so that people who have seen the ad before and passed on it will have another chance
- Unity and Facebook are high volume
- Live
- Use data from launch to pitch for a feature in New & Updated
- Try new marketing partners
- Marketing a live game on IOS
- Paid installs don’t really improve organic installs (unlike on Google)
- Use what you learn on Google about targeting and ARPUs
- Chart positions don’t help a lot, until you can get like 10k paid users per day (probably spending $10k or more!)
- UAC: needs a big spend commitment to figure out if it works… need to spend for like 30 days to figure out if it’s going to pay off
- $1k per day to get video ad views, which are what really pay off
- Conversion rate needs to be 1 to 3%
- CPI is at least $2.75
- Instagram versus Facebook: IG was much lower quality
- Why Apple App Store does 2x sales compared to Android’s Google Play
- Android has a much higher audience in Russia, China, etc.—if you look only at US and western Europe, they wind up looking much more similar