Paid Acquisition on Mobile: A Scrappy, Practical Guide

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
      • 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
    • 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
  • 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