How to get new settings for the game? Try meta games

    The faster the game industry grows, the more important are the gameplay, UX, marketing and monetization issues in creating games. An integrated marketing strategy today cannot but take into account retention rates. This is due both to the growing cost of attracting new users, and to fierce competition in the gaming market. Together with KamaGames, we studied the effectiveness of various advertising strategies to increase player retention.

    Rewarded video as a cross-promotion channel


    One of the retention tactics at KamaGames is the cross-promotion of other company games in their own projects. For the experiment, we decided to compare the effectiveness of the video with the reward with other channels for cross-promotion and retention of players. It turned out that cross-promo increases retention rates, user conversions in paying and ARPPU. Thanks to this, revenue from players who came from one company’s game to another grew by 26%.

    Full Screen Advertising - The Most Popular Game Format


    Monetization strategy and game design are the two main factors on the basis of which the developer decides which advertising format to choose. Ad networks offer different options. Here are the most popular ones:



    Popularity of ad formats in mobile games


    We selected the 100 most profitable games and, using their example, studied the effectiveness of various advertising formats. The results are displayed in the graph below.

    As the analysis showed, 95% of successful games use full-screen advertising, 65% also connect video with a reward. Full-screen ads give you the best click-through-rate (CTR) of all formats. And banners, despite their popularity, are the least effective - their clickthrough rate is only 0.4%. This is one of the reasons why full-screen banners are so common in top games. Rewarded videos rank second in popularity.

    As a result of this analysis, KamaGames chose full-screen banners and rewarded videos for cross-promotional campaigns.

    The choice of tactics


    Cross-promotion mechanics are used in all KamaGames. During the experiment, the company analyzed the effectiveness of four channels:

    • banners on the welcome screen;
    • social “hooks” - notifications about the activity of user's friends in various KamaGames games like “Your friend Peter Ivanov started playing Blackjack.
    • meta-games - tasks that require the player to perform a certain action. For example, get an achievement, do a daily quest, or try another KamaGames game.
    • reward videos that were available in the in-game store.





    Conversion in various channels


    The first interesting observation: in games on Android, the conversion in all formats was higher than on iOS - almost 1.7 times higher if we compare poker and blackjack (14.1% vs. 8.3%), and 1.6 times higher. if you compare poker and roulette (12.9% vs. 8.1%).

    Then, KamaGames compared the conversion of various channels. The result is shown in the graph below.

    The number of installations from different channels


    In the comparison of conversions and transitions to installations, meta-games are leading without any questions. Most likely, this is due to the fact that internal quests additionally involve the player, and he more easily tries other company games. The graph below shows that meta-games, in addition, give the maximum number of installations on both platforms.

    Rewarded videos show a higher conversion rate than banners and social leads, but banners still bring in more settings, probably due to a good location in the game.

    Findings:


    • Those segments of the audience who were shown meta-games gave a higher conversion and, accordingly, showed a higher LTV than the rest. This is also evidenced by the experience of Pokerist, one of the most popular KamaGames projects: cross-promo elements in quests and in-game trials increase conversion.
    • Social “hooks” - an effective and organic channel to attract user attention. The conversion of the "leads" is higher than that of advertising, but it goes to installers less often. These data correlate with numerous studies on the strong influence of social recommendations on user actions.
    • Rewarded videos also work well as a cross-promotional channel - 17.9% of the players switched to the settings of the game that we advertised in the video. In general, this format is very convenient - users are happy to watch videos to receive rewards and advancement in the game.

    If you need to motivate your users to do something, add a call to action in the meta-game format to the game - it will give the maximum effect (and will be the least annoying for the player).

    Another interesting tactic is to use rewarded videos as cross-promotions . This option will definitely give a good result, and players will take it positively.

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