Promoting a mobile game app can be a complex process, but here are some key steps to consider:
- Create a website and social media accounts: Before you launch your mobile game, create a website and social media accounts to promote your game. This will help you build an audience and generate interest in your game.
- Optimize your app store listing: Your app store listing is crucial to attracting downloads. Make sure to include high-quality screenshots, videos, and a compelling description of your game. Use keywords relevant to your game to increase the chances of appearing in search results.
- Reach out to influencers and reviewers: Contact game reviewers and influencers in your target market to review your game or promote it on their social media accounts. This can help increase visibility and attract downloads.
- Run ads: Running ads on social media platforms, search engines, display ad networks can be an effective way to promote your game. You can target users based on demographics, interests, and behaviors to reach your ideal audience.
- Offer incentives: Offering incentives such as discounts, bonuses, or in-game rewards can encourage users to download and play your game.
- Participate in game communities: Joining game communities and forums can help you build relationships with potential players and get feedback on your game.
- Monitor and analyze your results: Keep track of your promotional efforts and monitor your download rates, engagement rates, and revenue. Use this data to make informed decisions about future promotions and updates to your game.
Remember, promoting a mobile game app is an ongoing process. Continuously engage with your audience and adapt your marketing strategy as needed to ensure the success of your game.
Let's go in details over a few of the above points.
User Acquisition for Mobile Games
Mobile user acquisition (UA) is the process of acquiring new users for a mobile app or game through various marketing channels, such as paid advertising, social media, app store optimization, influencer marketing, and more. The ultimate goal of UA is to drive app installs and user engagement, which can lead to increased revenue and profitability for the app or game developer.
Mobile UA campaigns typically involve identifying target audiences and designing creative ads or promotional content that resonate with those audiences. These campaigns may also involve tracking and analyzing key metrics such as user acquisition costs (the cost to acquire each new user), retention rates (the percentage of users who continue to use the app after the initial install), and revenue generated per user.
Mobile Attribution and ROI measurement for mobile games
In mobile app install campaigns it is essential to keep an eye on your efforts and spending in order to see if your campaigns are successful and if your users are high-quality users. This is particularly true for your app marketing efforts. Mobile Game Marketing is very expensive, and if not properly executed can earn the reputation of that of a cost center rather than a profit-driver.
Return on investment (ROI) is an approximate measure of an investment's profitability. ROI is calculated by subtracting the initial cost of the investment from its final value, then dividing this new number by the cost of the investment, and, finally, multiplying it by 100.
ROI measurement is usually offered by the Mobile Attribution Platform, a technology that takes care of attribution (i.e. attributing every install and action to the channel that has generated it) and also of measurement, in terms of KPIs and ROI.
Creatives for Mobile Game User Acquisition Campaigns
Mobile is now the primary driver of growth for digital games consumption, increasingly becoming the world's preferred form of gaming, and central to a robust cross-platform experience. It is more important than ever to fully understand your mobile games user acquisition strategy so to ensure your app is optimizing user acquisition for mobile games. And the key to user acquisition for mobile games is definitely in Creative ads.
There are a few types of creatives for mobile games user acquisition:
- In-Game Banners. Banners are still widely used for mobile app promotion
- Rewarded and non rewarded video ads. Gaming apps do rely a lot on video ads, because video creatives have a strong impact and good conversion rates.
- Playable ads. Playable ads are a step further than video ads, since they offer even more engagement for people viewing the ad. This yields a good conversion rate.
- Mobile Game preloading. Preloading, only available on Android, is huge for mobile games and also for other verticals. Obviously preloading an app on a mobile phone doesn't offer any guarantee on the engagement (thus on ROI). But nevertheless preloading is huge.
To sum up, mobile game promotion is an essential part of the mobile gaming industry, and any advertiser must follow some specific tips to grow their game in terms of both revenues (thus ROI) and user base. Paid user acquisition makes it possible through business KPIs that can facilitate the optimization of the app campaign. But Paid user acquisition is never enough, so the savvy advertiser must also focus on other channels, such as cross-game promotion (free) and App store optimization
