There are a variety of metrics that must be measured and tracked in order to manage your app’s user acquisition for mobile gaming. Each value provides information on how well your mobile game is performing in a certain area, whether that be monetization, infrastructure, or user experience, to name a few.
However, not every KPI is made equal. When it comes to guiding your user acquisition for mobile games, some indicators are more useful than others.
Mobile gaming user acquisition
The particular thing about mobile gaming is that publishers tend to count on users to engage regularly — sometimes more than once a day or for hours at a time. Depending on which segment of the mobile gaming vertical you operate in, the regularity with which your users engage may even be critical to your monetization strategy.
With this in mind, the KPIs for mobile gaming will be different to that of e-commerce, fintech or crypto for example. Each has their own requirements in their own right, and now it is time to shine the light on key KPIs for mobile gaming user acquisition:
LTV
LTV stands for Lifetime Value, and is a way of calculating the value of a new user. In the respect of mobile gaming the LTV is how much that user is predicted to be worth to your mobile gaming app, over their whole relationship with your mobile game.
LTV is the measure that is used to determine each individual mobile gamer’s value from the overall pool of mobile game users that were acquired from that publisher’s traffic. It can also be looked at as the measure of the overall revenue that a customer will generate in their “lifetime” as a user of the app. Ultimately, it’s important to have as high an LTV for your mobile game users as possible.
Your users have an LTV even if your app is completely free. Calculating LTV will help you improve mobile gaming user acquisition tactics and increase ROAS whether they generate value through ad engagement, in-app transactions, or subscriptions.
Engagement & retention
These two measurements complement one another and are essential to the success of free, ad-supported mobile gaming apps. It is important to evaluate user behavior and activity level objectively using engagement metrics. Engagement KPIs assess how successfully your app keeps people who have already downloaded it active. Some games, especially action and strategy can use their levels as a metric for engagement. For example, users who reach at least level 10 are considered active users, who have high engagement with the app and are going to generate revenue. Retention is the percentage of users who continue engaging with an app over time. This app metric is typically measured at 30 days, 7 days, and 1 day after users first install the app.
You want to provide your mobile gaming users an incentive to play frequently and interact with adverts in addition to making sure they don't uninstall your app. Daily challenges or incentives are excellent ways to entice users to utilize the mobile game each day.
Cost per Install (CPI)
CPI stands for Cost Per Install, meaning that through this payout model, the advertiser pays the DSP (Demand Side Platform) or other media sources whenever a user installs and opens the app for the first time after having engaged with a given ad, published by marketers.
The KPI to consider is how much is each install costing you? This is crucial for all apps, but it's particularly critical for mobile games whose day-1 retention rate is considered successful if it is above 35%. It's critical to reduce the cost of attracting users to your mobile game when more than there is the expectation that half of the consumers you acquire will churn.
Conclusion
We’ve examined which KPIs are frequently tracked in mobile games, what makes a KPI essential, and some best practices to help you get the most out of those KPIs in this article.
It's time to put what you've learned into practice now that you have a better understanding of the key mobile gaming metrics to monitor. Applying them to your mobile gaming user acquisition strategy will be key to building a successful app install campaign.
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