🥇Winning together: How to unify product and user acquisition teams – with Nebojsa Radovic, Growth Lead at N3TWORK Inc🤝

Our guest today is Nebojsa Radovic, Growth Lead for the N3twork Scale Platform at N3twork. I’m excited to have Nebo today, as he’s known, because I’ve known him for many many years – and he’s one of the smartest folks in UA. Nebo talks not just about UA – but also the extended ecosystem in which it can be most effective. We explore how collaboration with product, design and analytics teams can unlock tremendous performance in UA teams.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💡How Nebo’s UA team learned to understand how the game performs to unlock growth opportunities

👥How UA and game teams can work together to change the appeal of the game, improve onboarding, or build new games

🥅The ultimate goal is to improve the revenue and ROAS of the game.

🔄How a seamless flow between an ad, the App Store, and the game itself can impact retention and long-term monetization

⏰What works on UA changes as a game grows older.

🎣How a product team can think about ‘hooks’ that can attract users to a game.

🗣The importance of developing a common language between product and UA teams.

🛠How game team metrics like DAU, ARPDAU and retention are often a function of UA strategies.

🤔How the different infrastructure of UA and game teams is different can be a challenge

👀Thinking about analytics and design teams organizationally – along with game and UA teams.

🤖Designing in-game characters that can convert well on the UA front.

💪🏽The importance of a product marketing manager – and the kind of meeting cadence that makes sense for seamless collaboration.

KEY QUOTES

Why hyper casual has become more popular

Then all the changes that happened on the UA front made promoting mid-core games much harder in the last four years, and that’s why casual is winning and all you see nowadays are ads for Playrix games or Toon Blast or Toy Blast — games that are significantly more casual. This is a byproduct of Facebook and Google moving to different types of buying.

How to respond to market dynamics as a team

Then when you work closely with the game team and see that something’s not working, and it’s really hard to promote a particular type of game, then both of these two teams can work together to either change the appeal of the game, improve onboarding, or go even deeper and build games that do really well on certain types of traffic or certain types of monetization.

Breadth of audience steadily increases

What works on the UA front changes as the game gets older. Usually, when you start running UA for a certain game, you tap into the golden cohorts, and usually the performance is really good. As you start spending more money and more aggressively, it’s really hard to maintain the same kind of ROAS goals, which is why you also need to change the way you approach the creative. You need to go after a slightly broader audience, and that requires a different kind of both product and UA strategy.

Product-market fit

I think when game teams start working on a new game, they need to understand what are the current market trends, what are the current creative trends, and whether the gameplay they’re trying to build supports the theme they’re using – and can actually provide them all enough opportunity in the market where they can grow that game and turn it into hopefully a 100+ million dollar game.

Effective teams do not exist in silos

We would start working on predictions and figure out what the daily targets are for that month. Then we would work together towards hitting that goal. I think that’s quite crucial because games won’t grow without UA teams, and UA teams won’t be able to spend more money if games are not performing, so there is kind of a virtuous cycle there. They can easily turn into a vicious cycle if things start falling apart. That’s why the game teams need to consult with the UA teams and talk together and just understand, “Okay, how do we drive more users? What can we do to improve the UA performance?”

Team understanding has repeatedly saved the day

I still remember the days when we would do a tier four incent campaign where you’re paying half a cent for user, one cent per user, and the retention drops, ARPDAU drops, everything looks like crap. The game team just freaks out. But if the UA team does a good job explaining and giving a heads up to the team that something like that is going to happen and what the impact on ARPDAU is going to be, the game team is going to be just fine. As long as the revenue is growing, they’ll be grateful.

Retention is tightly coupled with UA and revenue

A lot of games have an issue where everything looks great in the first 30 days, but after 30 days, numbers just fall off the cliff. That’s usually because of lack of content in the game or poor long-term retention. If people stopped paying after 30 days, that means the revenue stacking is not occurring, and that means that you have to keep your payback windows really tight in order to keep your campaigns profitable. That’s why the UA team needs to understand what the retention profile of the game is, how the revenue stacking occurs and what it looks like.

Design teams also get insights from game metrics

In terms of design, UA design, and game design, one thing to play around with is because the game is event-based, and we have different characters in the game every week, can we design characters in the game that are converting while on the UA front? In order to minimize the friction that we talked about earlier on, can you improve the performance of your campaigns by finding specific topics and specific themes that work well on the UA front and have them in the game and vice versa? For example, we did some audience research two years ago, and we realized that people who play Legendary like heavy metal music, tattoos, and cosplay. Then we were testing those themes on the UA front in order to see whether the ROI is actually going to improve if we do that.

How to foster team collaboration

For larger companies and teams, it might be smart to have Product Marketing Managers mainly because one of the shortcomings of this approach is that you’re really looking to work with a unicorn who can understand both functions really well, and there’s not that many people who can do both things.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Nebojsa Radovic to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. We’ll call you Nebo — Nebo, welcome to the show.

Nebojsa: Thanks for inviting me. I’ve been following the show for a while now, and you’re doing some great stuff for the community, so thanks for that.

Shamanth: I’m very excited to have you because you’ve been highly recommended. You and I have actually moved in similar circles for a long time. We work in UA and have crossed paths for many years. Certainly, I’ve heard only very good things about all of the work you have done.

Nebojsa: Yeah, I thought about it as well. I’m pretty sure we met when you were still at Bash Gaming — if that was the name of the company. That was a long time ago and remember, huh?

Shamanth: Yeah. 2013. Just crazy those years.

Nebojsa: I remember coming to your office, and we had complimentary audiences. Bingo Bash was in the top 10 at the time, and we had a meeting with you guys a long time ago. We’re still here alive and kicking.

Shamanth: Yeah, doing very similar things. All very exciting. Of course, we’re going to talk about some of the ways in which UA has changed and evolved, and how your work and my work has changed in the world since then. Specifically, we’re going to talk about how there’s so much more of an interdependence between product and user acquisition as compared to a couple of years ago. This is certainly something you’d be much more at the forefront of because you work much more closely with game teams with what you do. I’m curious how you first started to think about this interdependence. What were some of the factors that inspired you to start thinking about how critical this interdependence needs to be for the success of a game?

Nebojsa: I was fortunate enough to join Network, which at the time was still a small team — I was employee number 30-35. So it was a one-game company. Legendary was the only kind of game that was making money at a time. Because it was a small team in a small company, I had a chance to sit and work on a daily basis with the game team. There was the setup that was there even before me. The people who were running the game were always sitting with the UA people and trying to understand how to unlock growth opportunities.

So I joined in April 2017. We just raised almost $40 million at the time, and we had to scale that game really, really aggressively. The goal was to scale in the smartest way possible. Since Legendary’s monetization is event-driven…how events perform and how the game performs has a pretty significant impact on UA performance and more specifically on payback windows. We wanted to keep the payback windows and pay the money back in under 120 and later 180 days. To be able to do that, the UA team really had to understand how the game performs. Over time we realized it’s not just about understanding, it’s also about unlocking growth opportunities and working with the game team to make changes that will potentially help us lower the cost, shorten the payback window, and improve ROAS. That’s how it all started, and overtime we just managed to improve that relationship and do pretty well.

Shamanth: Yeah, and I find that in smaller studios, that relationship can be much more easy to develop. You guys are oftentimes sitting in the same room, much like you pointed out, but again, I’ve also seen smaller studios where there still is a silo. By no means is that taken for granted. With that interdependence in place, what are some of the ways in which a UA team can impact product roadmaps in a way that can contribute to the overall growth of the game?

Nebojsa: Yeah, I’ll share part of my article and explain the part of the article about what the top grossing list looks like right now compared to 4 years ago. If you look at the top grossing charts on iTunes 4 years ago, you’ll see a lot of mid-core games.

I’ll give you a few examples. If suddenly CPMs on the ad monetization front are much higher, maybe we should show more ads in the game. Or if we can drive really cheap installs on SKAdNetwork, rewarded video networks, maybe we should improve the onboarding and make the game more accessible to larger audiences or improve the retention of users coming from those channels because it’s just better from a ROAS or payback windows standpoint. It starts from a very high level. The goal is to unlock growth opportunities. If these two teams have a common goal, which is to grow the revenue of the company, then they also have to work together to find and unlock these opportunities, and the examples I mentioned are just some of the ways you can do that.

If you look at some of the recent examples, it’s where game teams and UA teams work together. In the article, I mentioned Playrix and their games where they implement ads inside the game in order to minimize the friction and improve the retention as a result of that. When I say the friction, I’m talking about the friction between the ad and the onboarding. The other example I use is Hero Wars as well where they have those little puzzle ads inside the game. That way, they work on improving the retention and making the game more interesting to those users who come from those sources and ultimately improving the ROAS and the overall revenue of the game.

Shamanth: What you’re also hinting at is how there’s a seamless flow between an ad, the App Store, and the game itself. Speaking of HomeScapes, this is something they also started to put into their App Store iTunes later recently. I think it’s somewhat recent, they said “Oh, we have new minigames where you could rescue Austin the Butler.” That’s certainly something that’s a part of the ASO as well. I could definitely see how making that fairly seamless can definitely impact your retention and longer term monetization as well.

Nebojsa: There’s one more point that I think is important to bring up. UA often changes or

what works on the UA front changes as the game gets older. Usually, when you start running UA for a certain game, you tap into the golden cohorts, and usually the performance is really good. As you start spending more money and more aggressively, it’s really hard to maintain the same kind of ROAS goals, which is why you also need to change the way you approach the creative. You need to go after a slightly broader audience, and that requires a different kind of both product and UA strategy.

I think in this particular case, and HomeScapes and GardenScapes, they simply kind of saturated all the core audiences that were interested in Match 3. And now they’re going after slightly broader audiences that are interested in puzzles and just games overall. That’s another example where the game team and UA team need to work together. The game team needs to understand that the existing kind of wells of users or places where you can find good users are kind of drained and that they need to pivot and change the strategy.

Shamanth: They’re also probably going after users who want the storyline of Austin or Lily or any of the other characters. I think that becomes critical. If you would look at this dynamic from a product teams’ perspective, what are some of the ways in which it can be beneficial for a product team to understand market conditions and how UA works?

Nebojsa: I think you mentioned a good example about Lily and Austin. I think you could start from the very beginning when you design the game or the product that you want to build and launch, you should think about these hooks or baits for driving users to the game. So an example of HomeScapes, it’s a metric game, but it’s also a narrative-based game. You can use both of these elements to advertise, and you can tap into different audiences that way. On top of that, they added these little puzzles.

You have to think about a mix of art-style, theme, and gameplay that will yield you the highest possible amount of revenue. In order for them to understand that, at least at a high level, the game team should understand…What are the current trends? What are the current UA strategies that are working? Whether that’s Facebook AEO or VO or Google tCPA. For example, how a rewarded video traffic performs, so like users who come from the channel perform in the game. It doesn’t have to be a very specific or very detailed understanding of these channels, but at least if you’re building an IP-heavy game, you should understand the ways to track payers in the game. The most dominant way of driving payers in the game are Facebook VO and AEO. Then make sure that the monetization in the game reflects that. One way to do that is developing common language and making sure that the product teams are familiar with the latest UA strategies or successful UA strategies.

Shamanth: I think at the simplest level, if they’re at least familiar with what kind of ads the user sees, they at least know that this is the kind of direction they could be building the game in, the kind of aesthetic they could be building. One of the challenges I have seen when it comes to this sort of collaboration is that the distinction between UA and product can be very real in many companies – partly because they roll up to different org structures.

In one public company that I have some familiarity with, the UA team sits on one floor, and the product team sit on another, so they’re just part of completely different meetings other than one meeting per week where they just exchange notes and numbers. Let’s assume a company finds that they are in this form that is so siloed that the teams just don’t talk to each other. How do you envisage addressing this challenge and making sure there’s more of a collaboration between what are essentially two very different structures?

Nebojsa: One of the great things again, there was some sort of epiphany for me when I joined Network was that, you know,

We started working on goals together for the game team and the UA team. The goal for this month would be let’s say, we’re going to spend $5 million or $2 million. We would work with the game team to see what that would mean in terms of the revenue for that month.

We would start working on predictions and figure out what the daily targets are for that month. Then we would work together towards hitting that goal. I think that’s quite crucial because games won’t grow without UA teams, and UA teams won’t be able to spend more money if games are not performing, so there is kind of a virtuous cycle there. They can easily turn into a vicious cycle if things start falling apart. That’s why the game teams need to consult with the UA teams and talk together and just understand, “Okay, how do we drive more users? What can we do to improve the UA performance?”

I think the crucial thing here is to develop common language. In the case of small teams, that’s much easier as you said because pretty much everybody sits in the same room and, the people on the game team can understand what the UA team is working on. In the case of bigger teams, we’ve talked a lot about the role of a Product Marketing Manager and someone sits in between those two teams and bridges the gap. So that’s one solution. When you think about it, if the game team wants to grow its revenue, they need to understand where the new users are coming from, and how the new users are affecting or impacting the revenue growth and revenue stacking. If most of your revenue is coming from the users who are in their first 90 days of their lifetime. If 90 days is the payback goal for the UA team, that basically means that you need a lot of new users in the game, and the ARPI and CPI need to be equal in the first 90 days or basically the campaigns need to be profitable. If it turns out that users don’t retain in the game after 90 days, that means the ARPI won’t grow, and that will mean that the UA team won’t be able to spend more money.

There are multiple ways to address that, you can either improve the monetization, which is not always easy, or you can lower the CPI, which is also not always easy. So, the best way to solve this problem is if both teams push and do their best to improve the monetization and lower the cost. Another example that explains why it’s important to develop common language is that the game teams have different targets. They worry about DAU, monetizing DAU, ARPDAU etc. But the thing is all of these metrics can vary quite a bit if different UA strategies are deployed.

That’s an example where these two teams have to work together, so there’s no scrambling on the game side to figure out what the hell is going on with ARPDAU. At the same time, there is no need or pressure on the UA team to pause those campaigns even though they’re a net positive for the company. We had those examples in the past that’s why these are very specific.

Shamanth: I actually worked on a game, and it’s so important to have that common language and understanding, because eventually you’re all shooting for the same goal, which is to grow the game, the UA team, and the game team. I actually had an experience a couple of years ago, that the game was hugely profitable, but its LTV, according to a lot of the dashboards was really bad.

And they were like, “Oh, we’re not going to invest money in this. But this is so hugely profitable. We have to invest money, but we don’t know how to do it.” So that was a conundrum. And eventually, the answer we figured out was there’s a lot of year 2 LTV and year 3 LTV, let’s just extend the payback window, and that will let us invest in it and it took a lot of brainstorming to arrive at that point.

But all of that to underscore what you said about how important it is to find common ground. One of the challenges also tends to be that the infrastructure for UA and game teams is different. As UA managers, we’re looking at cohorted numbers. As game teams, they’re just looking at overall numbers. Do you find there is a way of bridging that gap in the infrastructure? Or, should one team look at the other team’s infrastructure? Because for whatever reason, there is no unified infrastructure or data stack that addresses that needs of both game teams and UA teams. How do you recommend thinking about this?

Nebojsa: Yeah, so in our case, the overlap is pretty high. I’ll mention the same example from earlier about incent traffic and specific traffic channels. The reason why the ROI needs to be high is because the game team still wants to know what’s the ARPDAU for a certain group of users that’s behaving pretty consistently. That’s why they need to understand what’s the contribution of paid users and organic users to the revenue and overall economy. For example, if the team wants to use Facebook VO users as a group of users that are behaving consistently, they need to know that those are Facebook VO users. At the same time, the game team needs to understand how the game performs in different geos, on different platforms, and different OS versions to know what type of decisions to make on the UA front for the game.

It’s really important to understand how the game performs from the retention and revenue stacking standpoint. So a lot of games that they work with, and, now, I’m mostly focused on the publishing side of things, on Network’s scale platform,

a lot of games have an issue where everything looks great in the first 30 days, but after 30 days, numbers just fall off the cliff. That’s usually because of lack of content in the game or poor long-term retention. If people stopped paying after 30 days, that means the revenue stacking is not occurring, and that means that you have to keep your payback windows really tight in order to keep your campaigns profitable. That’s why the UA team needs to understand what the retention profile of the game is, how the revenue stacking occurs and what it looks like.

For example, does the cohort make more money in the second month of their lifetime than in the first month? Based on that, what does the LTV curve look like? This is the reason why we work so closely with the game team in order to understand the behavior. If you want to spend a few million dollars a month on a certain game, and you don’t understand what happens in month two, month three, month four in the game, then it’s likely that at some point, you’ll just waste a lot of money. You’ll get into a death spiral of UA where you have to scale things down, the game is not growing. People start pointing fingers at each other. But ultimately, it’s because there was not enough understanding on the UA side and the game side, and how these two tactics or strategies best work together.

Shamanth: When we talk about this sort of collaboration, there are also teams that are adjacent to game teams and UA teams. Specifically I’m thinking about design and analytics. How do you recommend organizationally thinking about alignment between UA design teams, UA analytics teams and game design teams, game analytics teams? So that’s just four sets of constituencies like that, how do you recommend thinking about them organizationally?

Nebojsa: In our case, marketing analytics people are also part of the larger analytics group in the company. So they work together on making sure that the reporting is there, it’s real-time or near real-time and, both the game team and the UA team have the best possible data set to work with. They communicate quite often. The goal is not to understand every single specific thing about UA, but to understand where for example spend data is, campaign data is, and how the game team can use that data to make the best possible decisions. There should be a pretty high overlap between marketing analytics and overall game analytics in the company. These two functions should work closely together to make sure that teams have all the available levers in place to make the best possible decisions.

I think because of the kind of abundance of data that both teams have, there’s a lot of opportunities to work together and to inspire each other by just using what the other side knows. And it’s not always easy. Sometimes, those two teams have different goals, but they can also unblock each other in times when they’re not really aware of what the next step should be.

Shamanth: Exactly. I think there’s definitely a lot of inspiration that artists can get from each other just from looking at what’s out in the market and what’s happened in the game. I think there’s just a lot of opportunity. What sort of a meeting cadence could make sense to ensure that this kind of collaboration is most fruitful?

Nebojsa:

That’s why sometimes it’s better to have a person who’s basically in charge of making sure that the two teams are aligned and they’re doing their best work. In this case, they will be a Product Marketing Manager.

When it comes to smaller teams, It’s much easier because everybody sits together, and people are more up to date on what’s going on on each front. I think in terms of cadence, and how often these two or three teams should meet, in case a product marketing manager should work together, it depends a lot on the amount of spend and revenue as well. So if you’re spending a few million dollars a month, you need to meet every day because there’s more at stake. When you spend $200,000-300,000 a day, you really have to know where the money’s going and what’s going on because mistakes can be quite costly.

In our case, we were meeting every day and there’s still someone from the UA team attending daily stand ups of game teams every day because we want to make sure that teams are aligned and are making the best decisions. In terms of when it comes to some earlier products that are in soft launching early development, the cadence is not as frequently mainly because there is no need for that. As the game starts scaling up and spending more money and the team starts spending more money, there’s definitely a need to meet more frequently.

Shamanth: Yeah, indeed. I think that this collaboration can put in place a virtuous cycle where the product team can help the UA team perform better, and the UA team can help the product team perform better. That can help the games grow very substantially. That’s something certainly you and your team at Network have definitely done just in the last couple of years. I’ve been very, very impressed by the magnitude of what you guys have achieved. Nebo, I think that’s perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. As we finish, can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you?

Nebojsa: Yeah, feel free to add me on LinkedIn. Just search for Nebo Network — should be fairly easy to find me. I am occasionally writing on medium, my blog, so it’s medium.com/eniac. That’s my online handle. I’m fairly active on Twitter as well, but the best way to reach out to me is probably on LinkedIn, where I’m fairly active. If you have any questions or want to learn more about how these two teams can work together and how to unlock growth opportunities, I’m always happy to talk to industry friends, so feel free to reach out.

Shamanth: Excellent. We will link to all of that in the show notes. Nebo, as always, this has been incredibly instructive. Thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show

Nebojsa: Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a great experience, so hopefully we’ll do more in the future.

Shamanth: Absolutely.

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