ABOUT JEROME: LinkedIn  | APPLOVIN




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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🕹 How metrics differ for hyper casual games vs. match-3 games

🔧 The benefits of fine-tuning during the pre-launch phase 

📆 The impact of the hyper-competitive Q4 when launching an app

📣 Is cross promotion within and across other studios beneficial?

🏃🏽‍♀️Player motives that were tested out before launch of Project Makeover

👥 The team structure during the launch of Project Makeover

KEY QUOTES

Different targets for different genres

And the way that we look at it is what is the breakeven target for these titles? So a hyper casual game will tend to have a break even of maybe a couple of days or maybe up to a week. The casual games, the more successful ones have a longer tail, you could be looking at a year’s time for a breakeven.

Why Project Makeover’s hit creatives resonate

The tagline for the game is to give makeovers to help people achieve their dreams. And so that’s kind of fun, or could be a comical experience having a make over and one approach that we’ve explored is testing a kind of a win, or a fail motive. So the win motive is if you have a successful makeover, and the person can achieve their dream, and then maybe the fail is they’re not at that point yet, then there’s some comedy that can come in. Those get people’s attention, make them laugh, and drive interest in the game.

Did Apple’s privacy policy changes impact Project Makeover’s launch?

One thing I agree with is that user behavior hasn’t changed. It’s really just a measurement, or measurement challenge that’s new. So there’s some historical precedent that you can lean on. What did monetization or what did user behavior look like In the pre-ATT world? I don’t think that’s changed too much. There are also ways to lean on data sets from the small subset of consenting users on iOS to make decisions. What I would note is that – this is not so much for Project Makeover but for other titles, ad monetization, or the ad ARPIs on iOS have taken a hit.

The team structure at Applovin

We’ve structured our teams around the game category or type. And that’s because we see that there are learnings that are more scalable and relevant there. Other structures have been channel specific. That’s how we operated at Machine Zone, before we joined AppLovin. That’s because there were fewer titles. And we saw that this specialty has a very channel specific focus, but we do it by categories. So we’ll have a match category, they have insights from other match games that they’ve worked on. And our team will manage some part of the UA, whereas the studio will have their own in-house UA team.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Jerome Turnbull to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Jerome, welcome to the show.

Jerome: Thanks Shamanth, great to be here.

Shamanth: I’m very thrilled to have you because I’ve heard so much about your experiences. And I could see how deeply and how in a nuanced way you approach all things growth and user acquisition. The other reason I’m excited to have you is because we’re going to deconstruct a game that has been a phenomenon over the last year or two. And I’m very intrigued by many aspects of this launch. We’re going to dig into all of that today. To get started, I’m curious. What are some of the metrics or signals that you and your team look at prior to greenlighting a game for worldwide launch?

Jerome: Retention is always the first indicator, and we want to ask ourselves if we’ve created an experience that engages users.

Shamanth: How do these metrics differ for different genres? For instance, something like Project Makeover, which we’re going to talk about, is going to be very different from hypercasual. So how do these signals differ for different genres?

Jerome: We want to look at monetization. These games need to generate revenue for us, that could be either through in-app purchases, or through ad monetization. So for a hyper-casual game like you mentioned, those tend to lean more on ad monetization. For casual games, it’s heavier on in-app purchases, but there still can be a mix between the two.

And the way that we look at it is what is the breakeven target for these titles? So a hyper casual game will tend to have a break even of maybe a couple of days or maybe up to a week. The casual games, the more successful ones have a longer tail, you could be looking at a year’s time for a breakeven. So we take those factors into account when we’re looking at the retention rate, and then the monetization.

Shamanth: So there’s a retention target that the game needs to hit, and there’s the monetization that you look at for the app. What’re the monetization metrics we’re looking at?

Jerome: In many cases, we start with just retention. We won’t have any monetization in the game, and we’re observing how the players are interacting. And then as the title develops, we start layering in other forms of monetization, and comparing those against what we see. So there are category level benchmarks. For example, in the case of a casual game for retention, you’re probably in a good spot if you have a D1 retention rate above 40%, a D7 above 20% and a D30 above 10%.

Shamanth: We started speaking about Project Makeover. I understand that you guys launched in November 2020, but it was live in the app stores some time prior to this launch. Help us understand what was the purpose and the idea behind this pre-launch phase. And what happens during that pre-launch phase to prepare for what is, the official launch?

Jerome: A lot of things are happening during that time. User acquisition began in September. So there were two months of runway before the global launch. On the studio side, they were refining the user experience. They were setting their targets for D7, D14, D30 monetization. You’ll want to have some cohorts at the time of global launch that have been in the game for some time so that you have a better understanding or more predictability about what the long term LTV could be. The studio will continue to improve and they’ll continue to add content to the tail. On the marketing side, that’s when we’re refining to go to market strategy.

Shamanth: So Project Makeover launched in November 2020. This was after Apple announced its privacy changes. How did these changes impact launch plans and post-launch plans?

Jerome: There was no impact for launch. The privacy changes were announced but it wasn’t until June 2021 that we really saw an impact on the consent/non-consent ATT framework. That was when there was a forced update for iOS 14.6. That being said, we were planning a lot of changes with our product team.

Shamanth: I would imagine this was still early on and a lot of the ATT build-up happened afterwards. Given that the launch happened in November, another big factor was the Christmas and holiday season. How did that impact the planning for the game and the launch?

Jerome: The Christmas season is a very competitive time in the mobile marketing space. You have a lot of new devices coming online within the Q3 Q4 period. Users have a lot of recreational time. So that’s why we like to get new games out in front of players. So the launch in November was intentional. Any other developer would be trying to get things out at that time period. Things continue to get expensive throughout at least in western markets leading up to Thanksgiving in the US, and then Christmas. The more momentum you can build coming into that period, helps out. 

Shamanth: As user acquisition gets more competitive, costs get more expensive. Would it not be more challenging to market during Christmas? And how did you guys think about the fact that it would actually get challenging?

Jerome: It’s challenging because everyone else wants to be marketing during that period since there’s so much recreational time available. How do you handle that? You want to have a refined strategy for that period. And that was a lot of the pre-launch phase – the right creative, the right messaging, that the game metrics are in a good state to buy and take that risk on

Shamanth: What you’re saying underscores that the game itself has to be strong, so that the higher costs can be supported. Because if the game isn’t quite in the best place, it might not always make sense to go big during Christmas and Q4.

Jerome: Exactly. What differentiates a hit from other titles is just how good is the long term monetization for these games, particularly, the match 3 game that we’re talking about here?

Shamanth: I would imagine a cross promo from the other studios as a part of every launch strategy. And if that’s the case, how effective was the cross promo from the other games?

Jerome: It’s a key part of the strategy. For casual games, we see that players will play multiple games at once. For more strategy, hardcore games, that might be a lower number, and they might dedicate their time just to one or two games. But for Project Makeover, there’s not much harm in cross promoting users to another title, within the studio or even within the network. So AppLovin drives over 8 billion app installs through our platform. We’re viewing it as a network, and we ask ourselves: how do we give users the option to move between different gaming experiences within the network?

Shamanth: I know you talked about creatives and the creative strategy. I find some of the creatives to be both hilarious and over the top. And maybe they’re hilarious, because they’re over the top. But I’m just curious – and I do see a couple that seem to be consistently winning, at least when I look at a third party analysis. So tell us about these creatives and tell us what inspired them. 

Jerome:

The tagline for the game is to give makeovers to help people achieve their dreams. And so that’s kind of fun, or could be a comical experience having a make over and one approach that we’ve explored is testing a kind of a win, or a fail motive. So the win motive is if you have a successful makeover, and the person can achieve their dream, and then maybe the fail is they’re not at that point yet, then there’s some comedy that can come in. Those get people’s attention, make them laugh, and drive interest in the game.

We try to keep it positive and tasteful. And when we’re going through this process of testing, there’s two tracks. We work very closely with our Spark Labs team for this and I’m very grateful for all the resources that we have for that. It’s expensive to come up with a brand new idea – that’s one track. We run that every once in a while. For the existing things, we can iterate on a concept and maybe test different ways to show a win or fail.

Shamanth: Showing an emotional peak in terms of win or fail – sounds like that’s what resonated. And there’s certainly a lot of talk about player motivations and how they can impact not just the gameplay itself, but also the ad creative. And I’m curious if you guys tested motivations other than the win and fail motives that you talked about? Or did you guys infer that the win and fail states of the makeover – these are the ones that are winning, let’s keep doubling down on them. Or were there other motivations, other themes of concepts that you guys felt had legs and you guys tested? 

Jerome: Yes, there are a lot of motives out there. I think another one might be, how it started and how it’s going. So these are almost kind of meme-like trends or motives. And you’ll see in the mobile space that there’s a lot of inspiration taken from other games. Within our own network we have other design style games that we’ve been able to test and then carry over learnings and insights. And as you’ve noted, there’s add intelligence tools where you can see what else is out there and kind of be inspired by those messages as well. So we tested many of them. I think the win-fail is one that kind of stands out to me.

Shamanth: I know we briefly talked about ATT and Apple’s privacy policy changes. And obviously, we have been with ATT for a few months now. Post ATT, considering all of the measurements are completely shaken up, how did you approach measurement on iOS? And how do you look at the incremental impact of a channel or different channels after ATT?

Jerome: I was listening to one of the previous podcasts you had about SKAN with some thought leaders in the space. I think there are a lot of relevant points, if people want to go back and listen to that one.

One thing I agree with is that user behavior hasn’t changed. It’s really just a measurement, or measurement challenge that’s new. So there’s some historical precedent that you can lean on. What did monetization or what did user behavior look like In the pre-ATT world? I don’t think that’s changed too much. There are also ways to lean on data sets from the small subset of consenting users on iOS to make decisions. What I would note is that – this is not so much for Project Makeover but for other titles, ad monetization, or the ad ARPIs on iOS have taken a hit.

Shamanth: I’m also curious in terms of measurement, considering a lot of it’s gone, how do you look at whether a new channel to the mix is even valuable? Do you look at installs or CPIs? What does the criteria look like for whether a new channel is a success or not?

Jerome: So one approach for iOS is to slim down your portfolio, so that there are fewer variables, and then look at your marketing as a whole.

Shamanth: Let’s say you have three channels, and you’re layering on a fourth, you have a baseline, it sounds like you’re saying – look, how much does afford one add to what was happening before? I’m curious what the methodologies look like. Is that using a spreadsheet and saying, this is organic baseline, this is the lift, maybe in a certain geo. Is it something akin to media mix modeling? Or is there something in between? And how do you think about the mechanics of measuring that lift?

Jerome: For the example that you’re describing, if you have to run with fewer channels, you probably have to increase the budgets on new channels in order to see a lift. And it could be either from an organic baseline, or, hey, we doubled our spend, and we didn’t see revenue double- that’s usually a bad sign that your channel’s not working.

Shamanth: A big part of the launch is obviously the team, yourself included. So I’m curious, what does the team look like? What does the structure look like in the pre-launch phase, during the launch, and afterwards?

Jerome:

We’ve structured our teams around the game category or type. And that’s because we see that there are learnings that are more scalable and relevant there. Other structures have been channel specific. That’s how we operated at Machine Zone, before we joined AppLovin. That’s because there were fewer titles. And we saw that this specialty has a very channel specific focus, but we do it by categories. So we’ll have a match category, they have insights from other match games that they’ve worked on. And our team will manage some part of the UA, whereas the studio will have their own in-house UA team.

It’s almost necessary at this point, given how competitive the space is. Whether we split that out by region, or we split that out by different channels, we work together to grow the overall user base. 

Shamanth: Yeah, I certainly think this has been incredibly instructive. And I know we are coming up on time. So perhaps this is a good place for us to start to wrap. But before we do that, Jerome, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Jerome: Yeah, if you’d like to learn more about AppLovin, and what we’re doing, I think a great place to start is our website. There you can also learn more about our partner studios and how AppLovin helps those studios grow. You can also check out our blog, social channels, and reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Shamanth: Wonderful, Jerome. And this has been an incredible behind the scenes look at I think what’s been one of the biggest hits of the last couple of years. And thank you for taking us behind the scenes. Thank you for sharing all of your insights. This is perhaps a good place for us to wrap thank you for being a guest on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Jerome: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoy the show and I’m looking forward to future content.

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