marketing and monetization for mobile indies
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Marketing and Monetization for Mobile Indies. Execution Labs’ Lessons from the Trenches Keith Katz. XL: A Bunch of Indies Under One Roof. Vexing Indie Issues We’re Tackling. What game do I build? When should I think about monetization? How should I tackle analytics? - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Marketing and Monetization for Mobile Indies
Execution Labs’ Lessons from the Trenches
Keith Katz
XL: A Bunch of Indies Under One Roof
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Vexing Indie Issues We’re Tackling
• What game do I build?• When should I think about monetization?• How should I tackle analytics?• What’s the best way to launch?• How do I monetize through ads?• What’s the best way to acquire users?• How do I deal with live ops?
What game do we build?
• Assumption: you want to make money• Look for a goldilocks pie slice• Find successful games like yours• More important (and harder): find failures like yours
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Sample Competitive Analysis
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When should I think about monetization?
• Critical to think about your levers from the beginning
• You can’t build a successful F2P game by designing gameplay and retrofitting F2P mechanics around it
• Important side note: use SDK’s that serve more than one function (more to come later)
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How do I launch my game?
• Roll out in small markets• NZ, Australia, (Taiwan) to make sure nothing’s
broken• Canada for monetization• Give yourself 30 days minimum before global
launch
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How should I tackle analytics?
• Utilize something a small team can use and act on• Getting baseline analytics gets you 80% there,
which is better than most• Give a team member ownership; lots of events to
track and hook up
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How do I monetize through advertising?
• None of our teams want to use banners• Flurry for video ads (already using their SDK); may
add others later• Chartboost for interstitials (using for acquisition and
cross-promo)• Playhaven for interstitials (also using their “Get
More Games” widget)
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How do I acquire users?
• We allocate $10k per team• $2k (ish) during pre-global rollout• During Beta, using Admob for icon testing,
Millennial for cheap CPC users, iAd Workbench, possibly Flurry
• Also using Chartboost (Lab Partners) & Playhaven
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How do I deal with live ops?
• Realize that your game is a service; this has to be part of your planning
• We will benchmark against each other; general stats for retention, conversion, etc. are only useful for games similar to your own
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Questions?
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