{"id":2103,"date":"2019-09-02T08:34:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-02T08:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.frozax.com\/blog\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2019-09-02T08:34:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T08:34:06","slug":"an-indie-game-developer-discovering-the-world-of-user-acquisition-and-advertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.frozax.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/an-indie-game-developer-discovering-the-world-of-user-acquisition-and-advertising\/","title":{"rendered":"An indie game developer discovering the world of user acquisition and advertising (with numbers)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been developing mobile games as a hobby for more than 5 years. My latest game (Tents and Trees<\/a>) became quite successful and I decided to found my own company a few months ago. Tents and Trees has today about 800k downloads on Google Play<\/a> and 100k on iOS<\/a>\u00a0(oh, and 112 downloads on Amazon App Store…).<\/p>\n

\"appannie<\/a><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t do any marketing beyond posting on social networks (and I don\u2019t have many followers). I\u2019ve been lucky to have as many organic downloads as I\u2019ve had, but I wanted to try user acquisition, as the big guys do.
\nIt is a whole new topic for me, as I\u2019ve been mainly focusing on development, and usually, when I release a game, I move on to the next one rapidly. Also, when this was all a hobby for me, I was a bit reluctant to\u00a0inject\u00a0\u201cfamily money\u201d into it. Now that it\u2019s a company<\/a>, I can invest more of my personal money and be at ease.
\nMy experience was very interesting, as I learned a lot, discovered many acronyms (UA, LTV, CPI, CPE, KPI\u2026), and got many contacts from companies specialized in user acquisition or publishing.
\nI\u2019m sharing here my results, my process and some numbers obtained along the way. I hope you\u2019ll find some use for the information presented here, and maybe apply some of these same strategies to your own experience.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0goal<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

With about 8 times more downloads on Google Play compared to iOS, I am heavily dependent on Google as my source of revenue. That\u2019s a risk I want to lower, as I\u2019ve already had games removed from the Play Store overnight and I can\u2019t afford this risk. I also think the game has a potential to get more players on iOS. My main goal was to learn UA, but with a stronger focus on getting iOS players.<\/p>\n

Getting ready for UA<\/h1>\n

Until now, my downloads came from word of mouth or the Play Store algorithm. I had an initial spike on iOS on release because it was featured in some countries, but once the feature ended, downloads on iOS were terrible.<\/p>\n

Obviously, organic downloads are free, but you don\u2019t have much control over it. I\u2019m just glad it happened. When you start to spend money in UA, you need information from your player base. Basically, you \u201cpurchase\u201d players, and you want to measure their quality depending on the source (acquisition campaign). The quality of a user is basically its lifetime value (LTV), that is the money it brings back in the game. My revenue comes mostly from ads, and also from in-app purchases of virtual currency.<\/p>\n

\"chart<\/a><\/p>\n

Attribution SDKs<\/h1>\n

\"faa\"There are a few SDKs allowing you to perform user attribution. Attribution is being able to tell where the players found out about your game. It\u2019s a complex topic, because you need to find the connection between the click on an ad, the download and the execution (possibly a few days later) of the game. Nearly all SDKs have a cost (usually a few cents per attributed player). I decided to go with FreeAppAnalytics<\/a>, the light and free version of Kochava\u2019s solution. I found the setup of the partners and campaigns quite complex, but their support was very good. I can then track installs, tutorial completion, level completion but more importantly, ad views and in-app purchases.
\nAnd then, I was ready to track my UA campaigns!<\/p>\n

Computing LTV<\/h1>\n

One of the most frightening things in UA and, more generally, in analytics, is that depending on the source, you often get different results. I spent a lot of time trying to compute the LTV of my players. My most precise approach was to use data gathered from Game Analytics<\/a>. However, the features of the dashboard were a bit light and couldn\u2019t perform it directly on the website. I downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of raw data and wrote multiple computation scripts to gather interesting data. It\u2019s a complex problem and there is a lot of things to consider, such as:<\/p>\n