User acquisition strategy in the gaming industry

Background

User acquisition is an essential component of any app’s marketing strategy, especially in the mobile gaming industry. During 2016-2021, while the gaming industry has achieved a double-digit YoY growth rate, user growth and revenue growth has slowed down, requiring gaming company to both refine the quality of games and enhance game launch ability. Excellent distribution ability is the amplifier of a high-quality game, and a targeted user acquisition strategy helps to maximize user growth.

High-quality content and large traffic acquisition are complementary. The difference in player preference and behavior gives each game an opportunity to precisely target the player groups, and a deliberately designed advertising system facilitates the targeting process.

The system is composed of three major business modules: placement, data, and strategy, each of which has a key focus.

Placement: optimize user acquisition efficiency

For gaming companies, placement is the foundation of all business. Gaming companies own the user data to track the resources, analyze user behavior, and optimize their user structure and revenue structure.

Data: revenue and profit performance

Data focus on the company-level financial data. Gaming companies tracks the revenue and profit, set budget, profitability and ROI target to each games, and this in turn will guide the overall user acquisition and marketing strategy.

Strategy: Internal & external integration

Gaming companies typically own diverse genre of games and requires different marketing strategy accordingly. Therefore, strategy in gaming companies occupies an important position to connect both internal and external by data-driven insights. Internally, strategy refines insights from data to solve the questions to products. Why did the ARPU of a channel recently remain low? How to explore more conversion targets? How to quickly find the right audience? How do select advertising materials and improve their application value? These answers can be told by numbers owned by gaming companies. Externally, strategy explores more user acquisition possibilities, such as targeting strategy to certain channels or user segments, or optimizing ROI effect by diversifying distribution channels such as RTA, online streaming, etc. Also, it helps to allocate brand marketing budgets to ensure organic user growth and increase user LTV.