๐ Growth Gems #67 - Subscription Monetization, Lifecycle/CRM and Paid UA
Hi there,
This week Iโm sharing gems on Google UAC and Unity Ads, Lifecycle/CRM and improving subscription apps monetization. These insights come from Fillippos Drogitis, Lukasz Baranowsky, Belen Battaglini, Aleksandra ลฝivkoviฤ and Dan Burcaw.
Enjoy!
P.S. Iโm taking some time off ๐ ๐ด so there will be no newsletter edition on May 31, and the next edition will be on June 14. But you can always follow @growthgems for #1GemEveryDay!
๐ฅ TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
Paid UA: Google Ads, Unity Ads
The GameCamp webinars rarely disappoint.
This one is no exception to the rule, with Filippos Drogitis (Regional VP of Growth Team at Reality Games) and Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games) presenting a deep dive into their Google App Campaigns strategy in User Acquisition is a marathon, not a sprint.
Very relevant for non-games too.
๐ When starting campaigns, be careful of the LTV curve assumptions youโre using to define your acquisition efforts and spend. Your LTV curve for users acquired through paid UA might be different from the LTV curve of your organic users.
by Filippos Drogitis (Regional VP of Growth Team at Reality Games)
at 06:55
๐ When setting Google UAC campaigns optimizing for the in-app purchase event (e.g. Firebase in-app purchase event), consider a shorter conversion window than what the system suggests (e.g. 2 weeks conversion window).
by Filippos Drogitis (Regional VP of Growth Team at Reality Games)
at 10:50
๐ A way to target better quality users with smaller scale campaigns is to:
Analyze the in-app events (e.g buying skills, watched 20 ads in 3 days, etc.) and corresponding user behavior and LTV
Select the most popular and valuable events
Test campaigns optimizing for them by using audience trigger events in Firebase
by Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 11:40
๐ tROAS and CPA campaigns require a lot of scale to work. For geos where this is not possible, having smaller campaigns with different optimization strategies (e.g. using audience trigger events) still allows you to advertise and gives you the flexibility to use localized creatives.
by Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 14:24
โ๏ธ Going Deeper: Fillippos later shared two important pieces of advice when starting new campaigns.
Itโs very important to make your campaigns incremental. If you run 2 campaigns at the same time in the same country, you have to be very careful how you pick the audience so the campaigns donโt overlap. Otherwise youโre bidding against yourself and losing money.
Itโs better to start with CPI campaigns than CPA/ROAS campaigns to make sure that your MMP is working well, that youโre collecting the data correctly and that everything is connected properly. It also lets you look into engagement/retention data so you can continue improving monetization.ย
๐ For a game monetizing with both ads and in-app purchases, use a predictor to adapt your bidding strategy for each market:
Calculate a predictor based on the number of ads watched
Divide the number of purchases by that predictor
This allows you to highlight countries that monetize well with purchases (e.g. US and Germany below) and where you should base campaigns on in-app purchases and countries that do not monetize well with purchases (e.g. Turkey and Egypt below) where you should base ad-based campaigns (like โ20 watched ads in 3 days).
by Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 17:32
๐ With Unity Ads, campaigns can scale up very quickly overnight so pay attention to your daily caps. Consider starting with below-benchmark CPIs to see if they get out of the learning phase and increase accordingly.
by Filippos Drogitis (Regional VP of Growth Team at Reality Games)
at 20:08
๐ Monitor cohorts D1, D7, D14, D30, etc. and LTV curves in short, mid and long term. Not every country/campaigns has the same LTV curve: some countries have good short-term ROAS but worse long-term ROAS, and vice versa.
by Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 23:11
๐ Organize your ad groups by themes. Examples for Landlord Go:
โTechโ ad group - ads related to the technical side of the game (e.g. how they use GPS or big data)
โNewsโ ad group - โclickbait-yโ adsย
โFunโ ad group - ads with people having fun together, playing with family
by Lukasz Baranowski (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 26:40
โ๏ธ Going Deeper: a good complement to this conversation on Google UAC is the podcast episode โThinking Out of the Black Box to Win with Google UACโ from the Mobile User Acquisition show. You can read the gems from it below๐
Lifecycle/CRM: user behavior, extension of product
Itโs hard to come across discussions that are insightful about lifecycle marketing and CRM.
It might be because itโs so specific to each product that it ends up in โpersonalizeโ and โright message at the right timeโ statements.
But at the last APS London, Eloise Shuttleworth (Senior Director of Customer Success at Iterable) had a discussion with Belen Battaglini (Mobile Tech CRM Manager at Zalando) and Aleksandra ลฝivkoviฤ (CRM Manager at Nordeus) with some good insights and perspectives.
๐ Make sure you understand your usersโ behaviors and that youโre not being driven by what you expect your usersโ behaviors to be.
by Belen Battaglini (Mobile Tech CRM Manager at Zalando)
at 11:53
๐ Nordeus tracks every single comment or piece of feedback they get on their different channels and try to incorporate this into their decision process. CRM works with the community and user research team to understand user sentiment. Example of impact: introduced the 3D Live Matches in Top Eleven, one of the most requested features from the community.
by Aleksandra ลฝivkoviฤ (CRM Manager at Nordeus)
at 13:11
๐ Understand your users, and what is the natural usage frequency for your specific app. This is how you can find the sweet spot between being too pushy and too relaxed. Example: for a social media app you expect a high frequency and long sessions, for a banking app you expect users to be able to perform the required actions quickly.
by Belen Battaglini (Mobile Tech CRM Manager at Zalando)
at 23:26
๐ Think of CRM as an extension of your product experience: they are not two different things. Think about communications as a whole and not as individual messages.
by Belen Battaglini (Mobile Tech CRM Manager at Zalando)
at 25:12
๐ Mapping all your communications on different channels in relation to important milestones in your app helps you identify where there might be some pain points in the product that you can reduce with CRM communications.
by Belen Battaglini (Mobile Tech CRM Manager at Zalando)
at 25:34
Subscription Monetization: the right fit, testing, personalization
You might have noticed this topic is one of my personal favoriteโฆ
Esther Shatz (VP Product Marketing & Consultancy at Storemaven) talked with Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML - subscription apps platform) about strategies and tactics related to growing and monetizing subscription apps in Why and How to Develop Subscription-Based Apps with Dan Burcaw of Nami ML.
Gems below!
๐ Even before you figure out how to monetize, figure out:
How to get an audience that is growing
The messaging that resonates with this audience so you donโt have to fight a churn problem later on
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 08:37
๐ If youโre going to have multiple Custom Product Pages, you might as well have multiple paywalls that are aligned with the different messaging angle that youโre trying out (or acquisition campaigns that youโre trying on).
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 12:00
โ๏ธ Going Deeper: unfortunately Apple still hasnโt yet put something in place to know which CPP users are coming from once they are in the app so for now the only way is to ยซย triageย ยป users during onboarding. But submit your developer requests!
๐ The ultimate goal might be to get users into a subscription i.e. finding the segments that are the right fit for the subscription. But you also want to find if there is an opportunity for users that are not the right fit for the subscription: light experience with some value exchange, segment of audience that you still want to have in the product, etc.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 17:30
โ๏ธ Going Deeper: Thomas Petit also talked about this Growth Gems #60. You might have way to leverage network effects with free users.
๐ A mentality mistake that sometimes people make is that they are jamming users through the acquisition funnel and want to convert them all to a subscription. What theyโre missing is that the subscription is not going to be right for everybody.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 18:15
๐ You need to have some general behavioral analytics to understand what different cohorts of users are doing. Example: casual users that are in the app only once a month -> decide what you want to do with this.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 19:05
๐ You need to be clear on what youโre trying to determine when A/B testing. If you donโt know all the inputs to your test or A/B tests (e.g. acquisition channel and the type of users coming to it), you might get an answer about an audience that youโre not really focused on. Example: messaging about free coins for a slot game will almost always increase your download conversion rate, but you wonโt monetize these users.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 21:08
๐ Itโs pretty common for a web SaaS product to ask users that signed up about how they found out about the product. Drop off in mobile B2C is pretty steep and it makes it harder to do this, but maybe we should try finding UI patterns that allow us to survey users so you can personalize the experience.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 24:05
๐ A common mistake is to spend a lot of time on marketing (product pages, videos, etc.) but not paying enough attention to the upsell screen.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 30:30
๐ Often, people look at their peer set for pricing and paywall and assume that it must be working for them, but some of these things are afterthoughts for several developers. You might be missing out on opportunities if you just go with supposed best practices and mimic other apps without understanding how they have come to these conclusions.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 31:37
๐ When it comes to paywalls, itโs important to have a mindset and investments that are about gaining flexibility, so that you can adapt the paywall and offering easily. Treat this as a canvas that is never finished: there are always opportunities to learn.
by Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
at 37:15
And before I leave, a quote from Dan on not getting bogged down on pricing and paywalls at the very beginning (and testing later):
โIf youโre a new app, just start!โ - Dan Burcaw (CEO at Nami ML)
See you next time. Stay savvy!
โ๏ธ Sylvain