There sure is no one-solution fit all strategy for user
acquisition. A strategy needs to be in-place after identifying who the users of
the app are? What is the genre of the game and what is its novelty? How many
users do you want to acquire in a day, a week, 10 days etc? What is the true
purpose of this game – earn money, brand awareness, marketing a product, a
teaser for a something big etc? The most important question would be: What is
the budget for user acquisition?
>0-low budget
Basic marketing – tell people about the app, tell your
friends, your families, your friends of families and ask them to tell others. Maximize
marketing through YouTube, Facebook, twitter. If it’s a kid’s educational game,
organize talks in schools, communities, etc... Engineer user acquisition
methods and virality in the game-play - Social gameplay – “ex: In a city
building game invite a friend to get a new free tractor for farming”. Keep
rewarding for every invited friend but with a ceiling. Allow in-game achievements
to be announced through social media and maximize announcements through the
medium.
>low-mid budget
Advertising to the right segment after careful slicing
and dicing users would be possible with a decent budget for the game. One other
aspect to make a note is to track the progress. With some room to play, and a
flexible plan you could employ a certain strategy for user acquisition and then
tweak it based on how well / bad it is working out…
Engagement reward programs offered through Ad agencies offering
Incented ads - Kiip, Tapjoy, Beintoo etc offer starter programs for user
acquisition which entice users to download and try your app in return for a
reward inside another game. Free App-a-day services are also an option...
>mid-high budget
The answer is more advertising and advertising more.
Optimizing search engines, Search Ads, in-mobile web ads, in-app ads, PR, and
increased visibility of the game through hitting the app-store charts.
Generally it takes about 80,000 installs/day to be in Top-10 on Apple list of
top games (in US – the most competitive). It’s important to set and measure
KPI’s - ROI, Cost/new user, revenue/new user, retention rate etc over different
periods of time - /day /week /month and /life time,
One real life example (source: confidential): With a
sufficient budget for advertising and hitting through all the channels and
sources the game achieved 90,000 installs in a day and this further grew
organically to 2 Million downloads in a matter of 15 days after hitting the
apple charts.
However, for a game to go truly viral it still depends
on fundamentals like uniqueness / novelty of the game, the target segment and
interestingly, the download size (wifi only limitation for games>50MB).Things to keep in mind during Monetization
- The increase in installs will depend on several variables, such as the current rank in app store, marketing, promotion, and potential cross promotion.
- Increase ARPPU by offering large bundles in-app purchases.
- Offer Consumables instead of fixed items for sale in-app
- If you have other titles, go hard on cross promotion
- Featuring Ads in Apple/Google
- Track the ratio of daily active users to total registered users which tells how engaging the game is or how strong the demand is
- To increase the engagement, tweak the game parameters
- Track user purchase pattern, and re-sort the most popular packages for users to buy
- Give incentive to buying users to make larger purchases (consider unfair advantage)
