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CPC CPI Cover
6 min read
#Ads & Monetization

How to Calculate CPI, CPC, eCPM and More

In our last foray into the mystical land of obscure acronyms, we explored terms like Daily Active Users (DAU). Today, we’re getting out our machetes and hacking away the mystery surrounding CPI, CPC, CPM, and more. So let’s get out the jargon repellant and start wading in the long grass. Heads up. There’s an online calculator for this stuff if you want to cut some corners. Check it out here. How to calculate CPI: Cost Per Install You can pick a date range or your total When you’re looking at your ad spend and installs, you’ll probably want to look at the last quarter’s figures. But this can really be any range you like. Last month. Last week. The whole lifetime of your game. It’s up to you. See whether less-direct marketing is working People are sometimes unpredictable, and often...
Adjust Email Marketing
9 min read
#Guides

Your 101 guide to email marketing to mobile apps

Email marketing is a critical part of a healthy overall marketing strategy. A study by the UK-based Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that for every £1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect a return of £42. Additionally, Statista found that 49% of consumers like receiving weekly promotional emails from their favorite brands. But there are some common mistakes to avoid when adopting email marketing. In this guide to email marketing for mobile applications, we are going to: Define what email marketing means for mobile applications Discover why email marketing is important Outline how to build your email marketing strategy Share best practices for marketing your mobile apps via email What is an email marketing strategy? Marketing emails can be used to send regular newsletters, essential updates, and promotional offers to your users. You can be hugely successful at...
Battle Pass Cover
6 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Designing battle passes in mobile games: the whats, whys, and hows

Battle passes have been around for a while now, but only recently so in mobile games. With the rise of battle royale games like Fortnite and PUBG, this new strategy is now proving to be a reliable source of revenue for mobile game developers alike. So, what makes a good battle pass? And should you add this to your monetization strategy? To answer this, I look at the best of the best, and see how top developers use this tactic in their games. But first, what are battle passes? Let’s first talk about what battle passes are. To put it simply, players purchase a plan, and usually get extra rewards, items, skins, and more (which aren’t normally available in the free version of the game, or even on the item store). These passes usually last a limited amount of time...
Calculate ARPDAU Cover
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

How to calculate ARPU, ARPPU, ARPDAU and more

Metrics like Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) or Daily Active Users (DAU) are like the coins you collect in a platformer: you want to rack them up, they’re sometimes fiddly to find and if you get enough they’ll give your game an extra life. Knowing these figures helps you figure out what you need to improve, predict how much you’ll earn, set yourself realistic targets and – fingers crossed – persuade investors to give you funding. So how do you calculate and use them? This is the first part in our series on key metrics you’ll need to know and today we’re going to cover: DAU, ARPU, ARPPU and ARPDAU. How to calculate DAU: Daily Active Users Count the number of unique players doing any action in your app on each day. 1. You’ll need to decide on what defines...
7 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Getting started with mobile ad mediation – a how-to guide

What’s ad mediation? And why should you care about it? To find out, we asked our friends at TopOn, a mediation platform for global monetization, to give us the lowdown. Here’s what they said…  Nowadays, advertising monetization is one of the most popular profit models for mobile game and app developers. According to IDC the global mobile game, ad revenue in 2019 was nearly $20 billion. And it’s expected to reach $45.2 billion by 2023, which is an annual growth rate of about 26% (this is according to our Mobile Game Advertising and Monetization Report for H1 2020). But despite this, most developers are only scratching the surface when it comes to getting the most from mobile advertising. They’re still mainly relying on automatic functions to improve their in-game ad revenue, rather than trying out more advanced techniques (which can...
12 min read
#ASO

7 ways to optimize your mobile game on the app stores

“One does not simply hit the top of the app stores” – Boromir, Lord of ASO. Seriously though. Getting your game noticed on the app stores is no easy feat. Just like websites have SEO (search engine optimization), app stores have ASO (app store optimization). So I thought it best to ask some of the industry experts. I took the time to talk to a bunch of different developers, some with games on the Google Play store, others with games on the Apple store. And some with games on both. Simply to see how they set up their game’s pages, what they felt was most important, and to discover their top tips when it comes to the Mobile Store Page. I’ve compiled them into a bunch of takeaways, but I’ve kept all of the quotes in so you can see...
6 min read
#Ads & Monetization

A Game Developers’ Guide to Playable Ads

Playable ads have become more and more popular in the last couple of years. According to eMarketer, 28% of ad agency professionals in the US think playable ads are the most effective format out there. So what makes a great playable? And what steps should you take when making your own? We look at that, and more, in this blog. But before we dig in, let’s go over the basics. Playable ads – the basics Playable ads are exactly what they sound like – adverts you can play. Similar to free demos, they let you try out an app or game before you commit to downloading it, rather than just watching a video or looking at an image. What makes a great playable ad Playable ads are generally only a minute or so long. And if you’ve done any research...
5 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

5 copywriting hacks to ace your mobile game’s push notifications

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by Adjust. You can read the original version here.  Since the average mobile app loses 73% of new users within 48 hours of the initial download, customer retention is the real growth driver for mobile apps. Push notifications are an essential part of the user retention puzzle. These updates, reminders, and special offers are like little hooks that pull users back into your app. Push notifications increase the 90-day retention rate by 23% compared to users who deactivate them. Push notifications are a useful tool for: Improving brand awareness and engagement Converting inactive users to habitual users Improving the user experience Advertising products and special offers …but only if you use them properly. Writing useful push notifications is a real challenge. You need to be creative enough to stand out from the dozens...
8 min read
#Data & Analytics

4 features to look out for when picking a consent management tool

Editor’s note: This article was written by Nandi Gurprasad, head of Strategic Partnerships at Ogury. As GDPR and Privacy is usually a tricky topic, we’ve asked them to dive into one of their recommended solutions: Ogury Choice Manager.  GDPR and data-privacy isn’t exactly new. Unless you’re starting up a new business or company, you’ve most likely heard these terms and have a rough idea of what it’s about. But what a lot of people may not know is that GDPR isn’t a one time thing. The advice from Data Privacy Authorities (DPAs) is evolving, constantly. And a lot of smaller companies tend to set up their policy once and don’t think about it ever again. When in reality, compliance is an ever-evolving process that needs your attention. To give you an example, advice from the Data Protection Authorities is updating...
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

5 A/B tests to run during your soft launch

As we released A/B testing last month, we thought we’d share a few tips, tricks and ideas on how to make the most of your experiments. So put on your lab coat, fire up the flux capacitor and let’s get to sciencing. If you’re new to A/B testing, it’s a pretty simple concept. Send three variations of your game out into the wild: A, B and a control group. One group of your users sees A, another sees B and the last sees no change at all (your control group). You pit them against each other and see which performs better. It’s survival of the fittest in action. But when should you start your A/B tests? And what exactly should you be testing? Your soft launch is the Goldilocks zone Before you can start testing, you need players. And the...
4 min read
#Tool & Product

Will GameAnalytics work in iOS 14? Yes, and this is why

In Apple’s most recent WWDC privacy was a key topic. One of the big reveals in this area was that come September, when iOS 14 is released, users will be asked if they would like to allow or restrict data sharing per app. After this, the question on many developers’ minds is… What happens to my analytics? Will my reporting still work or will it be restricted? The answer, for GameAnalytics, is yes! Here is why. All our SDKs are ready for this (and have been for years) GameAnalytics always determines an identifier for each device that is sending data from a game. We call this the GameAnalytics User ID. This value is normally a device identifier (like IDFA on iOS), but when this is not available a random User ID is generated and used on all future data for...
6 min read
#Game Design

Making a puzzle game? Avoid these 5 common mistakes

The puzzle game genre is arguably one of the most popular genres on the market, and has been around since the first smartphone was created (remember Cut the Rope?). There are hundreds, if not thousands of puzzle-like games on the app stores, all of which offer their own unique take on the genre. We’ve previously released articles on mistakes to avoid when you are creating a F2P game, but this time I want to focus my attention to puzzle. What makes a good puzzle? How can you make your game stand out? And most importantly, what mistakes should you avoid when working on yours? Here’s what I found… 1. Avoid breaking natural progression Progression tactics are a great way to get your player up to speed without overwhelming them. (Afterall, you wouldn’t start a newbie on a grandmaster level of...
8 min read
#Game Design

4 Key Steps to Making a Successful Hyper-Casual game

Hyper-casual games became the hottest trend in the industry when developer Voodoo saw an exponential increase in downloads, which made them the third best performing game developer worldwide in 2017. Only Google and Facebook performed better, and the message was made clear: hyper-casual games are in-demand and can be extremely successful. Since having sustained this popularity, hyper-casual games now generate between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in annual revenue. People across the globe are now spending more time than ever playing games, and perhaps more significantly, they’re also engaging with advertising more – a trend that has played to the strengths of hyper-casual’s unique monetization model. The first quarter of 2020 saw hypergrowth in the hyper-casual vertical, with global installs doubling from December 2019 to March 2020. Users weren’t only downloading more hyper-casual games, they were also playing them more...