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Free Recorded Webinar: UA Automation In Mobile Games

by | Jun 15, 2020 | Future, UA Strategy, Webinar

You have probably seen a lot of buzz lately about automation in mobile user acquisition.   So we teamed up with Gamesforum to explore this topic deeper with some of the best mobile gaming UA leaders from top companies like EA (Electronic Arts), Luna Labs and Hyper Digital Partners.  Sign up below to watch the recording of this free webinar from June 9th, 2020.  

Credit: MobileDevMemo's UA Automation Level 3 by Eric Seufert

In the recording, you’ll hear these leaders (John Wright of Luna Labs, Daniel Lopez of EA and David Jumper of HyperDP) share their insights about UA automation in mobile gaming.  Our very own CEO, Brian Krebs also shares his perspective (as a technical co-founder who has been innovating for over six years) on how automation and AI can be leveraged for successful mobile user acquisition, especially in mobile games.

Sign Up For A Free Webinar: UA Automation In Mobile Games (June 9th)

by | Jun 3, 2020 | Benefits, Future, Product, UA Strategy, Webinar

There has certainly been a lot of buzz lately about automation in mobile user acquisition.   So we thought it would be a good idea to explore this topic with mobile gaming UA leaders from top companies like EA (Electronic Arts), Luna Labs and HyperDP.  Register today for this FREE WEBINAR on June 9th, 2020 where you’ll hear how these leaders are thinking about UA automation.  Big thanks to John Speakman of Gamesforum for hosting this webinar and the panelists (John Wright of Luna Labs, Daniel Lopez of EA and David Jumper of HyperDP) for sharing their insights. 

Credit: MobileDevMemo's UA Automation Level 3 by Eric Seufert

You can check out Gamesforum’s other free webinars on important industry topics on their site. Our very own CEO, Brian Krebs will join that webinar to share his perspective as a technical co-founder who has been innovating for over six years on how automation and AI can be leveraged for successful mobile user acquisition, especially in mobile games.

Reduce Your UA Complexity With Automation

by | May 20, 2020 | Benefits, Future, Product, UA Strategy

User Acquisition Automation & LTV Prediction For UA Optimization

Unfortunately, complexity is no stranger to mobile UA teams.  Every week, they have to contend with large data sets that have to be assembled from disparate sources to then sift and analyze the data and coordinate numerous campaigns that involve a broad mix of ad channels.  According to Adjust, “the average marketer runs 19 campaigns with 14 different networks“. Of course, this translates into the bulk of the marketer’s day being spent on data management.  

Through numerous client conversations, we have confirmed that data management and the avalanche of tedious, manual tasks are major pain points. Many are struggling with reducing their daily time spent on campaign management which is a collection of manual and often repetitive steps that seem to explode with campaign scaling.  These steps are ripe for automation and our clients witness that as early as the first 30 days of using our platform.  The added bonus is that these tasks can be executed in real-time based on live monitoring of the click stream by our platform.  So it never sleeps on the job!  This approach liberates the UA team to focus on the higher value aspects of mobile UA such as devising strategies, setting goals and creatively adapting to fresh changes in the market.

Another area that our clients find ripe for automation is the bid and budget optimization process. This is where our platform uses real-time performance monitoring to adjust bids, reallocate budgets from lower to higher performing ad channels and pause campaigns based on pre-defined automation rules and business goals.  Once again, all the manual tasks and repetitive checking across different dashboards and spreadsheets are eliminated to free up large blocks of time needed for the higher value tasks that are critical to successfully differentiating from your competitors.

Rapid Change In UA Presents New Opportunities for Scaling Via Automation

by | May 8, 2020 | Benefits, Future, Product, UA Strategy

User Acquisition Automation & LTV Prediction For UA Optimization

Thanks Joe Kim for posting the great article about the death of performance marketing.  We certainly agree that things are changing rapidly in performance marketing/user acquisition but think that it is far from dead. It is actually going through a metamorphosis.

For one, we believe that LTV prediction engines wrapped in automation will save performance UA as real performance and scale are VERY realizable across leading ad channels such as  ironSource, Unity Technologies, AppLovin, Vungle and all of the other major SDK networks. When Facebook and Google shift to the new setup (described in Joe’s article), the ability to perform will require any UA team to shift their skill sets to become experts at wielding sophisticated SaaS automation technology like MetricWorks UA Command Center. 

Secondly, with a UA automation platform and LTV prediction engine that works seamlessly across all networks, one will be able to quickly and easily predict where the most profitable AND scalable venue is to spend one’s money. Currently, UA teams waste significant amounts of time accomplishing these tasks manually with large error margins.  Herein lies a further opportunity to save valuable time, reduce the probability of costly errors and to be agile by responding in real-time to data feeds from the variety of mobile ad channels.  This capability becomes even more crucial when teams have shrunk in response to the market changes described in Joe’s article. Once again, it is the skills shift that will be important in order for UA teams to take advantage of these new tools to take their game to the next level.

UA Automation: Reality vs Hype

by | Apr 30, 2020 | Benefits, Features, Future, Product, UA Strategy

You have probably heard all the buzz about UA automation and are trying to determine the best path forward for your business.  As Eric Seufert outlines in his MDM article, The Five Levels of Digital Marketing Automation, UA automation is the ambition of many UA teams but there is still a considerable gap between hype and real-world application.  As a partner to some of the leading mobile gaming companies and having spent the last six years in the UA automation and AI space, MetricWorks is firmly planted in the real-world application of automation.

However, if we were to apply Eric’s classification model to our UA automation platform, we find that even our technology most closely resembles Level 3: Marketing strategy automation:

Credit: MobileDevMemo's UA Automation Level 3 by Eric Seufert

In particular, we feel that our innovation over the last six years enabled us to cover the bottom two rows in the graphic above, namely, Campaign setting experimentation (except for budget optimization) and ROAS projection and reporting.  So why is that?

Well, firstly, ad creative production has proven to date impossible to automate.  As we all know, producing captivating creatives requires human creativity.  This production process resists automation.  Therefore, UA teams around the world have found it better to spend their budgets on human resources to deliver these tasks that are difficult to  automate.

Secondly, automating audience testing requires the machine (or automation platform) to know a lot of different things that may require cross-sectional industry data or domain knowledge that is not easily accessible or is simply not possible to share due to intense competition among gaming companies.  

That leaves the bottom two sections that we feel our automation platform brings to life via a powerful range of features:

  1. Cost & data aggregation in a consolidated dashboard
  2. Real-time source-level LTV predictions (95% accuracy with 30 days of historical data)
  3. Automated Bid Management Across All Channels At Source By Country Level
  4. Impact Analysis: Easily conduct detailed analysis of the impact of bid optimizations on performance (volume, ROAS or custom KPIs)
  5. Automation Rules: Automate time-consuming marketing strategies on a near real-time basis and set guard-rails based on ROAS, Retention, DAU or other KPIs
  6. Performance Monitoring: Live monitoring and customizable alerts for designated publisher behavior
  7. Bid History: Visually graph & analyze bid history along with metrics like ROAS or installs
  8. Supply Groups: Customize, manage and analyze traffic groups with shared performance traits 
  9. Targeted Micro-Strategies: Execute specific actions on a defined supply group

One of the features that our clients are really excited about is Automation Rules that allow marketers to encode their own user acquisition strategy.  However, the heart of our platform and the core feature is our AI-driven mobile LTV prediction (down to the source-level) and how that flows into the automated optimization and execution.

Others have built reporting dashboards and some have even added the ability to take action within these dashboards when it comes to UA execution. While this is a productive step, it is still an incremental one in the traditional direction.  In contrast, MetricWorks rethought the entire paradigm and can proudly say that we are the only ones that built our platform from the ground up to seamlessly go from raw data aggregation and analysis across all mobile channels to model/prediction to optimization and finally execution without human intervention. 

 Of course, the proof is in the pudding and our field success bears testimony to the value of our approach. Learn more about how our clients have realized a ROAS of 145% while generating an unprecedented 22.5 million LTV models and saving 40 hours per month per UA manager.