The iGaming industry continues to grow and evolve and as it does, it also raises the bar in terms of creativity and innovation in areas such as game-play design, UX, monetisation and marketing.
A comprehensive marketing strategy must look at the different stages across the user’s lifecycle. However, an increasing number of marketeers are realising that retention is in fact king. This growing realisation isn’t just down to the rising cost of acquisition, it is also due to the huge number of games in this incredibly saturated market.
Rewarded Video As A Cross-Sell Channel
One successful tactic KamaGames uses to retain players, is to cross-sell its portfolio at a specific point in a players’ lifecycle. Cross-selling is a proven tool for increasing Retention, Conversion and Average Revenue per Paying User – as much as 26% higher compared to single product players.
Working in collaboration with one of the top intelligent ad mediation solutions, Appodeal (www.Appodeal.com), KamaGames conducted research to see the effectiveness of Rewarded Video compared to other tactics.
Please click here for a full breakdown of our research into the impact of rewarded video undertaken in association with Appodeal.
Interstitial Ads Are Dominating The Games Category
Monetisation strategy and game design are two influencing factors which guide developers in their decision of which ad type to implement.
There are multiple ad types offered by Mediation Platforms. Here is a quick recap of the main ones.
Interstitial Ads Are Dominating The Games Category
Here we looked at the popularity of the different ad types as reflected by the top 100 highest earning games apps as featured on the Appodeal platform. 95% of the top 100 highest earning Gaming Apps use Interstitial ads, with Rewarded Video also proving popular with 65% choosing this format.
Lining Up The Tactics
Cross-selling promotions are run across the KamaGames portfolio using Home screen Banners and Meta-Games. Meta-Games are methods used to encourage a player to perform a specific action, such as, for example, try another game.
These Meta-Games could be a range of triggers strongly linked to the game-play itself, such as Daily Challenges, Personal Achievements or Quests. Players also receive notifications of friends’ activity across the portfolio – such as «Your friend XYZ has started to play Blackjack».
We compared the performance of these tactics with Rewarded Video, which is featured through the in-game Store.
Conversion Rate by Channel
First interesting observation was that, in general, Android users were showing higher CR across all ad formats compared to iOS users – nearly 1.7 times higher when comparing Poker to Blackjack (14.1% vs. 8.3%) and 1.6 higher when comparing poker to Roulette (12.9% vs. 8.1%).
Next, we compared Conversion Rates (CR) across the different channels
Installs By Channel And Operating System
Clearly, using Meta-Games to cross-sell outperforms all other tactics in terms of CR. The following chart shows it also outperforms most tactics in overall volume across the two main Operating Systems.
Rewarded Video had a higher conversion rate than Banner Ads and Social Hooks, yet, Banner Ads delivered more installs in absolute terms given their prominent position in the game.
Bottom line
When it comes to encouraging your user base to take an action, embedding a CTA into the game in the form of Meta-Game yields the largest response (as well as being the least intrusive to the game experience).
Yet, the use of Rewarded Video for cross-selling has proven to be a highly effective tactic that has managed to deliver solid results while also enhancing the game experience. And there is another plus - it puts unsold ad inventory to good use.