marketing and monetization for mobile indies

Marketing and Monetization for Mobile Indies

Execution Labs’ Lessons from the Trenches

Keith Katz

XL: A Bunch of Indies Under One Roof

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Vexing Indie Issues We’re Tackling

• What game do I build?• When should I think about monetization?• How should I tackle analytics?• What’s the best way to launch?• How do I monetize through ads?• What’s the best way to acquire users?• How do I deal with live ops?

What game do we build?

• Assumption: you want to make money• Look for a goldilocks pie slice• Find successful games like yours• More important (and harder): find failures like yours

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Sample Competitive Analysis

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When should I think about monetization?

• Critical to think about your levers from the beginning

• You can’t build a successful F2P game by designing gameplay and retrofitting F2P mechanics around it

• Important side note: use SDK’s that serve more than one function (more to come later)

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How do I launch my game?

• Roll out in small markets• NZ, Australia, (Taiwan) to make sure nothing’s

broken• Canada for monetization• Give yourself 30 days minimum before global

launch

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How should I tackle analytics?

• Utilize something a small team can use and act on• Getting baseline analytics gets you 80% there,

which is better than most• Give a team member ownership; lots of events to

track and hook up

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How do I monetize through advertising?

• None of our teams want to use banners• Flurry for video ads (already using their SDK); may

add others later• Chartboost for interstitials (using for acquisition and

cross-promo)• Playhaven for interstitials (also using their “Get

More Games” widget)

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How do I acquire users?

• We allocate $10k per team• $2k (ish) during pre-global rollout• During Beta, using Admob for icon testing,

Millennial for cheap CPC users, iAd Workbench, possibly Flurry

• Also using Chartboost (Lab Partners) & Playhaven

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How do I deal with live ops?

• Realize that your game is a service; this has to be part of your planning

• We will benchmark against each other; general stats for retention, conversion, etc. are only useful for games similar to your own

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Questions?

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Contact

Keith@executionlabs.comTwitter:@ztakk

www.labpartners.executionlabs.com

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