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Marketing and Monetization for Mobile Indies . Execution Labs’ Lessons from the Trenches Keith Katz. XL: A Bunch of Indies Under One Roof. Vexing Indie Issues We’re Tackling. What game do I build? When should I think about monetization? How should I tackle analytics?
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Marketing and Monetization for Mobile Indies Execution Labs’ Lessons from the Trenches Keith Katz
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
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)
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
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
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)
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
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
Contact Keith@executionlabs.com Twitter:@ztakk www.labpartners.executionlabs.com