7 Optimization Tips to Supercharge Your App

In this article, we’ll be examining practical, holistic strategies to optimize your game’s mobile marketing acquisition and improve your long-term KPIs. 

This is the methodological approach, meaning that the title you’re working with and it’s constituent market space can highly influence the intricacies of your campaign. This article will explore how you can adapt your strategies to your market and drive growth in your product.

Fundamentally, any strong marketing campaign is a result of careful planning, testing, and decision-making. This article will help get any app marketer to their point of release with the tools they need to build strong acquisition campaigns and curate their audiences for months to come.

Game development is, above all, an exercise in consensus between teams. Production teams need to set realistic timeframes for development teams, development teams agree on graphical specs with the art team, and so on throughout the process.

The Business of app marketing is no different, and at the cross-section of practicality and hierarchy where business goals meet market reality the seedbed for troublesome decision-making traps quickly develops.

The purpose of a Marketing strategy is, first and foremost, to provide readymade frameworks for when your marketing campaigns don’t perform to expectations. Calm water and sunny skies are easy to plan for: identify what works and emphasize it. Choppy seas are much less predictable, almost impossibly so if your basic business goals and KPIs are not given strategic leeway for when things start to go south.

Of studios we surveyed on the subject of Marketing Strategy:

• 92% reported they had a documented Marketing and Business Strategy for their latest title.

• 58% reviewed this strategy at each production Milestone, however,

• 23% reported that they incorporated decision-making clauses into their strategy.

This leaves marketing teams unable to remain flexible in response to changes in strategy over a month-to-month, or even week-to-week. Without critical decision-making templates in place, course correction is difficult. At its extreme, this can leave business teams floundering without the capacity to make critical decisions at all.

You need a clear understanding of your game’s position in the market. Don't market blindly. What makes your game stand out? Are you operating in the premium space? Are you launching a freemium product? Is the product hypercasual (ie. your best KPIs are early in the funnels) or does the product require long-term investment from both your and your players?

Hypercasual games in particular twist the narrative on what effective mobile marketing campaigns look like due to their extraordinarily short tail and their pervasiveness on any and all App Stores. Couple with the general paywall nature of mobile marketing data and many new games are left without an accurate barometer that tells them what CPIs are reasonable or unreasonable, or what LTVs should look like for a hypercasual versus a strategy game or a sports game.

Conduct a rigorous competitive analysis. Identify what successful games in your niche are doing right—and where they’re leaving gaps you can fill. Your marketing needs to reflect your game’s strengths, whether that’s top-tier graphics, innovative gameplay, or a unique genre appeal. Don’t waste time trying to be everything to everyone. Zero in on what sets your game apart and hammer that message home in every campaign.

Also, understand your revenue potential. If your game is premium, market it that way. Don’t undersell it to drive installs—focus on high-value users who’ll pay for quality. For free-to-play games, focus on retention and engagement metrics that drive in-app purchases or ad revenue. Know your market value, craft your message around it, and make sure your marketing matches your game’s actual position within the market.

More than half of studios do not adequately plan their pre-launch, and suffer in lost reach, lost potential audience, and ultimately decreased revenue as a result of a lack of launch visibility.

No platform guarantees visibility on launch, and with the absolute glut of new releases throughout 2023 and 2024, pressure is increasing on marketers and product managers to emphasize and build viability into their apps before launch.

To many, this can seem impossible without an arms race of increasing marketing budgets available to conduct pre-heat and other types of release campaigns. But this isn’t necessarily the case if you take advantage of key tools available to you during pre-release.

Test and Deploy Rich Creative Early

Your trailer, game screenshots, and promotional material can very directly guide users to your store page and begin testing engagement rates. This is also a prime opportunity to do search-focused testing and deploy Logo and Short Description tests, helping you nail down your core VPs in discrete tests before opening up your store to larger markets.

Run Geo-Targeted Test Campaigns

Pre-release beta testing tools through native store platforms are an excellent way to pre-qualify your first-time user experience (FTUE) and provide initial testable data that you can compare against your objectives. Running geo-targeting campaigns with small budgets in low-cost markets adjacent to your core Geos is highly cost-efficient.

Test UX & ASO Concurrently

Even in pre-release, testable batches of users still provide usable information for App Store pages in order to qualify and place your app within relevant keyword rankings. This means pre-release is a prime opportunity to begin engaging in Six-Week ASO (more below) in order to start building a baseline presence on app store placements and begin testing your potential long-tail keyword strategy.

In a real-time development environment, the pressure to release can override even the most level-headed of decision-making processes. But while the reality of releasing a product on time may be immovable and utterly material, the strategy when releasing doesn’t have to be.

Marketing objectives are not just the targets achievable on release, but the performing metrics that show health and viability within the game experience or user journey. Each piece of that journey needs to be qualified and evaluated, or else regressive trends will work against you when it comes time to launch.

A simple structure to begin with building your own timeline can begin with the following considerations:

1. What is the largest limiter on growth present in your User Conversion model?

2. What major features must be tested prior to full release?

3. What does the user funnel look like? If tested, where are the highest friction points?

4. How many users successfully complete your FTUE?

5. Is your current ad creative batch generating competitive engagement KPIs?

6. What target CPI do you need in your acquisition campaigns to remain ROI positive?

Ultimately, the development of a game and its marketing testing go hand in hand, as this allows marketers and product managers to create valuable feedback loops for development teams, UI designers, and backend specialists to make changes to an experience based on valid data.

As if you didn’t have another reason not to structure your testing according to a timeline: we’ve seen considerable reductions in ad creative testing when working with a structured testing timeline, in part because ads are now being tested properly in a strictly controlled environment.

ASO has an unwarranted reputation as a black box among mobile marketers, partially because it feels like a “win more” situation. Those who are on top tend to stay on top, while reaching even the minimum threshold for participation takes agonizing effort. While on the other hand, both Apple and Google are famously cagey about how ASO ranking algorithms work.

Both these perceptions are completely true, but ASO is certainly far from a black box. Where ASO gets confusing is that most business teams find difficulty initiating and sustaining a long-term growth campaign via ASO because the best available data to compare to is mature competition. We learn from our betters, but we have no clear idea how they got on top, let alone how to stay there.

Fortunately, the solution to good ASO lies not in specific techniques but in a rigid methodology of testing and iteration. While we’ve used many different methodologies for ASO growth, but one of the most consistent and reliable we’ve used for rebuilding ASO campaigns is the Six-Week ASO method.

Six-week ASO is a process that focuses primarily on kickstarting learning on the page, refining the page focus, and finally optimizing the page based around traffic and conversion KPIs to both build click volume while providing an active route to ASO keyword testing.

The industry is rife with step-removed cookie-cutter integrations that, while they solve one pressing issue, introduce a myriad more. Effective mobile game marketing requires a custom approach, tailored specifically to your game and its constituent audience. Out-of-the-box solutions might look convenient, but they won’t necessarily. get you the results you need. Every game is different, and your strategy should reflect that.

This isn’t to discount core integrations that make up the bedrock of mobile marketing. Analytics frameworks, conversion tracks, ad APIs, etc. are all heavily critical to building a cohesive user funnel. Where we caution marketers, is in bespoke solutions that target only one platform, one audience group, or one distribution channel.

Put in the work to create marketing assets that resonate. Whether it’s tailored creatives, bespoke user funnels, or precisely targeted ad spend, every decision should align with your game’s specific needs. Focus on ongoing iteration. The mobile landscape changes fast, and your marketing needs to be just as agile. Test often, adjust constantly, and make data-driven decisions that keep you ahead.

AI’s position within the development process is still in its exploratory phases, and often quite contentious or even controversial when it reaches audience eyeballs. There are seemingly infinite applications for AI as touchpoints in a release strategy, but each comes with potential risks or drawbacks that come with introducing an unmitigated element like AI.

Where AI has proven highly successful, however, is in creating, managing, and collating Ad Testing cycles. This is of particular value to smaller mobile studios for a few reasons:

1. Ad Creative Testing is predicted to be an even more critical element of ad campaign management on digital platforms due to decreasing precision and targeting of audience segments.

2. Ad spend is projected to increase in 2024 relative to 2023, necessitating more rapid testing cycles to stay ahead of the competition.

3. Audiences are simply disengaged with older advertising formats and looking for something new.

Additionally, ad testing, irrespective of other factors, is certainly a discipline that’s been neglected within the industry, either due to convenience or lack of bandwidth to adequately test. We’ve surveyed different studios within our industry. Of the 50 we polled, we learned the following:

• 53% were doing no ad testing on their active campaigns whatsoever.

• 67% were not updating their ad creative monthly.

• Of the remainder who were rotating ads, more than half were merely copying or restarting old campaigns. (The old “kick the machine” solution)

• 73% weren’t advertising on Meta, feeling it was a poor channel.

• Only 17% could demonstrate a coherent creative production and testing process.

• 30% believed it was acceptable to show footage or images that were not in their game.

Using AI to automate ad testing and produce rapid variations on existing assets is both faster and more representative of your product when conducted with strict prompts and controls in the process. As a tool to aid marketers in retaining momentum in their campaigns, AI is both extremely responsive, able to collate ad performance information to tweak its output, and able to operate at a scale necessary to support larger campaigns.