Panel: How To Create Your Own Retargeting Strategy.

0:00 Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Uh we're going to do how to create your own retargeting strategy and for that we

0:47 have uh Vera again. So, thank you very much. And we have uh Silan Atard from TiltingPoint, who I did see. I think he's at the back there. All right. Thank you very much. Really great to have you have you both on stage. So, uh just reminder, yeah, I'm Craig Chapel, head of content at pocketgamer.biz, but uh most importantly, uh the people next to me. Um if you could uh do some introductions yourself. You've uh already done your introduction. I've talked a lot already, but yeah, S. Yes, let's go. Uh so I'm Silan, associate director of growth at Ting Points and we've been running retargeting for ever basically and that's why I'm participating in in this panel here. Great. Thank you and I'm Vera. Nice to meet you all again. For the ones that

1:32 were here already in the new faces, I'm an account manager um direct RTB House for gaming. Uh we are retargeting the SB that specializes in um programmatic advertising. Great. Thank you. It's good for the the video recording as well. Oh, absolutely. U so yeah, we'll kind of jump straight into the questions and I guess uh the question I want to start with is you know what is the right moment for you to start retargeting? So do you define it by any specific KPIs or or the maturity of a game? We start with I can start. Yes. Uh you spoke a lot already as you said. Um so yeah basically retargeting user is uh to recapture the churn users and people churn from day one basically. So as soon

2:18 as you launch the game, you have some people to actually retarget. If you want to do so, it really depends on your own uh strategy for the game. But from even the first months of launch, it can be worth to actually launch your targeting. And I think that's such a mix, right? is what I was um just talking to a little bit back on my on my presentation just before where this is the ideal where we want uh to see it retargeting complement UA and um advertisers being a little bit more aggressive with it because you just spend so much effort and and budget with us acquisition campaigns. If you just sit on retargeting and then wait for too long, you're really just missing out. Um, so I I shared just earlier that there's an average um 70% of your new

3:06 installers are dropped out after three days. This is where retargeting should start. That's exactly where you should be at. Um, so it's all about being a bit more quick and aggressive. I think when we think about retargeting, I guess that leads nicely. So you going to uh so what are what are your main goals with retargeting? Should you focus only on the rorowass uh or or other sorry or are there other metrics that are just as important? I'm a U manager so yeah ro that's my golden thing. Um obviously if you want to talk to product uh they can be interested in retention and obviously I care about retention but I care about more. So yeah, uh every time I have a call with a new advertiser to work with, we always say,

3:53 "So what is your goal? Is it rose?" Of course it's rose. I think rose is definitely the main goal. Um, but I feel like what happens though is growth is usually the main goal when you first launch a campaign. But then when that campaign starts getting mature and you start looking at other bits that you can improve and what how else can you support your main retargeting retargeting activity, then that's where other goals might come and other campaigns might come as well that are specific for those goals. Um, and and forgive my naivity, but are there any other I guess what what other metrics are there now like as as the mobile games industry kind of evolves? Are there other things that you kind of take into consideration that are different now or is that or is that what's changed? I think for us uh at least we are

4:41 looking more and more at uh time spend or time per session or whatever you want to call it. Uh because obviously the more the user plays the more is engaging. Um but yeah Ras remains the the golden one sorry as an addition. Yeah, I feel like the same for sure. I don't think there's a lot of new new out in the space. Um, we seeing some advertisers that are a little bit more aggressive on retargeting, especially on a social casino space where they also focus quite a lot on campaigns that are targeted at daily active users to support that activity. So while they have their main retargeting activity, they are a little bit more quick and you know inactivity will be a little bit shorter for campaigns where they just want to focus on bring as many users back to the game but their value isn't

5:26 so important. Um, so we see that quite often as well. And I guess uh if we kind of talk about budgets, how should you balance your retargeting and UA budgets? I'm going to take this one. I think you should. So obviously the higher the UA budget, the higher the retargeting. Um, but it also depends about the setup you have uh or the strategy you have. Um, of course for like hyper casual it's going to be super different from like hardcore or casual or whatever. So I would say a good amount would be around 5 to 10% um on retargeting. Yes. Uh but it comes back to what I just said before. It really depends on the strategy. Uh I

6:12 think anything higher than 10% would be a bit too risky. Um but once again it depends on the ROS. If you have an extremely good roas, go for it. I'm curious why why do you think it's too risky? Is it because those players because you're trying to bring them back so then it becomes Yes, but um a lot of the CH user, they are churn forever and they will never come back anyway. Um and you can do whatever you want with them. They already played the game. They don't want to play it anymore anyway. So you can throw more money at them. They're not going to come back. Do you reckon that is a little bit linked as well to um this is something I was talking as well on how product also has an impact um on the game itself and

6:58 like why why for certain games users might not want to come back the reasons are different for everyone right and what you saying the 5 to 10% is pretty much the most that we hear of um lately there are advertisers that are starting to actually spend more on retargeting than you and we're like yay that's so exciting to finally see um but the norm is obviously the lower end for sure. Um, but if there's, you know, more exciting updates in the game happening and it it's continuous, right? There's new levels, there's new things to do, they welcome to the game. I know that that competition is pretty tough, right? So, it's hard to kind of like keep them coming back and not just going elsewhere with the fun that might be a little bit better. So I think that's probably the challenge, but I think it's all about how you can work with product as well to

7:44 make sure that your game is, you know, continues to innovate and be attractive for your players to come back. Yeah, fully agreed. Uh especially on games when you have I think there is a question about later, but if you have like specific events within the game there, it's super important to actually retarget them and then you can uh increase the budgets on the retargeting. Definitely. Yeah, sure. Um so that that is the next tech we've kind of moved successfully on to the next question which was uh how how does product development impact your strategy? So for example events uh game updates or or sales covered a few bits. Yeah. You want to say something? Yeah. And the other example that um I shared earlier as well I'm sorry for those that were here um was on um thing are you

8:30 welcome back to the game. Um, so if you're this advertiser was telling us recently, all my castles are gone. Like, you know, come back to the game like us playing this game like all the castles are gone. Like they have nothing else there left for them. They spend like ages like working on it, like working on a team, being part of the team on the game, and then they're not in that team anymore. They don't have their castles anymore. Why would they want to come back to the game? This is like the challenging we're having with retargeting and like product. And this is such a good example to that. I think it's it's really really key um that those teams are working together 100%. Yes. And to add to this and to come back what I just said before um we saw what worked the best on our retargeting campaign is when we have a new map that is being released and then we do like

9:16 you just showed before like we do specific creatives, we do specific audiences for those people. Uh but usually these kind of uh campaigns work the best and they really allow us to really bring back user that would have not come back with just like normal creatives. Do do you um obviously we're talking about you know when you got an update or something that that's the time to bring them back but do you also have like a kind of a time frame that you think about generally? So you're like okay we've released something new but this user kind of churned like a month ago. Is that that's too soon or is that anytime is a good time to get a user back? I mean technically anytime. Uh but um we can see and I I'm sure you'll see something pretty similar is that um the

10:03 7day inactivity window is most of the time the starting point where we start retargeting at least for us. uh and then we move from there. But um obviously the player that did not play for like a year that will be super hard to retarget and um that will very likely not even be attributed to retargeting. Um but yes, I would say 7day window is the the starting point definitely. That's quite quick. Uh and um I was going to say so uh I can't that I had a really good question. I I'll think of it again in a minute, but we've got some other. So, I guess with creatives kind of what is your approach to creatives when it comes to testing new content or ad formats? Uh, well, we saw that except for

10:50 specific events or new maps or new content that the actual best UA creatives were also the best retargeting creatives. Um, we didn't think that would happen. Uh, but turns out that if it was a really good creative once, then the user will very likely just like it again. Um but yeah, like I said again before um tailoring the creatives to whatever you propose new within the game can really make a big difference uh for the for the users. It can happen that sometimes where UA creatives actually also work for retargeting. Um but there's so many different iterations as well, right? So what we see working really well um season pass creatives if you have a season pass 100%. um someone that we work with recently we noticed, oh

11:36 there's like a huge spike of revenue every whatever period it is. Um what happens around this time? Um and they were like oh yeah that's our season pass time like great we need to leverage it. So like can we have season pass creatives cuz you know it's all about when is it that your users are obviously like more engaged and and what's the higher chance of them coming back? Um those work really well. Seasonal creatives even for retargeting. There's advertisers that do this really well where they just tag along. Even Valentine's, Valentine's was really big this year actually for creatives in gaming. I think um there's um an advertise on a social casino space that did creatives for Valentine's for retargeting with couples that have met in the game. I thought that was amazing. And there was their actual footage. So it was a video of of those couples in

12:23 real person giving their testimony of how they met in the game and how they married for whatever like 10 years. And I was like, are these people actually real? Like, do they actually meet in the game? This is so cool. So, it's definitely about, you know, thinking about different things and what what what works for you and just yeah, testing it out. There's some pretty cool stuff out there. Just a small question about the battle pass. Uh, do you change the inactive window when you target the user for the battle pass or is it still the same for the for the season pass? Uh, yes, the season pass. Uh, sorry. Yes. Um, well, it depends. For some advertisers, um, they keep the same winner throughout all the time, but there are some, and back to the ones that I said are probably a little bit more aggressive with retargeting. When they have things like season pass, battle pass, or an event that is a bit more specific, they do sometimes run a

13:09 specific campaign with different inactivity window specifically for that to support that activity. So, that happens as well. Yes. Good to know. So, that's really interesting. So retargeting ads are always different from your UA campaign ads or do you is there like overlap there? Like how do you and then also to your point about uh kind of couples that met in games which is really interesting. Do you have a way of or do you have a way of like splitting trying to get my terms right. Do you have a way of like splitting uh people into different cohorts I guess so they're more likely to react to this kind of retargeting ad? Like how do you kind of work that out internally? It's a little bit tricky. Um, but obviously you can use audiences. I mean a both adjust and appro have audiences

13:55 tool and you can play with it. Um, but I would say for this we always asked this kind of questions to the retargeting partner we're working with and they always came up with good recommendation for it tailored to our game. Yeah, I feel like every DSP or retireing partner will have different product that supports different things and it's definitely worth discussing that with them if it's something that you're not able to do on your end. But also that goes back to how tracking certain events is so important. Um, and it doesn't answer directly to cohorts, but to try and understand if there's certain behaviors of your players that you should be tracking as an event because then it's very easy for your partners to use that event to target those players um, directly. Um, so there's an advertiser for example where the game is

14:40 very much about walking within the app. Um, and one of the events that we used for retargeting was the distance walked. So we would only target players that um have obviously met other conditions such as in an activity, you know, but also one of them was they have at least walked five miles within the game because that means they're engaged and they actually in it for the play. So that helps for sure if those can be set up in advance. Yes. And I was going to ask, so you make an interesting point earlier uh in your talk. Uh when when players come back, so if they've been away for a long time as well, like do they still kind of have all the stuff, all the progress that they've made before? So how do you kind

15:26 of collaborate with the teams on on that? And then also like do you then give players kind of extra perks because they've been retargeted and they come back to help them ease back in? What's the is there a process there? Uh I mean yes, keeping the progress of the user is key like if he comes back and stuff. he has to start over like it will be gone. That's almost sure. Uh in terms of rewards, yes, that really helps uh on both of the US side. So they see you can get 4,000 coins or whatever, they will be happy to to install again, but also it helps them engage more into the game and eventually like make another purchase or whatever. Uh so yeah, it's super important. And how do we do this? Well, we send a Slack message to the product team and they take care of it.

16:14 That's a very good answer. So, I guess where do you uh bit of a broad question really, but uh where do you see the the future of retargeting going now? Oh, there's a lot that we could say in here. Um everything is about technology, right? And like we we everything is AI now. Oh, like chibbt intentb AI. Um, but it was already before anyways. It's just that now we're talking about it more. Um, for for us personally, my RTB house, obviously being a head of technology has been such a big thing. We we were the first DSP to um integrate deep learning algorithms way before everyone else. So um one thing that I see for example um the other day I use our platform to

16:59 upload creatives um and there's already like this better version that um allows us if we want to to um prompt um different prompts for creative um on specific ad format with um you know AI and I was like great like you know every every week there's something new every week I go in there's something different and that is already being tested to be integrated um but Silvine you yesterday when we talked you said something that I thought was pretty key. Um remember this AI thing and automation. Yeah. When you mentioned like what's important to you is just making our life your life easier. Everything is automated. Yeah. Exactly. Basically like less the less work we have as your manager the better because now we're taking like care of so many things and well right now the

17:45 process is super manual is and it's lot about communication between the PC and ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, but if we can get to something like AI, automator automation or whatever you want to call it, uh that would be extremely helpful because as I said like it's a super manual process. You look at the audences yourself, you create agencies, you send it to the partners, then they do their thing. If there could be like something way more automated uh that can retrieve uh the events within the game, plan the creatives ahead, something like this, that would be extremely helpful. And I'm really sure that it could really uh be a game changer for retargeting. Actually, is it kind of u word this right? Uh if you got the AI power, if you got AI to help you make this, can

18:32 you make even more like granular granular more targeted ads that you just didn't have time to do before? Yeah, 100% 100% because uh obviously um looking at the data and all the different cohorts or the different personas, all the different whatever you have into your games is like extremely time consuming. And if you consider that we're targeting, like I said before, it's like 5 to 10% of your spend. You cannot spend like 10 hours trying to tailor a campaign that will just like improve 1% of 10%, you know. Um and having automation like this really helps because they have the granularity. um and tailoring everything the creative audiences and everything is really key I believe. Yeah, for sure. I think creatives um iteration on creatives has been quite key with AI right that's what

19:17 everyone's talking about on when we talk about AI I feel like in our industry that's what's now being more tested is creative and iteration of creatives because that's where teams spend quite a lot of time and that can be done so quickly with with the support of AI. So that's definitely what we should expect to see coming up the soonest or is already happening. Um and yeah, and then in the ideal world, more automation in general for sure. And uh uh I guess if teams aren't using it, should should they be? I I I was I met someone yesterday. I think it was like in the lift here, and they were like, "Oh, I'm here to kind of find out if AI and they're specifically talking about UA like if it's if it if it's an actual thing or it's just kind of overhyped." But it sounds like what I've been hearing from people before and now it's

20:03 like you you have to be using these technologies. I think so. It just makes life easier and quicker. You obviously use it for the right things. Um because I feel like you still need to have a lot of input um yourself for certain things and knowing how to prompt it as well, right? Because if if you're using AI, your prompt needs to be really key as well. I mean, there are now courses on prompting and how you should prompt for AI. So that's how it's developing. Um but I think you know going back to emotion and how users feel um valuable uh valued and their emotions I I think with it I think AI um is still not there with that. I think that's what's missing and and there still needs to be the human element and emotional intelligence to support AI with that. It doesn't mean

20:50 it won't happen, but I think people should definitely be using it because for, you know, certain things on our day-to-day, it just helps it um so much. Yeah. Yeah. And just to add to this, yes. Like an AI is never going to be able to understand why your user stop playing the game. Uh I mean, at least for now, it's impossible. And yes, you really need to still be able as a human to understand how uh how it happens. But then, like you said, you can use it just to make your life easier on everything. And I guess uh before we move on to the next question, we we talked a lot about AI there, which is obviously a huge topic just for the industry and really everyone everywhere, but are there any other kind of are there any other areas you see the future of retargeting uh going or is it or is is the future the future is AI?

21:37 No, I think um I think in general retargeting is starting to become um way bigger in in all aspire in terms of budgets and how how um advertisers are working around it. I mean as you we saying before in terms of budget splits and what we see UA versus retargeting historically is that it's also been always been that oh my game is pretty new. It's only like three or four years like why would I do retargeting? that's really changing now um for the better where we starting to see you know advertisers doing it before their game is even launched they're already ready to run retargeting for when that that that time comes that definitely is changing um we are seeing a lot of advertisers already allocating more budget to retargeting uh than before and in some cases more than what they do in in user acquisition and for games that

22:23 are older that does make a lot of sense because um you know you you you know a large part of your user base. If you continue to develop your product, if your game keeps innovating and you have new levels, new things, like it's it's still exciting for players to come back and you have like a really loyal audience, it makes sense to continue targeting them and make sure you don't lose them. Um, so yeah, for sure. I feel like that is the way going forward. Yeah, I just think it's all about like tailoring and granularity. Uh, tailoring adds the good user granularity of the different audiences. Um, yeah, that's pretty much it. Personalization is quite key, right? I think that's uh we we talk about it quite a bit, but I don't think we're doing it a lot yet, especially in

23:09 retargeting. AI might help with that as well, but I want to leave AI on the side now. But personalization is definitely big, especially in retargeting, right? Because everyone is different. All your users might have different reasons why they in the game, different states of the game, and it's quite important to talk to them directly as well through creative. So yeah, for sure. I also I mean I believe that something like this will happen that at some point we may be able to integrate like some retakening SDK within the game and they will be able to tell us okay you should do this this and that. Um because basically data is key for retakening even more than for UA. Um and being able to know uh the game deeply will really really help I believe. And and one last followup uh was was is

23:56 kind of the you say more budget is going to retargeting. Is is that driven by uh basically that UA is very expensive uh now? I I mean I've been hearing every year since I've been reporting on mobile every single year it's like it's got more expensive. Is is that kind of the key driver or is it because now like tools services like you have like that is that you have new tools services to to do a better job of retargeting I guess. What's what are the drivers there? UA is definitely more expensive. Yeah, there is an I don't know if it we say it in English, but there is an old adage that says um it's always cheaper to uh keep a current choose customer than to acquire a new one and it's getting more and more real year after year. Um I mean I have a presentation right after the first slide

24:42 is UA is expensive. Uh so definitely um advertiser must uh use retargeting to actually decrease their cost. Yeah, for sure it's more expensive and also it's not dedicated to those players directly. So you are because you will still target those players that are you know that you would do through a retargeting campaign. You will still target them through a user acquisition campaign. So you will pay more for them and also you are showing them creative that is probably not relevant to them either or it is relevant but not you know personalized to an extent that is what it will probably be getting more into their emotional side of it. they'll be like, "Oh, okay. Yes, like I feel like this ad is for me. I want to come back to this game." You won't do that through UA. Um, but you will still be doing it.

25:29 And uh, so with the recent uh, court judgment related to Apple and Epic Games, you might have heard about this judgment. It felt like it's been burning for about 5 years and then suddenly came out of nowhere. Uh, but you know, do you think like the importance of direct consumer is is that kind of rising? And then how do you think retargeting will tie into that? Yeah, for sure. Um we both pioneers on this. Um so um 100% um one of the things that we everyone is talking a little bit about this and how can um advertisers explore um different um means of revenue that are not directly through Apple store right or play store. Um we for example we are together currently

26:15 testing um web shop um where we can use um exolar um in specific um as a web shop for one of the games at Tilting Point and whilst we're still going through some technicalities of it um and troubleshooting it's it it will definitely happen. It's already being under test and it's so promising because when that happens I mean the benefit goes all to everyone right what's the difference you see between web shop and non shop not everyone not apple obviously but uh yes like for example and even for players that are still playing the game like you show them an ad you say okay uh you have 50% off this purchase of coins gems or whatever um and you direct them to the Excel web and then you're like,

27:03 great, I have more margin. So, it's definitely uh a good way to actually engage the current users to the to the web shop you may have in the game. So, yeah, obviously it's it's a win-win for everyone, right? Players, advertisers, everyone. Pending appeal. Yes. Um I'm going to keep knocking my head on this TV. I think you're going to Oh, sorry. But um I guess one of the things I was talking to you last night is uh with a couple people and they were just like even if there's some well already direct assume is a thing. There's other ways to kind of get people to to to web etc. But it was just like you kind of have to with what's just happened everyone's just instantly taking

27:48 advantage of it as much as they can. So I guess hope maybe the mobile market's kind of changed for good uh with that. Hopefully. We'll see. We'll see. All right. Uh, thank you very much. [Music]