Our Director of Sales, Cameron Thom, joined the Mobile User Acquisition Show to share some insights about what the future holds for cross-promotion in 2022. We dive into how cross-promotion can be leveraged to help app marketers retain their users and maximize user LTV at the portfolio level. Big thanks to Shamanth Rao for having us!
The importance of cross-promo in 2022
When we say cross-promotion, what we mean is redirecting an existing user who is about to churn from one app to another in the same portfolio via an install ad. In doing this, marketers are able to keep this user within the app ecosystem and continue to maximize their LTV.
The best app cross-promotion strategies of 2022 are going to rely on marketers’ ability to anticipate user behavior and re-engage them in time. Driving this shift in focus for app marketers is changes to Apple’s consent mechanisms, and the fact that gaming companies are diversifying their portfolios by acquiring new studios.
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Cameron Thom & Shamanth Rao
Here’s what Cameron had to say about the importance of cross-promotion in 2022.
Shamanth Rao:
Our next guest is Cameron Thom, Director of Sales at Adikteev. Cameron dives deep into the world of cross promotion for game publishers. His experience with different gaming apps has obviously helped him identify and differentiate between genres when it comes to cross-promotion.
Cameron Thom:
I’m Cameron Thom with Adikteev. Our prediction for 2022 is a meteoric rise in cross promotion for gaming publishers. When we say cross promotion, we’re talking about sending a user of your existing app (the source app) to a new app (the destination app) with an install ad. 3 factors drive this prediction:
One, the Apple privacy changes limit user level targeting capabilities for non IDFA inventory, which has caused UA cost for opt-in inventory to rise. Two, consolidation in the industry across companies that provide different services, supply, analytics, publishers, has advertisers questioning key relationships due to perceived conflicts of interest. Three, gaming studios going through acquisitions of their own are suddenly in charge of different genres of games with very diverse audiences.
So what’s been the response to these factors so far? And how does this set up the rise of cross promotion for marketers? Well, we’ve seen a trend towards further consolidation on spending toward the self attributing networks like Facebook and Google, as marketing teams went more risk averse during the initial response to iOS 14.
Performance retargeting kept chugging along to see enough users opt in around 30% on gaming to still have an addressable audience, and in fact, have better performance on revenue returns overall. However, not everyone adopted performance retargeting, and for some genres like hyper casual, it often lacked the unit economics to warrant running it. This leads marketers to look for an answer that is already in use by some teams – cross promotion.
While ad IDs will go away, companies can still track users across their portfolio with IDFV or publisher ID. There are two traditional ways companies have addressed cross-promo. If you make money on ads, like hyper casual games do, you have a pretty quick LTV and churn arc. So beyond the first ad, it doesn’t risk you anything to purchase an impression or two from yourself to advertise on your own app.
Now, if you do care who sees ads and monetize over longer periods of time with purchases, you don’t want to risk alienating that user and need to limit that risk through segmenting by user behavior, ad format, and position in the waterfall to be more thoughtful in your approach.
An example is users who play a ton, but rarely make purchases. Not much risk there. But still, you’re purchasing your own inventory with your competition and trying to limit risk through resource intensive studies on audiences and behaviors to minimize negative impact.
So how is this overcome in 2022? We see advancements in diagnosing and predicting user behavior through data science making growth teams more accurate in anticipating actions - what each user will do and when they’ll do it. This creates the opportunity to further pinpoint the next app that the user is most likely to appreciate, within your portfolio, potentially even across genres.
As a user’s awareness grows from an individual title to that of the studio with a portfolio, publishers have the opportunity to create a longer and more profitable relationship with their user base. That’s why we see studios betting big on cross promo in 2022. Thank you.
Shamanth Rao:
Thank you Cameron for describing how the mechanics of cross promotion will evolve here.
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Thanks again to Shamanth for having us on the podcast! Find the full transcript on the Mobile User Acquisition Show, or listen to the full show wherever you get your podcasts: