The Ultimate Growth Hacks: The Smart Approach to Paid & Organic User Acquisition Campaigns

By Sukey Miller - February 09, 2023

Bango sponsored the Growth track at PocketGamer Connects London 2023. In addition to our keynote, we participated on the Ultimate Growth Hack panel.

Aimed at offering practical guidance to hack your UA results, here’s a snapshot for those who missed it.

A mid-term approach to growth hacking - Hagop Hagopian, Founder & CEO at Appvertiser

Constantly optimize to grow organically.

Outside traditional approaches, we need to explore the social networking world.

99% of growth for blockchain came through community. Why don’t we, as app developers use this approach?

Start with brand ambassadors. Use your highly engaged game players for established games. If it’s a new title, hire an ambassador, have them be your voice and let the ripple effect take place.

Community-driven marketing is powerful.

Also, SKAd 4.0 is here! Talk to your platform reps and see if you can use it.

Scaling growth with Purchase Behavior Targeting - Dale Lawrence, Head of Client Solutions at Bango

On average, 95% of revenue comes from only 5% of a game’s users.

The cost of targeting is more expensive than ever so it’s increasingly important to reach, engage and grow this valuable cohort.

Bango Audiences can map which apps and games users pay in.

We build custom audiences based on the segmentation of this purchase behavior data so app marketers can get their ads straight to the users with the highest purchase intent.

This purchase data can scale your paying user acquisition over time.

Follow the paying user journey across multiple apps and multiple categories, get granular with different purchase behaviors.

You can really drill down and find non-obvious audiences who are highly likely to pay in your apps, including whales, then target your ads directly to these audiences.

How do you get the most from this approach?

Scale by layering these three targeting strategies:

  • Target users who pay in similar and competitive apps
  • Where else do users pay? Target users in categories with a high overlap of paying users
  • Break down and prioritize targeting high LTV segments within the high paying user overlap categories

For more on this, watch the Bango Audiences keynote session: Scale Your IAPs With Purchase Behaviour Targeting Data Insights 

Get the split right between paid and organic - Michal Grno, Head of Marketing at Pixel Federation

Only 0.01% of apps developed over the year succeed.

The future is a combination of targeting plus a product that addresses large audiences.

With the ATT privacy changes you now have to look at organic and non-organic as a total to base decisions on.

You have to get the data right.

You must engage users as soon as you launch.

Leverage in-game play, recommendations and all touch points.

We don’t have a lot of control over organic but we do for where our spend goes and how to construct that.

Paid ads allow diversification.

My advice - leverage different avenues and different touch points over the lifecycle of users.

Users are spending, use every available touch point to activate new users at different times of the day.

Start small on new channels. We’ve learned the hard way from going in big, and investing too much money and time in new channels.

Be skeptical. Start in the thousands/ten’s of thousands and scale when you see value.

Change the focus of retargeting campaigns.

If a player churns, it’s because they got bored. It’s then really difficult to get them back.

If you can, run a survey on churned users. Collect feedback to improve the product and retention profile.

Adjust the product to get whales and address players that never spend in games.

Leverage the power of recommendations - Ryan Cook, RVP, Head of Performance Sales EMEA at Digital Turbine

We want to avoid a cutback in activity.

It’s less about privacy and more about the monopoly of the big platforms.

Paid ads are dominated by the big apps trying to find payers. We need a smart way in a troubled economy.

33% of people find apps from friends, 50% from research – reading and media, there’s a big organic proponent to growing your user base.

We need an alternative to the app stores that offers improved recommendations.

Mobile carriers used to make recommendations for content and services, why can’t they make recommendations for apps and games?

Let’s give the power back to developers by leveraging the power of carriers and device manufacturers to promote and recommend apps.

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