Growing your Media Mix and User Acquisition

Growth and User Acquisition are highly critical elements of any business. It’s especially vivid in the new technologies and game industry, where the market is extremely dynamic and fast-changing. As a Director of growth alongside my team, I am taking care of growth of all new titles that we either build, publish or acquire.

Growing is not equal

Huuuge has various games in different stages of their life cycle. Our Core Franchises, Huuuge Casino and Billionaire Casino, are one of the top ones in their category, with stable product and economy numbers. While we scaled our games to quite a high level, we also realized that social casino is operating in a niche category and there is a lot of growth available in other genres.

A different approach is required by game titles published by Huuuge Publishing division, with the goal to make them successful. Traffic Puzzle is an example of the title that we originally published and after two years of calibration became the third significant title in our portfolio. We do not slow down, and we are constantly working hard to give our publishing titles a chance to be as successful as Traffic Puzzle.

We keep experimenting with building new games and have a dedicated studio for building prototypes. Once a prototype has passed the marketability test — we can decide if the work should be continued or not. Build strategy is constantly evolving in our portfolio and we have spent 2021 to develop the new processes and to test the waters. There are huge plans for this part of our strategy in 2022, some of which we have already shared in our blog posts.

Marketing mix

Games that are in growth stage usually don’t monetize users at all or the economy is not balanced enough and hence ROI campaigns and optimizations are not recommended in such cases. At the beginning of the growth stage, a game’s goals are usually around minimizing the cost and growing “stickiness” of users. We want to be able to acquire an extensive number of users with relatively cheap CPI and good retention.

Monetization (ROAS) is something we are not optimising towards at early stages of game marketing as we need to make sure that users like the game (meaning: the retention is good) and cost is acceptable (CPI is low). For these reasons we are not focusing on media sources that are not able to help us meet those criterias. Our key media partners in the growth pillar are SDK networks as well as social channels.

Tactics for growth

“How to grow your game?” — this is obviously a type of question that is never easy to answer. There are too many variables and dynamic obstacles to figure out the right way and the secret sauce of success. But there is a few cardinal rules that any game developer should be aware of:

• Do research on your genre. Talk to people from other companies, play games, use App Annie, Game Refinery, etc.
• Establish clear responsibilities. For example, in Huuuge the product team sets up payback goals for the product and works on budget with the company management. UA then works on meeting those goals.
• You should have an experienced UA manager to handle growth marketing. UA expert must know how to do all UA across all channels

If you like to get more insights into games’ growth and User Acquisition, listen to the full version of the Fyber podcast.
https://huuu.ge/fyber

Misha Syrotiuk
Director of Growth at Huuuge Games