Appi Camper is an interview series that shines a spotlight on today's mobile elite, showcasing their expertise and knowledge. Growth leaders share trends, strategies to navigate the current market, tips to overcome present challenges, and how they approach these impacts to successfully emerge as an Appi Camper.
Spotlight with Lidor Feldman
Lidor is the Retargeting and Cross Promotion Lead at Papaya Gaming, managing retargeting campaigns Papaya offers. Her day to day involves creating treatment protocols, monetization live-ops for users that come back from Retargeting campaigns, and much much more. Previously, she was at Playtika for almost three years as a Retargeting Campaign Manager, managing social and casual games on various platforms.
What dictates budget allocation? What metrics are the main focus in order for you to remain with a partner? What does that relationship look like?
Performance and scalability are the bottom lines for dictating budget allocation. Performance can either be measured for non-paying users' activity based on cost per daily active user (DAU or how much cost to bring a user back to the game) and retention metrics, or based on KPIs for paying users' activity with return on investment (ROI) as a top metric and cost per action (CPA) as a secondary parameter. Of course, it's not all black or white. You need to balance your portfolio as much as possible, otherwise the scale won't happen.
The key to a good relationship is a trust which builds from three parameters: availability, patience, and understanding of the pros and cons of your partner.
To summarize the first question, “what dictates budget allocation” – the answer is collaboration. You can't ask your partner to refresh creatives when you don't send them. You can't ask for good performance when you don't share the tools, the user's behavior, your action items for analysis. Building a segment is just the first step, but you have much more things to know that you need to consider to succeed.
When discussing new channels, what goes into that discussion, and further into making that decision? What metrics do you use to validate that test being a success or not?
When discussing new channels, I check the channel's chemistry, experience, and success story with competitors. I learn what kind of creatives they can run and if they can make their own creatives in house. In addition, you need to know the advantages of the creative type they are offering – for example banners, playables and videos. It is important to know the placements and sizes.
I also analyze how this opportunity can grow and how much they can scale and in which countries. It’s important to look at the match rate for audiences and how long they bring back users for. For example, to reach and bring users that didn’t log in for 30 days and above.
To validate the test and build trust in the new collaboration, start with a small budget and reach realizable KPIs according to your organization's goal. Then you can grow together step by step. It's much more challenging to repair a relationship than start a new one. Don't try to execute all your activities at the same time. If you want to target non-payers users, make sure to set early KPIs and define the red line that the channel can cross. Give clear benchmarks as well!
If doing both user acquisition & retargeting campaigns, how does your creative and messaging differ amongst the two?
You need to follow trends and significant life events (not only from the gaming industry) and react fast! Take the seasonality and play. Use your top concepts and learn from them by deep diving into the color, text, and game-play. If your competitor is trying a new thing, test it as well.
The difference between UA creative and retargeting creative is freedom. With UA creative, it is crucial to show the GamePlay itself in different concepts and messages. When it comes to RTG, you can use any feature, characteristic, or situation with those creatives. Be inspired by TV commercials and try to take it to your own content world. In RTG creatives, we use gifts as an incentive to come back to the game, communicate the special event in the game or a Raffle, and make the user feel that they’re missing something by not playing. One last thing is localization – use slang and phrases. The most significant advantage of RTG messaging is that you already know your users and now you need to surprise them.
What are you doing to stay balanced with so many changes in the mobile space?
I join webinars, stay on top of sites such as AppAnnie SensorTower as well as reading articles and case studies. The most important topic for me is the iOS limitation of privacy, since most of our activity is in iOS.
When you’re not working, what hobbies or interests do you have? Do you track this on an app, if so which one?
I like to do pilates or play tennis with friends. Another main hobby of mine is music – from playing saxophone, piano and drums, to going to music shows and just listening to music all day long.
What are your current growth goals? Does this relate to how many partners you run or are willing to test with?
I want to reach more users (the match rate isn’t 100%) in order to accomplish that I'll need to work with more partners and double my current monthly budget. Another growth goal will be when all of our games will be available on the Galaxy store in all the markets we operate. When that happens the geos and user's behavior will be much more broad, and we have to find the right parameters to target those new users.
In addition, I believe that the right retargeting activity is when you have a unique treatment protocol per segment per game. This way you know how to communicate and bring back the users in a more efficient manner. However, you need to do a lot of AB tests to find the right balance of gifts without decreasing your ARPU and to renew your incentives from time to time. Otherwise the users will be apathetic to this communication.
