How 6 gaming marketers achieve campaign optimization victory

With COVID-19 sending people indoors and looking for more entertainment options, gaming apps have brought in a chart-busting $23.4 billion and ad spend has
jumped 25% as a result. Now, gaming marketers are contending with how to keep pace in an overwhelmed, rapidly changing space.

We can learn from history—and a few Singular customers—about what to do to keep gaming ad campaigns optimized and high-performing.

1. Jam City spends moments, instead of hours, measuring and reacting to performance

When a “rapid response” to changing consumer behavior becomes even more vital, marketers can’t waste time manually gathering data and updating spreadsheets. Jam City eliminated manual data entry and started using Singular’s automated tools for assembling data from every source, loading it into dashboards or preferred BI tools, and allowing teams to slice and dice it the way they want.

“Having that data in the dashboard, especially for someone like me who’s spending across 8-10 titles, we have a massive portfolio, the dashboard really gives us the ability to easily pivot that data whether it be by spend, by channel, by paid installs, by tracker installs, impressions, it’s very, very useful, as well as creative.” — Brian Sapp, VP of User Acquisition Marketing, Jam City

See our full interview with Brian Sapp here:

2. DGN combines strategy, people, and tools for massive growth

DGN wanted to aggressively scale their user acquisition efforts while ensuring a profitable ROI. To this end, they implemented a three-pronged strategy:

• Leveraged Singular to aggregate, standardize, and analyze their campaign analytics across all of their apps and +10 media sources in a single platform
• Uncovered insights, such as publisher-level ROI, that ultimately enabled faster and smarter decision-making and optimizations
• Exported their insights—such as cohorted KPIs by App and Source—from Singular to leverage in their internal BI systems, freeing up precious BI resources

Many gaming companies develop multiple titles and advertise across multiple ad networks. Fragmented data can be measured by orders of magnitude—for gaming marketers, that means keeping track of all your titles and all of your data sources, often from five to 15 networks and with 10 games or more.

With so many different sources and factors to consider, having data all in one place, for a single source of truth, becomes a treasured resource for cross-functional teams.

For more information on how DGN experienced 85% YoY growth, read the case study.

3. Ilyon automatically optimizes their creative to visualize and act on performance

Like many gaming companies right now, Ilyon’s focus was quickly increasing their user base and keeping those users engaged. Gaming marketers seeing rapid user growth can learn from how Ilyon improved their storytelling and broke through to audiences using Singular’s Creative Analytics.

How?

• Comparing creative asset performance across all their media sources in a single view to understand which creatives work best for each channel
• Using Creative Clustering to easily visualize the performance of a certain ad asset across different campaigns and media sources
• Leveraging Automated Alerts to get notifications when there were meaningful shifts in performance, allowing the team to make quick optimizations

Learn more about how Ilyon increased installs by 98%.

4. N3TWORK aligns their internal teams to do their jobs better

Using Singular as its marketing stack, as both an attribution and cost aggregation partner, N3TWORK solved the challenge of getting all of its internal teams on the same page.

Why is this important?

“Singular helped us a lot with aligning the Finance team with the User Acquisition team. And within the User Acquisition team, we have a media buying team, data analytics team and marketing creative [team]. All four teams, Finance and the three sub-teams of the marketing team are looking closely into the Singular data and trying to understand how to do their jobs better.” — Nebojsa Radovic, Director of Performance Marketing, N3TWORK

“Better” includes:

• Finance estimating end-of-week and end-of month spend
• At a high level, estimating the financial health of the company
• The User Acquisition team making better ad buying decisions

To hear more from Nebojsa, watch our full, two-minute interview.

5. Zynga uses standardized schemas for clean, quickly accessible data aggregation

Standardized schemas means never having to worry about the process of extracting, transforming, and loading your data to your analytics tool or database of choice.

Zynga standardizes its data with Singular to power its campaign analytics, which helps them decide which marketing channels to use for acquiring customers.

Automated data pipeline management allows you to make faster decisions and achieve 100% data coverage. With gaming advertisers working with so many ad networks that are now on hyperdrive, it’s essential to gain a fast, complete view of performance—across offline, mobile, and desktop.

6. Nexon transforms marketing data into granular performance insights

Going even deeper, Nexon wanted to analyze ad creative performance, especially since it advertises multiple titles across its many ad partners.

The name of the game was “granularity.”

“With the number of titles that we’re buying for, we don’t have the time to go into every separate source, every separate title, and look at it all à la carte. So the ways that we can slice and dice, and stack rank what’s important to us to see what’s giving us the highest ROI” — Warren Woodward, Director of Acquisition, Nexon

Not only does Singular allow Nexon to get up and running fast with new ad partners, it offers deeper levels of insight across Nexon’s partner portfolio.

Listen to Warren explain the finer points of working with Singular to gain granular performance insights.

Going for the campaign optimization gold

In a time of future uncertainty and current, off-the-chart gaming, marketers can make certain adjustments to ensure continued—and ramped up—success.

To recap, you should:

1. Quickly measure and react to shifts in consumer behavior and performance
2. Combine a nimble strategy, people, and tools for data-driven growth
3. Engage audiences with better creatives by identifying top performing assets
4. Keep everyone on the same page by establishing a single source of truth
5. Transform disparate data sets into a complete view of marketing performance

Singular’s here to help. To learn more, schedule a demo with us, and we’ll guide you through the steps needed to simplify your marketing data and get a complete view of performance.