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Kristina Petrova
Marketing Manager

In the 5th episode of our special project, we talked to Gulnaz Saitova, Head of User Acquisition at Azur Games. She told us about the differences in promotion strategies for hyper-casual and mid-core games, provided insights on what skills and expertise you need for successful publishing and gave tips on how to always keep up with UA trends.

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Gulnaz, you’re currently the Head of User Acquisition in a mobile game development and publishing company. Did you always dream of a career in the game industry? Where did your journey start?

I have a degree in international relations, but never became a UN ambassador. I chose marketing instead. I was always fascinated by this sphere, because here you can combine creative and analytical approaches to solve complex strategic tasks. Moreover, your performance can always be measured, which is also very important!

I started my career in game development more than 5 years ago as a User Acquisition Specialist. Over time I gained a lot of experience in various aspects of marketing, built my release management skills, and worked with key platforms and channels. This experience helped me form an understanding of how to develop effective strategies and manage a team of my own.

In Azur Games, interesting new projects appear all the time, so our UA Department is expanding and developing rapidly. I’m glad that my team has an opportunity to experiment and look for new problem-solving approaches.

One of my rules at work is ‘no micromanagement’. In my team, no matter if you’re a Junior or a Senior, you get full freedom. After all, what really matters is the result and professional growth of my team.

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One of my rules at work is ‘no micromanagement’.

Gulnaz Saitova

Head of UA at Azur Games

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Attracting users to mobile games is rather complex and costly. How does one not spend a fortune and still get players to make purchases in a free-to-play game, maintain its virality, and stay active?

High-quality product and strong ad creatives are definitely key to successful user acquisition. When planning our marketing activities, we focus on specific individual characteristics of the users, depending on the app genre.

You can only avoid spending a fortune on UA if you understand your partners’ ad technologies and products well enough. Marketers should be aware of the latest updates and algorithm changes, and regularly explore how to use the partner’s latest offers to the greatest benefit.

It’s important to create transparent relations with channel managers, participate in beta testing, and talk about your needs. I think it’s vital to provide feedback to your partners and offer them to embed certain solutions into their product, which will help you improve performance in future.

You have both mid-core and hyper-casual games in your portfolio. What are the main differences in UA strategies for these genres? Are there any bottlenecks, and how do you deal with them?

Yes, we do have projects for any taste. The main difference is the approach to promotion, configuring, optimizing, and evaluating the performance of a campaign. As a rule, player lifetime in hyper-casual games is short, so such campaigns are typically optimized at early stages. After 24 hours, we can already make conclusions about the quality of traffic attracted.

In mid-core games, game sessions last longer, and monetization happens mainly via in-game purchases. That’s why it is extremely important to set up targeting correctly so you can find the users who will stay with you for as long as possible and will be willing to pay. In this case, UA doesn’t have to work so fast, and you can build a longer-term strategy together with the development team.

I think it’s the presence of different game genres in our portfolio that makes working in our team really interesting. We give our specialists an opportunity to constantly improve their skills and become universal UA soldiers :)

In fact, right now we’re looking for another «soldier» to join our department. We also have a lot of job openings in both product and marketing departments. Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to talk!

In mobile game promotion, the visual aspect of ads is quite important. In your opinion, what approaches work best in ad creatives and which formats perform best?

I think the simpler the creative, the higher its conversion potential. In the era of ad oversaturation, it’s essential to come up with a concept that’s concise and easy to understand. The ad creative must be aesthetically pleasing and neat, but most importantly, able to get the user’s attention within the first 5 seconds.

Based on our experience, video and playable ads work best. Actually, interactive ads are always a good choice, they help provide users with the most relevant experience and showcase the game’s competitive advantages.

Well-written text and friendly gameplay will help you achieve impressive results. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what makes a good creative.

You collaborate extensively with external studios as a publisher. What metrics do you use to evaluate how promising a project is and how hard is it to drive downloads for external projects? Can you tell us about some of the non-conventional tasks you’ve had to deal with?

Having a lot of expertise in publishing mid-core and hyper-casual projects, our team first studies the project based on standard metrics: CPI, retention and LTV. If the game test score is lower than expected, we don’t drop the project right away. Instead, we analyze the problem and offer solutions that would help improve the metrics so that they reach the required values.

From our experience, it’s sometimes enough to just make some changes to game mechanics or setting to see a positive change. We’ve had cases where we managed to raise Day 1 retention (R1 — the number of players that return to the game after the first day) from 20% to 40-45%.

How fast external studios work, and how willing they are to listen to our ideas and recommendations is also very important. To make it convenient for all participants, we keep our work transparent: our UA strategy is always open for our partners, we even share as many metrics as we can after the first game test to help developers understand what exactly needs to be changed and why it needs to be changed.

This approach helps studios grow their own expertise and facilitates the professional development of their employees. For example, if their team doesn’t understand how UA works and how campaigns are scaled, the chances they will succeed when creating a new product are not very high.

Talking about your product performance, how did the recent global events affect it? Did the «organic» traffic skyrocket? Has the competition for players become more intense, or has everything been business as usual?

The pandemic has affected all business areas, game development is no exception. To talk about our own products, we noted a significant rise in installs starting around mid-March when most countries went into lockdown. This rise can be attributed to self-isolation, since people found themselves having much more free time, and thus more opportunities to play games. Moreover, advertising competition went down slightly due to decreased advertising activity in other areas.

I think mobile games are a great source of positive emotions, just like books or movies. During self-isolation, games helped people relieve stress, take their minds off their troubles, and get new gaming experience. Now our metrics are slowly returning to their previous values. We think it’s because many countries have already eased up on restrictive measures.

What difficulties do you think the industry will be facing after the pandemic? We’re all tired of staying at home, so maybe some people will now prefer taking long evening walks to playing mobile games?

It’s hard to say for sure. Now that most of the restrictions have been lifted and people start going on vacations, we’ll probably notice a decrease in traffic.

We’re now facing the start of the so-called ‘quiet period’ when people are spending more time offline. But in autumn, when people will again be spending more time at home, perhaps we’ll see a new rise in traffic.

What resources would you recommend for improving skills in mobile game marketing? How important is networking for you personally? What events are you planning to visit when you can?

For me, the best way to hone my skills is constant communication and sharing experience with my colleagues from the industry. I’m always happy when I get to meet my friends, many of which also work in the gaming industry, and discuss the latest news.

To make sure I have many topics for discussion, I start my day by checking Google Calendar, AppsFlyer, Asana and FB feed while having my morning coffee. I really like Facebook, since that’s where my colleagues often share useful insights.

I never miss the White Nights conference, I find it very useful for networking and finding new partners. Moreover, it’s also a great opportunity to listen to your colleagues from the industry delivering interesting speeches.

If you want to know more about mobile game marketing, I’d suggest reading Mobile Dev Memo and following game company blogs on VC or DTF.

To put your knowledge into a system and learn more about analytics and mobile app marketing, I’d recommend taking a closer look at online courses. There are plenty of good materials available at devtodev platform.

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