How to increase your profitability with Cross-promotion? A step-by-step guide with Gonçalo @ Boombit

Speaker 1 At some point, you're talking about like, yeah, spending around 200K,

Speaker 1 where we're seeing that the overall profitability across all networks starts to be good.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 we see that cross-promotion is bringing us still one of them, is still by far the main source on profitability outside of organics.

Speaker 1 It's bringing us around 20% of the profitability, while the impact of scale is much lower.

Speaker 1 Because as soon as you start marketing, there's nothing that you can you cannot fight up level with an Meteoral Facebook

Speaker 2 this is a no bullshit gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition triple threat expertise

Speaker 2 Welcome to the two and a half gamers, the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles.

Speaker 2 Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 No, that's fine. Don't worry.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Hello, everyone. Welcome, these two and a half gamers.
My name is Matjel Ancheric.

Speaker 1 I'm Felix Bromberg. And I'm Yakubremier.

Speaker 3 And we are your hosts, and we are going to talk about cross-promotion. And We we have a special guest, Gonzalo from Boombit.
Welcome to the show. Can you

Speaker 3 first start with a brief introduction about yourself, company, and then we're just going to go straight in?

Speaker 1 Let's do this. Let's do this.
Thank you, guys. Thank you for inviting me.
So, yeah, my name is Gonzalo. I'm VPO Martin at Boombit.
Boombit is a mobile game publisher.

Speaker 1 We produce and publish games all the way from Apple Casual, Simulators, MidCourse.

Speaker 1 We've been in the industry for a while, and I've been actually yesterday. I did four years at Boombit, which sounds crazy.

Speaker 1 Time flats feels four months. Before that, I was at OMA right in the beginning of HyperCasual.
I was like the first user acquisition manager at the company.

Speaker 1 I remember my first job was to just set waterfalls per country, and no one was even doing that. It was just one waterfall for all.

Speaker 1 I'm more fine and more honorable in this world than anyone who started without monetization. Man, exactly.
And it teached me so much. So So it's been a super nice ride.
And yeah, now here.

Speaker 3 Perfect. Welcome.
And I think we discussed this when we were at the App Fest in Barcelona. And it was the casual discussion about, oh, you know, what's happening? You know, we do cross-promption.
Huh.

Speaker 3 So let's talk. Let's see.
Because we tried, I think, back in the days with Pixel Federation, it was okay, I guess, kind of with different launches.

Speaker 3 And then people are trying to do this nowadays as well, but always saying,

Speaker 3 it's tough,

Speaker 3 we don't know how to do it and all of the all of the different things about around it so how are you doing it like why why why you are great like what's let's do it

Speaker 1 yeah what's happening let's spill the beams yeah so maybe i can just share my screen i did like a small presentation and i think it could be like super good to go just out of curiosity so boom bit is public right like what's the what's the revenue roughly so the listeners kind of understand the kind of sums we're talking about so right now we're talking about revenue for the company itself.

Speaker 1 It's around 70 70 million a year.

Speaker 1 Then, yeah, it's the data.

Speaker 3 70 or 17?

Speaker 1 7.0. Yes.

Speaker 1 Between 60 and 70. Yeah.
Really depends on how the server will finish.

Speaker 1 Okay. And yeah.
And like so the 2.4, it's not public, right? So we don't

Speaker 1 give you a range. Give you a range.

Speaker 1 We, like I said in the beginning, so we have a lot of hypercapital titles, right? And then we have mid-core titles, we have simulators there in the middle with around like 30% IP.

Speaker 1 So we are working with games that have 99% ads in terms of monetization, games that have 95% IP in terms of monetization. So we felt that there was a need here to start cross-promoting our users.

Speaker 1 We have around 2.5 million daily active users. but within very different genres, right?

Speaker 1 So we thought that there was the need to not lose these players within their own genres and try to cross-promote them and generate as much as we could.

Speaker 1 That's what everyone says, and no one does it because I have tried so many times with so many companies and it never works.

Speaker 1 So I don't know what's going to be special about us, but let's try and discover. Maybe we're going to discover here the four of us.
There's four reasons why you do it. These are the first three.

Speaker 1 Of course, the main reason is because of privacy, right?

Speaker 1 You said, Mate, that you try to pixel federation. That was a long time ago.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was a long time ago.

Speaker 3 Privacy wasn't a thing yet.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So it wasn't a thing.
I missed that.

Speaker 1 And I think there is an opposite correlation between having tougher and tougher user acquisition due to privacy and then seeing cross-promoter just take cross-promotion just taking like a bigger chunk of your profitability.

Speaker 1 So that is for sure one of the main reasons.

Speaker 1 Then of course you start seeing that there was these small pockets of users that are enjoying our titles inside of Boombit, especially if you go to the mid-core side.

Speaker 1 Now we have Ant Royals, we have Clash of Destiny that is from the same developer and the cross-promotion between those titles is crazy.

Speaker 1 We have Darts Club, the club's title, darts, baseball, archery, the correlation and the conversion inside of those titles is massive compared if you want to move a Darts player to and

Speaker 1 at the same time

Speaker 1 we noticed as well that you know losing a player costs you much more than try and move it to another title and then maybe you're gonna lose a bit of revenue generation within the title where the user is but at least you know it's gonna cost you much more if you're gonna do user acquisition and it's within the company of course

Speaker 1 yes of course and it's definitely within the company but of course, the reason number one is this one.

Speaker 3 One question.

Speaker 3 Does your or like do your teams also fight between each other? Because they,

Speaker 3 at least back in the days, I'm not saying the name of the company, obviously, you already heard it. There was this problem with, oh my God, but it's my player and it's generating revenue for my game.

Speaker 3 Why should I send it to your game? And then it's going to be in your PL, not mine?

Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1 So let's not say they do not fight,

Speaker 1 then there is some kind of

Speaker 1 discussions going on, right?

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, we are lucky in the sense that the same

Speaker 1 product owners, they are the ones in charge of almost the genre itself. We have the hypercasual product owners, we have the clubs product owners, we have the mid-core product owners.

Speaker 1 So then cross-promotion tends to be naturally within their own genres, which is good.

Speaker 1 So back in my head,

Speaker 1 the CEO used to walk in and just clunk everyone's heads together. That worked.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that worked as well.
Like, that's how it started a little bit.

Speaker 1 And then we started seeing that there was ECPM correlation between genres. And then, like, okay, let's not create any issues here.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so

Speaker 1 the biggest reason why you're doing this is because it has like a really good impact on our profitability and in an incremental way almost.

Speaker 1 Right now, of course, taking Organics as a network, it's taking around 35% of our profit. Then there's one SDK green network that is generating around 20% of our profit.

Speaker 1 Then there is a blue social network that is generating around 14% of our profit. And then Escross Promo, like right away.

Speaker 1 Which, you know, for us, it's very significant.

Speaker 1 And also on top of all of that, it's a super reliable source. It's a source that doesn't change with Black Friday, with Christmas, with the low, you know,

Speaker 1 of the summer season. It's the only metric that really is impacting more or less performance of CrossPromo is the elective users.
And that is something that we are controlling. So

Speaker 1 it's something that it's very good to follow and to trust.

Speaker 1 Would you say it is also resilient to competitor games? Like to let's say if another like archery game goes in or Darts Club game or something similar there

Speaker 1 if it's resilient

Speaker 1 I would say so even though still like having novelty

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 like the new game a game that is new is gonna have of course much better conversion like when we launched I'm even thinking like the most recent hyper casual was downhill racing it was not it was the number one source as a destination but it was then of course the number one source as the source side of things because then you start having a lot of new users, even coming from the normal marketing, that they are fresh users, very active users, and then they're gonna churn a lot across promotion.

Speaker 1 But of course, then on all your other portfolios where you're showing this new game, there's gonna be a lot of conversions as well, because it is a new game.

Speaker 1 We have four

Speaker 1 placements.

Speaker 1 I don't know here. Okay, let's start with this, and then we can go into the game itself.
Maybe you can show darts. But we have the classic square called embedded.

Speaker 1 Completely incremental, right? It's not fighting against any other

Speaker 1 ad placement.

Speaker 1 It's showing the most amount of impressions by far, but also has lower conversion. Still surprising me every day how many people are converting.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so that's the one of the main ones. Then we have interstitial and rewarded.
For these ones, of course, we are always trying to do it mainly on no fill and on pre-fill.

Speaker 1 So, of course, as you know, no fill is when an ad network is not able to

Speaker 1 doesn't have any ad impression ready or cached. And then we go and we jump in with our own cross-promotion, but as well, pre-fill.

Speaker 1 As you know, a lot of titles they need in the first five seconds an ad either rewarded,

Speaker 1 normally not an interstitial, so mainly rewarded.

Speaker 1 and whenever the network didn't have enough uh the time to to select what impression to show we show a cross-promotion because some users need that placement right away question yeah the yeah

Speaker 1 more questions yeah i have so many questions so go for it if embedded interstitial

Speaker 1 and banners like together like 100 right how many percent of cross-promoted users comes from abended

Speaker 1 so i would say around fifty percent interstitial and rewarded. Then I would say twenty percent embedded.

Speaker 1 And then thirty percent, I'm gonna show it's the next placement that is what we call uh more games.

Speaker 1 So the majority for sure for from interstitial and rewarded, maybe embedded,

Speaker 1 maybe sometimes even a bit less, like fifteen percent. And then the rest is gonna be from more games, which is basically

Speaker 1 placement a placement that is actually

Speaker 1 kind of like a tab within every game that we have.

Speaker 1 So you can click on more games, either if it's in the main menu, it's in the offers place, and then you're going to have all these offers available that you can click right away, you know, and download the game.

Speaker 1 This one tends to bring like the best LTV users and the users with bigger retention because they have time to select the games. If they are downloading the game, it's not because they are forced

Speaker 1 by an ad.

Speaker 1 And this

Speaker 1 was for sure something that has been like super, super valuable for us. This is basically a GW formula now, isn't it? You have this kind of like buffet of almost a mini games.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Choose what you want, and it looks a little bit like mini-games. And yeah, there we go.

Speaker 1 Which brings me, by the way, to my other questions: like, if the game gets offline, do you still able to fill it with the

Speaker 1 as you say, no-fill setup? for sure so we have

Speaker 1 it's in in one of our next slides but we can definitely talk now we tend to cache one

Speaker 1 interstitial and two embedded so it's not a lot of course but it is cached and then in terms of you know if the user clicks of course doesn't go anywhere we are not like registering the click etc

Speaker 1 but that we always have the the cross promotion cached for the pre-fill for sure what happens by the way if the user goes out then and he has no internet, so we can actually download the game from the store itself?

Speaker 1 We are like

Speaker 1 a network within AppSfly, so we have set up in exactly the same way as Applevin, as MeteGraw. So we do have the impression, we have the click, we have the install,

Speaker 1 and then of course we have the revenue, and we have a normal tracking link. So that's

Speaker 1 you'll see it for sure.

Speaker 3 If you click and then there's no internet, then it just kind of goes

Speaker 3 i guess nowhere or maybe just goes i guess if you're offline

Speaker 1 install on zero zero megabytes and get stuck there i guess that that's that's not gonna happen

Speaker 1 yeah so i would assume you're asking me like if you click on it while online and then you go offline and you

Speaker 1 come back and you install the game but it's still the same yeah of course If you click on it while offline, it's going to show you nothing. It's going to show you like a loading store.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a loading store that People get stuck, I guess.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So yeah, so if you want, like we can, here are some numbers, but we can.

Speaker 1 This is just

Speaker 1 impressions. So no installs, but we can go at installs after when we're looking at the dashboard itself.

Speaker 1 But maybe, I don't know if you guys want to show Darsh Club in real life how it looks.

Speaker 1 I really do. I just had one more question about the preload up.

Speaker 1 so i'm assuming since it's preloaded you send an ad request when the user requests like a rewarded right so then while the rewarded is loading you then show your own rewarded ad or an ad for like a couple seconds and then that ad goes away as soon as the rewarded ad is loaded or do you play for 30 seconds yeah i think it's more they ask for the rewarded we gave it like two seconds to see if there is any impression if there is not we take over and then it's like okay okay, we lost the

Speaker 1 ads.

Speaker 1 If after like 15 seconds, the network answers, and yeah, so we just take fully over. I think it's more like that.
Okay, cool. Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, I think, I mean, and we notice, right, if the user needs to double the coins, right, in the first session and is waiting three seconds and then it gets the pop-up, like there's no ad, he's not going to keep refreshing and trying.

Speaker 1 He's just going to basically

Speaker 1 ignore

Speaker 1 double. So that's it.
Cool. Well, if you give me the screen, I'll do a little share on Darts Club.
Okay, I have to give you the screen. There it is.

Speaker 1 It's yours.

Speaker 1 All right. So, guys, take a trip down memory lane because we've all worked on Dart Club.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's very true. That's amazing.
At one time or another, this is the game that won't die.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 here. So tell me what to do.
Yeah, of course. So if you go go to collect, you're gonna see more games.

Speaker 1 So there... Or

Speaker 1 you should.

Speaker 1 That's beautiful right away.

Speaker 1 So it should be like as part of an offer. Or maybe just go to the basket at the bottom.

Speaker 3 Yeah, on the left-hand side. Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 1 Okay, it should be right away on the top. I'm just wondering if the issue here is that because you haven't moved a lot further.
Ah, there you go. So more games.

Speaker 1 So in the middle. So this is the the more games tab.
And basically, you know, for now, you will see we tend to show like bowling club first. On the top, it tends to see archery, which is also

Speaker 1 a game from the club team. And then

Speaker 1 I remember designing that core gameplay.

Speaker 1 And then it's basically like this. Sometimes we do have as well videos.
I don't know why they're not showing, but the biggest,

Speaker 1 you know, the biggest advantage of especially of the top offers is when you are having a new event in a game, especially like you're having a new event in Archery, and you want to move like a few users to this type of game.

Speaker 1 You want to move like a few users to Archery because you know in a couple of days going to be an event, it's a good placement to like prioritize the offers.

Speaker 1 Because events produce revenue spikes. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 3 And the question is now, you saw like the Felix had a big problem to actually find this. Do you have any other placements on this home screen? Or do you have a popular

Speaker 1 face mechanisms?

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the question.

Speaker 1 We do on the hypercasual side. So if you I think you also have ship ram jump, right, Felix? Yes, I do.
So on ship, you're gonna have you're gonna have everything.

Speaker 1 Okay. Let's go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have an ad right away. Don't worry.
Farm jam, farm jam.

Speaker 1 Look at all Unity ad. You can see that straight away.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I can can see it in the left bottom corner.

Speaker 1 Thank you for that impression.

Speaker 1 Just think how many extra impressions this impression is going to get. Is this an interstitial? Yeah, it's on the most aggressive in-card format.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Okay, good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Play the game. I'm a cross-promo now, Machie.
Okay. You can play later.
Okay.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm actually playing this game, so I want to talk about it, but it's not there yet in terms of the revenues yet.

Speaker 1 So, here you are.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So, that's the exactly the square, the embedded one, which is very no, on your face, as is in the main menu.
Then, as you can see, along the

Speaker 1 RAM itself, and you should play the level because you're gonna see so many. It is, there you go,

Speaker 1 one, two,

Speaker 1 three,

Speaker 1 four.

Speaker 1 So, this one,

Speaker 1 the base of it is actually GADSME, but as you know, GASME allows you to feel,

Speaker 1 to use no fill with your own cross-promotion. So it's something

Speaker 3 for non-admon people. Fair, fair.

Speaker 1 So GADSME is an in-game network that is basically showing advertisement and ads in game inside of the game assets, right? It's one of many right now in the industry.

Speaker 1 And we are partnering with GasMe on this game. Nice.
And they allow it to do this. So it's also like a good add-on for cross-promotion.
And as you can see, it's a hyper-casual because

Speaker 1 basically because the fill usually with these companies is like 30-40%, right? And then cross-promo then is a nice thing on top. Exactly.

Speaker 1 And you said 30 to 40%,

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 1 in the US,

Speaker 1 because especially in Poland,

Speaker 1 Berlin, I don't know, it's Lisbon for sure. You get a lot of

Speaker 1 this is just a click-through

Speaker 1 and it goes to Boombat. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 here as well, right? You press and it goes.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 Works well.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah.
Okay. And then below that, you have the more games.

Speaker 1 Right below the square.

Speaker 1 So it is

Speaker 1 super attractive. As you saw, the offers changed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the first is train, rum, jump, whatever. It's train, rum, jump,

Speaker 1 yeah. And even on the top, there's no archeries, only upper casuals.

Speaker 1 And so we tend to different setup for different audiences. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Okay, then wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Have you tried to promote this to other games, genres, and it didn't work?

Speaker 3 Or you just said fuck this and then let's just cross-promo the same genres within each other?

Speaker 1 No, we definitely tried. So all of it, all of it is based on ecpms.
So we do our own waterfalls and we change once or twice a week, depending on the title.

Speaker 1 Like this title is very low in terms of volume at the moment. So I would say it even has the same waterfall for a month.
But we are always changing constantly on eCPMs.

Speaker 1 If we would see that for some insane reason, Antroyal or Darts Club would have an amazing CP on this title, it would be there for sure. Okay, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 It just tends to be very normal that they are matching, so it's good to see that it's also matching. Yes, another

Speaker 1 makes sense.

Speaker 3 Archery collection, archery college. There you go.
But

Speaker 3 this is what voodoo? This is not you.

Speaker 1 No, it's not.

Speaker 1 This is voodoo.

Speaker 1 It's an interstitial, but yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So did you at some point try to

Speaker 1 just do the cross promo inside of the mediation? Because I've done that a bunch of times and it never works.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no.

Speaker 1 That's tricky.

Speaker 1 We tried a few partners as well, right? We tried even using the cross-promotion from our own source. And all of that tends to be much more complicated.
and less time effective than this one.

Speaker 1 Can you explain why it doesn't work to all the listeners? Because I think,

Speaker 1 because i've been asked so many times to do it and always i go like i'm not doing this this is never gonna work

Speaker 1 why it doesn't work first of all i mean it's so hard to understand the data as well like it's so hard to really understand how much you're paying for the user like why is the you like where to put them in the waterfall itself show the screen i'll show the game at least yeah and this is no it's

Speaker 1 if you want yeah short arts

Speaker 1 this is way more fun yeah of course let's not acknowledge the fact that there's a giant ship container container ship being launched into financial displays, which is super normal.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, and you move the level up.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, so that for us is always not very clear. And by setting

Speaker 1 our own cross-promotion as a network and having both ends of the information, right? Because we have the source and the destination, it becomes so clear and so easy.

Speaker 3 So I can tell evaluation is easier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 3 Also, the evaluation of the like the whole across product, how it works, and then how much money you get

Speaker 3 I don't want to say spend, but uh kind of get more incrementally like you said. Yeah, I'll get more than like that's the the key part of having the own your own thing.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And it's pretty it's pretty easy to to to get the data.

Speaker 3 Because you treated it basically as just the normal UHNO.

Speaker 3 in in Applause and the evaluation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So in Appslare, yes, for sure. There is no cost, right? So there is not the ROI

Speaker 1 check. But because we are mainly doing pre-fill, no-fill, embedded, and then more games, everything is kind of like incremental.
Nothing is really competing with ad networks.

Speaker 1 And then the only cost that we might be having is the user moving to a new game and not generating more revenue in that game. But then if it's going to a new game, his CPMs are going to be higher.

Speaker 1 and the revenue is going to be bigger. So just press the button that says I like ads.
How about ads?

Speaker 1 you didn't fail for it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. We tried the reverse psychology.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so right now we're showing like around a billion ads,

Speaker 1 a quarter. Of course, around like 980 million of those is embedded, obviously.
Like, you know, we have to show anything else in the presentation. I remember you said you had some questions.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I can share a bit more. All right.

Speaker 1 Something to, of course, have

Speaker 1 in mind is the fact that

Speaker 1 this is what I'm talking about. So we're showing around a billion in

Speaker 1 impressions in Q3.

Speaker 1 Of course, 980 are from embedded, but still having like almost

Speaker 1 17 million in interstitial and 18 million reward, it shows how big it can be at some point.

Speaker 1 The only if on all of this is, of course, there is some kind of small costs on the server side, but it's basically minimal. We're talking about like one cent per install,

Speaker 1 which could be at some point a no-no for like tier four geos, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what I would say. Like one cent, it's also kind of for tier three, tier four, a problem if we, if you pay for attribution, even

Speaker 1 exactly, exactly. So we are not really paying for attribution

Speaker 1 because then it depends on what kind of package you have, but on the server side, that's the only cost that I can say it exists. And yeah, it's around once we're seeing around one cent an install.

Speaker 1 So, for some tier four geos, depending on the average LTV of the game, we are not showing cross-promotion. Yeah, yeah, stage do you think cross-promo starts to work, right?

Speaker 1 You have two and a half million users, right? Like, is it worth someone who has like four apps that's like 10k DAO to do it, or is it not really worth it then? I mean, what scale?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 what scale? That's that's a good question.

Speaker 1 I think,

Speaker 1 you know, at some point,

Speaker 1 yeah, it needs to be as well number of apps because even if you just have two

Speaker 1 and you have like, okay, if you have two and five million delective users, for sure, I think it's worth doing it.

Speaker 1 But starting from even

Speaker 1 half a mil DAO depends on also what you're talking about. Half a milli per casual, it's nothing or not a lot.
Half a mil mid-core would be insane.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 fair.

Speaker 1 But maybe like three, four apps and half a mil DAO in terms of hybrid would already be very valuable in my opinion. But they have to be related, right? They have to be matching.
Okay. Yeah, in a way.

Speaker 3 In a way.

Speaker 1 In a way.

Speaker 1 Because at some point, you know, something that in the future maybe we'll also be able to share is that then you can also use these

Speaker 1 displacements, especially outside of interstitial and board, to add some kind of like brand deals, e-commerce deals.

Speaker 1 And as soon as you do start having populating these placements with some kind of ad network on top of that,

Speaker 1 it's going to get like 10 times more valuable than cross-promotion because cross-promotion is the minimum,

Speaker 1 not the minimum, is the last resource of trying to monetize the users and

Speaker 1 trying to move them around.

Speaker 1 So if you had, for example, half a meal DAO

Speaker 3 and a few games even just building something like this to then maybe try and add some direct deals on it could be something interesting that's exactly my question now so you have one billion impressions for Q3 are you gonna sell this as another ad network potentially to DTC or e-commerce or something because it makes a lot of sense yeah yeah

Speaker 1 i it's something that i really can't say just because we're public right Even if it's yes or no, but it is something that

Speaker 1 should be explored, right? Not just as a boom bit, but as anyone that has a portfolio like ours or they'd active users like ours, you should definitely explore that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it makes all the sense. I mean, you have the placements, you have all the technology and infrastructure now for cross-promotion, which is, as you said,

Speaker 3 I don't want to say bottom of the kind of, let's call it waterfall,

Speaker 3 but it is. And if you can sell those impressions elsewhere and just kind of run any other, not even gaming companies, but e-commerce, which is now the hype,

Speaker 3 pretty interesting.

Speaker 1 Definitely.

Speaker 3 We'll

Speaker 3 watch it closely.

Speaker 1 That's good. And we're going to start having more ad placements as well.
Like, we're going to have split screen where we're going to basically show, you know.

Speaker 1 try to show two or four ads at the same time.

Speaker 1 Of course, not all at the same time, but like with show one, then you show another then you show another then you show another and then allow the user to to play around and as well the splash screen the classic ad in in in the first second like forced and then the user can skip as soon as the game is loaded but at least during that loading time uh we can and you would be able to click on them

Speaker 1 we would you would be able to click on them yes

Speaker 1 that's how

Speaker 1 like normally splash screens are i mean even felix maybe knows more than

Speaker 1 i'm just comparing it with something like, let's say, for instance, emulators do this, like BlueStacks. They have lots of ads in the loading screens, but they're not clickable.

Speaker 1 They're just like call to action stuff. And then the actual.
Branding ads.

Speaker 3 Yeah, branding ads. They're just pre-roll.

Speaker 1 They're just pre-roll.

Speaker 1 And then the ads are like these extra icons that they put into emulator, which are like install buttons, I see.

Speaker 3 No, was this better?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think they will be clickable. If I had to say, if they come up with

Speaker 1 a way of not making them clickable, then maybe you're just annoying the user. I don't know.

Speaker 3 Think about it as an aggressive end card, which

Speaker 3 you click, you want to exit, but you can't. You just need to install.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so here we talked already about like the caching of the ads and trying to see.

Speaker 1 So this is a pretty basic look. I'm just then going to show you the tool itself.
So basically, we do have, I mean, this is pretty obvious.

Speaker 1 So we have a tool where we create the campaign, then whenever there's

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 cross-promo SDK

Speaker 1 starts working and it's going to show

Speaker 1 game A on game B, and then the user goes to game A. But I think the most interesting part is, of course, to show the cross promo tool itself.

Speaker 1 How do I change?

Speaker 1 So you're already seeing it. Sorry.

Speaker 1 I thought it was more

Speaker 1 showing it again. There you go.
Okay, perfect. So we have

Speaker 1 now here a few tabs. This is, of course, built internally.
So you're going to see a few features repeating across the tabs, but pretty straightforward. We go and we add our product.

Speaker 1 So we start from adding like the game. And then when we add the game, you need to select what type of ads do you want to show.

Speaker 1 So if either if it is the banner, the little square, the interstitials, or the more games. Then

Speaker 1 everything right away for both OSs, whatever you feel like doing it.

Speaker 1 Then you have the creative part where of course you can add, you need to add the creative that you want to advertise for the different banners, for the different banners, the different placements, sorry.

Speaker 1 And here as well, we have always the ability to just see what is live or what is not. For example, I just click that and I can see right away what creative

Speaker 1 has been added

Speaker 1 satisfying

Speaker 3 this this creative is running for fucking five years

Speaker 3 I'm pretty sure like

Speaker 1 amazing I love it love it let me see if there is more I think I mean that's for sure a lot but they're all

Speaker 1 this one

Speaker 1 not sure if you've seen this one

Speaker 3 no

Speaker 3 if you can turn down the volume that would be nice Pretty badass guy, and then he misses it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, obviously.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow, and he gets some courage again from his kid. Yes, from his kid, of course.
It's all his emotional. That's very emotional.
Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah. And

Speaker 1 yeah, so then, of course,

Speaker 1 you add your creatives, and then you start your own campaign.

Speaker 1 So, by creating the campaign, you are saying like what create what app you want to advertise in what other apps just to be sure that you know at least the connection is done both on the source side to the destination side and I think the most important part is the waterfall setup so here is when we set up

Speaker 1 the waterfalls per game per

Speaker 1 ad type and sometimes per geo that's a lot of work

Speaker 1 it's a lot of work but at the same it's not that much in the sense that for example the waterfalls are, we are only using a CPM.

Speaker 1 We are not, you know, trying to be an ad network query using like several types of metrics. So that's why I think a lot of other publishers can definitely do this.

Speaker 1 We are just using a CPM. And at the same time, that eCPM is being generated automatically.

Speaker 1 Basically, just a tool that is giving us the

Speaker 1 waterfalls. And then we're just adding it here as a CSV.
So basically, we are literally changing all the waterfalls for all the games in one click. Two clicks.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So not manually one by one. Of course, for then, for our biggest titles, we try to just see what

Speaker 1 the algo suggested, let's say.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's it. So it says 95% automated, 5% manual.

Speaker 1 And then the same for more games.

Speaker 1 Sorry, what about the backfill from Gadsme? When you have that in on the AfPO panels, what was the percentage you'd say of users you get from there for the cross promo?

Speaker 1 That's it's a good question that I should know. I honestly have no idea.
So probably not the high.

Speaker 1 Probably not the high, yes. I can tell you that Gadsme has been a massive surprise for us.

Speaker 1 And when I say Gatsme, I'm going to say, let's say in-game ads and not talking about cross-promotion.

Speaker 1 For example, for Darts, right now it's around, I was even checking before this call, around 13 to 15% of the ad revenue that we have, which I never

Speaker 1 thought it was going to be like this. And nice,

Speaker 1 and for Darts, it's still 80 percent ad revenue based, so it is

Speaker 1 you know a big part of it. And so, yeah, so I think for this tool, that's it.
Just wanted to show you around like how easy it is for us to then create these campaigns and just set up the waterfalls.

Speaker 3 It's a few clicks, basically. That's that's what I wanted to see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, literally, a few clicks, and uh, you know, whenever we will start working with other

Speaker 1 clients and other publishers, I mean, we already are working with them, but just definitely on the better side.

Speaker 1 It's as easy as having a self-serve network, right?

Speaker 1 So it's pretty good.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's again,

Speaker 3 I would consider this as additional UA channel for

Speaker 3 a lot of different games because if you have

Speaker 3 that many impressions, it's basically across like a a new UA channel.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's a new UA channel, but as well of the lowest quality of user, right? Because we are not trying to go above that networks.

Speaker 1 So I'm not saying that there is a massive quality, but as you saw before. Not yet.
Come on. Come on, guys.
Not yet. Not yet.
I love it. Not yet.
Yeah, that's true. So.

Speaker 1 Few quick other benefits. We use it as well.
Like we have an alerting system connected to the cross promo, which is really good why.

Speaker 1 Already a few times, you know, a new game was released with a buggy version or a network start to stop delivering an issue on the mediation SDK where ads just stopped working and you just start seeing like a massive spike on cross-promotion because now you're filling all the no fill.

Speaker 1 And this tells you right away as well, in a few hours, you're going to start receiving alerts.

Speaker 1 Cross-promotion is increasing by 300% today. Something is wrong.

Speaker 1 It's a good way to measure and to at least know if there's any bugs on the monetization side.

Speaker 1 Then, of course, there's no like no more and available ads, which is good for improving the user experience.

Speaker 1 And as well, what we talked before, like to push special events, whenever you do have a special event in a game, try to move that DAO to the right game at the right time.

Speaker 1 For sure. We also already talked about this.
So we set it as a network on Apps Flyer where we are basically seeing all the impressions on the source side and on the destination side. So we have the

Speaker 1 all view of performance

Speaker 1 and we have different dashes to

Speaker 1 check performance. This is one of them.

Speaker 1 I think you can see it.

Speaker 3 Now you can see

Speaker 1 it. Okay, cool.

Speaker 1 Where we so here I selected, I think, just upper casuals and like our main assets.

Speaker 1 And you can see right away like where the source is where the ad was shown and then the user was sent to the target game.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the game where the user arrived. The ECPM here, what is that actually? Is that something you calculate or is that taken from anywhere? Okay.
So the ECPM is just...

Speaker 1 The classic metric of Add RPU times installs divided by impressions

Speaker 1 times the thousand, right?

Speaker 1 If I'm not mistaken, I have the metric also in the so then you use that to calculate cost, I guess, of the cross promo, right? So you can keep the game teams happy, right?

Speaker 1 Exactly, exactly. So we're trying to

Speaker 1 access,

Speaker 1 assess like what is the real value of an install, let's say.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, wait, wait. CTR 68%?

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 1 Apparently. So this.

Speaker 1 And also, we have also 128%,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 it's amazing. I'm joking.
Like something clearly happened here. But yeah, I mean, let's not forget that most of them, and this is interstitial and rewarded, right? It's already no feel.

Speaker 1 Maybe some misclicks or a lot of misclicks. We are trying to imitate as well a network with like a small cross on the top,

Speaker 1 all of that. So yeah, 70% maybe is a bit too much,

Speaker 1 but it doesn't surprise me. If conversion rate was 60, I would be scared.
But yeah, conversion rate is 4%, 5%, 2%.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 makes a bit more sense. I mean, CTR on Applevin is what, Monte?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sounds about right. 90%.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 95%.

Speaker 1 95, 95%.

Speaker 1 It's crazy how that metric has just really diminished in value. Literally.

Speaker 3 You have other metrics which are more important.

Speaker 1 but we have 128 and app level doesn't have 128 percent yeah exactly

Speaker 1 there you go much

Speaker 1 then yeah then you can just uh the best way of as well understanding performance is you know you just select one of the sources and then you just try to okay there's a lot of them here and you try to understand how much revenue a game is generating

Speaker 1 for all the for all the destination apps. Here, I'm just looking at Adar Poo because I don't want to show you.

Speaker 1 We have a dash as well where we see real numbers, where you see like revenue being generated. But as you can imagine, if you multiply Arpoo by number of installed, et cetera, you can really see

Speaker 1 how much revenue is being generated. Cool.

Speaker 1 Okay. What else?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you said it was 12% of your overall profit in terms of ad revenue source comes from here. 13%.

Speaker 1 13%. Yeah.
13%.

Speaker 1 13%

Speaker 1 for sure.

Speaker 1 I have here an example of how CrossPromo can be impactful in launching again

Speaker 1 on the launch phase, on the sunset. I think maybe it's even after.
So we already talked about how we use ECPM on the waterfalls. So I can skip this part.
And yeah, this is the last thing.

Speaker 1 It's just kind of like a case study, right? We did it for downhill racing and it was rather impactful.

Speaker 1 More on the scale part, but definitely on the the profitability side. So, first week, let's call it soft launch.
It's not even really soft launch because here we're talking about what

Speaker 1 a thousand installs because the thousand

Speaker 1 span is the first week, 24k.

Speaker 1 And we have normally three networks. We always have two socials and one SDK.

Speaker 1 Obviously, the spend, the initial spend on the network is going to be it's not going to be profitable. You're just starting to scale.

Speaker 1 But right away, by having cross-promotion is bringing you an additional impact on scale. We see here around 12%,

Speaker 1 but as well as giving you already a buffer on profitability that you can somehow spend on the networks that you're soft launching.

Speaker 1 As well,

Speaker 1 even before starting one or two campaigns, you can use it to test the game, which is something that is basically cost-free, literally to test how the user is working on the is using the game, how the ads are working, what's the overall LTV for certain GUs.

Speaker 1 And it's also from moment one,

Speaker 1 increasing a little bit the impact on

Speaker 1 the algorithms from the stores, right? Because that goes into the store and right away starts having like 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 installs without

Speaker 1 any effort on our side. Of course, nowadays, this is not as relevant as it was before.

Speaker 3 Nice additional stars help always.

Speaker 1 Always, always.

Speaker 1 So it's pretty cool to see. Then

Speaker 1 first month, the first month, right? Launch. At some point we're talking about, so this is an hyper-casual, let's not forget.

Speaker 1 At some point, you're talking about like, yeah, spending around 200K,

Speaker 1 where we're seeing that the overall profitability, you know, across all networks starts to be good.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 we see that cross-promotion is bringing us still one of them, is still by far the main source on profitability outside of organics.

Speaker 1 It's bringing us around 20% of the profitability, while the impact of scale is much lower.

Speaker 1 Because as soon as you start marketing, there's nothing that you can, you cannot fight up level in Meteorological, Facebook.

Speaker 1 Still, it is a key moment to bring you that extra level of profitability. just so yeah you can run

Speaker 3 your UA a bit more comfortably also with hyper casuals and the margins pretty tight, this gives you a little bit breathing room,

Speaker 3 which is nice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 1 The impact where it definitely is less,

Speaker 1 sorry, the moment where it's less impactful is during the scaling phase or the less, let's call it like the proper launch phase. Of course, here is bringing us around 3%, 4%, 5% of the scale.

Speaker 1 But you can only see how impactful it can be on a profitability if we are looking at the scale here you're talking about 11 percent of course then at this moment in time almost half a meal spent the networks should be bringing the bigger majority of the profitability but in my opinion the biggest win of course promotion is on the sunset phase.

Speaker 1 Downhill racing is still not on sunset phase so I had to to change the game but just to give you a game that is basically dead on user acquisition side

Speaker 1 it has no any user acquisition we see that all the majority of the profitability that we are generating on this game comes from cross-promotion

Speaker 1 we have hundreds of games like this so you can imagine how

Speaker 1 it's a volume

Speaker 1 it's a volume play definitely not saying that you're going to be making 50k a day, 50k a week, even 50k a month. But if you do have a nice portfolio, if you have a lot of delective users

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 within the same genre, imagine multiplying this to like 50 games, 100 games.

Speaker 1 This is when cross-promotion is insanely impactful.

Speaker 3 We just talked about how hypercasual kind of a few hypercasual companies still make millions in and they're coming from Vietnam and then it's still profitable

Speaker 3 and this is again

Speaker 3 interesting point because not all the companies make hundreds of millions per month this can have like a very big impact on the like overall profitability of the the whole company basically and I don't want to say it's for free but it's like it's kind of efficiency at at its best let's call it that way 100% because these users would be probably playing this game

Speaker 1 but then at some point they would just have no ads anymore. And either they would be playing completely for free, or they would just like stop playing the game.

Speaker 1 And here, at least we are not letting them go and giving them a second life, third life, fourth life.

Speaker 3 Or just prolonging the life, basically.

Speaker 1 Exactly. In general, exactly.

Speaker 1 And I think that's it.

Speaker 1 That's pretty comprehensive. It's amazing.
I don't even have any questions.

Speaker 1 I think it was literally the best cross-promotion.

Speaker 1 Point people to this because it's always like, yeah, we're going to do this and then cross-promotion. Like, really?

Speaker 1 And they're like, yeah, it's around 13% if you have a giant portfolio of games that you can cross-promote to. Absolutely.
Hear my funny cross-promotion story just really quick before we end.

Speaker 1 Obviously. Obviously.
I was working at a large game company. And basically, the CRO told my boss, like, yeah, we're going to do cross-promo.
Make sure it happens.

Speaker 1 My boss comes to me and said, we're going to do cross-promo. I'm like, okay, well, we can set it up in the mediation, and they're like, Yeah, we want to do that.
That's exactly what we want to do.

Speaker 1 I'm like, But it's going to cost us money. He's like, No, no, no, we'll make it back, don't worry.
So, I set up the cross-promotion. Sierra comes back, and he's like, Why is the revenue down?

Speaker 1 And it's like, Yeah, because you know, cross-promotion. It's like, Well, turn that off.

Speaker 1 How many days? One day, two days, four,

Speaker 1 enough.

Speaker 1 I think it was only four because it was a weekend, but it's just like it's gonna cost you.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, Yeah, and then in the start, I had it on like backfill and like low ecpm and it's like why is the scale so low make it higher and then you're like meanwhile i'm in the trenches yeah they're living in dreamland yeah that's how it works so that's why we don't use the mediation now

Speaker 3 that's the answer my god okay thank you so much yeah that was this was perfect and i'm super practical yeah we made it happen thanks for sharing all the all the numbers insights and how it actually works so if people wanna contact you what should they do we'll put your kind of info in the show notes and obviously the many links to the tool or whatever.

Speaker 1 But yeah, please. Yeah.
What should they do? I mean, they can definitely contact me on LinkedIn, just Gonzalo Martins or Goncalo Martins.

Speaker 1 I have so many versions of it.

Speaker 1 Welcome to my world. Yes.
Welcome to Matej's world.

Speaker 1 I still can't say his last name.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 Perfect. Then if you want to ask also any more questions regarding this, please join our Slack channel.
I will put Gonzalo's info in the show notes. And thank you again.

Speaker 3 Please subscribe, comment on the YouTube, and then definitely subscribe on the Spotify because we are growing there as well, not only YouTube. But yeah, thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 3 Gonzalo, thank you very much for coming as well. And then see you next time.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Bye. Bye.
See ya. Bye-bye.
Thank you very much.