🔥 The Art of Scaling Applovin UA & Admon: A Deep dive

Let's say five percent of the impressions to this campaign will go for creative testing.

If you have five hundred dollar budgets and you put five percent of those impressions toward 20 creatives, every single creative will have very little room to test and to iterate.

When you have when you blast, as I said, it if you have a lot of spend and much more impression, and then you can afford having much more creative samples.

And so, let's say you spend 10 10k per day,

You should aim, let's say, to add five to ten new creatives a week.

That sounds reasonable, yeah.

Okay, okay, okay.

That

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And thank you very much for joining us for this special episode.

Now let's get back to it.

Thank you.

Of course.

It's very serious.

It's very, very serious.

I'm really, really sad you didn't get the memo.

Like you should brought the you should brought the moustache guys.

I mean I can see who is the half the half gamer now.

I guess we are the half gamers, Jakob.

Yeah, you are the half gas.

What do you mean?

I have my mustache.

Yeah, but it's not a stand-alone mustache.

I don't wear stand-alone.

Anyway, anyway,

whatever, guys.

Yeah, like, hello, everybody.

Welcome to another special episode.

I think, Felix, you mentioned it last time when we had a special episode.

All the episodes are special, anyway.

But this one's extra special.

Oh, so now we are doing extra special episodes.

Extra special.

Anyway, ultra special next one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, is this a gacha again?

Gacha pool.

Okay, anyway.

Thank you very much for coming.

Then this is it.

My name is Matthi Lancer.

Thanks for another episode of Two and Half Gamers.

Felix, Jakub, hello.

Nice, nice and great intro.

Yeah.

So let's introduce our extra special guest this time, Alexis.

Thank you very much for coming as well.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, guys.

Very nice to be here.

So can you, yeah, we know we all know you, but our dear listeners might not.

So can you give us a brief intro about what you did how you ended up in gaming industry maybe and then what you're doing at the moment sure um

i actually landed in the in the gaming industry by a bit of a hazard i came to to uplogin in berlin by chance um and yeah worked five years as a let's say account manager with the growth team the bd team in berlin so helping the the mobile developers and the the app makers to to grow their games um doing both qa growth and monetization.

So, yeah, had the chance to work with a lot of people in the industry in EMBA, in Europe, and a lot of studios and different types of games.

But, uh, yeah, it was really thrilling, lasted five years, had a blast, and yeah, decided to take my own venture and uh to start my own business.

So, now I'm doing it basically the same, but but on my own, so yeah, that's uh, but yeah, not leaving the industry.

This industry is too good, it's too

having too much of a fun to to leave it behind.

I feel something about it.

So, today we're going to basically ask Alexi some questions just about UA with Applevin and admonitization with Applevin because we can't think of anyone better to guide us through this process.

But, Alexei, just before getting started, why do so many people hate on Applevin?

Wait to open it, man.

Yeah.

I don't think there is a hate for Applevin.

At least, not anymore.

I think there used to be maybe like there might have been this feeling.

I might have heard that before, but I have the feeling it changed.

Applovin was not a love brand, right?

You would have some companies like Unity was more seen as a love company helping very close to developers, etc.

Not anymore.

Not anymore, yeah.

I think Aplovin had this aura of being very bullish, very aggressive in the way they they entered the space, and that might not have pleased everyone.

You mean by single-handedly giving unsolicited offer for Rovio and stuff?

But I think they did.

Sorry, sorry.

Not Rovio.

Merger with Unity and Unity.

Sorry.

Rovio.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and this is also something I felt over the years while being at Aplovin, is Aplovin kind of enabled and helped grow so many publishers and advertisers and was very in an advisory position that they kind of gained some trust in the heart of the developers.

I mean, you guys also have been in contact with a lot of people, you've worked with a lot of developers, maybe you can confirm that.

But I think this image kind of changed over the years, and Applovin is not seeing as bit as a benevolent.

And I think the sum of this switch was, you know, when there was the runtime fees, and

Ablovin stepped up for the developers when Unity kind of lost some points, and that was a fun moment too, especially.

Well,

I think the aura is still there, it didn't change that much.

I mean, you might not like Applovin, and I think that there might be a bit of that.

You cannot work without Aplovin.

That's exactly where I'm going with this.

Because I think Apple went from being an underdog somewhere now to the point where if you don't work with Applavin, you can't scale your game, period.

Full stop.

And that's that's that's uh an interesting journey for sure, and you need to get you need to have some balls to get there.

I mean, we, you guys, I've been to a lot of Aplo-In events, and I think now everybody, I think they've made a lot of great events.

I can testify to that.

I loved it, um, kind of miss it already, but uh, no, I think everybody was very, you know,

enjoying and very friendly.

And I think Apployan was a good good host in some events, absolutely, for sure.

Felix, we want to ask Admonia.

I think we're going to start with UA because it's kind of upstream from Admon, right?

So I think it would make a bit more sense.

And then I can button if anything makes sense with the questions, but let's start with UA, I think.

Okay, so I mean, I'm pretty sure you already heard all of these questions before, but you know, we have you here and people want to hear this as well.

So I think the major turnaround was when Axon 2 was kind of introduced.

And I think with Felix, we were sitting in Sol at one Amplify event where we saw the graph where basically max, like they showed us the max at like 180,000 developers on the mediation, which definitely helped to the Exxon2.

So, how does Exxon2 work, if you can unpack that?

And what kind of signals do you

start with what is Exxon2?

What is Exxon2?

What is Exxon2?

You guys are starting with the real

blackboard questions.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I can't really comment on what Axon2 is.

Nobody really knows.

It's a bit of a

mix of a great product

and lots of data.

And lots of data, but it's a bit black box.

You guys, you know,

there's only a couple of people that know what it really does and what it's like.

Okay, so it's some kind of Eplovin version of Skynet.

Great.

What it does is it combines a lot of historical data that Hablovin have had as being a mediator, as being also a first-party data with studio, etc.

Combines all of this data with a great product into making you find the right user for your offer.

That's as simple as that.

And then what happens in the back end, it's a bit more complex.

I give it to you, but I can't really give more details on that.

I don't have them.

But it's...

Let's be honest.

Like, there used to be a time where you would run CPI campaigns to upgrade to address campaigns.

You would have to collect purchaser to be able to run a a purchaser-based campaign.

Like this was a hassle.

And there was a lot of, you know, roadblocks to get started on your campaigns, a lot of learning budget that would be wasted into getting your campaign set up.

Right now, from day one, you launch a ROAS campaign.

It taps into an audience of users that are already known by the system and it adapts and it calibrates toward your goals and your your your campaign and your your game specifically.

How does that possibly?

Is because of ExxonTwo or because of of so many data points that you already have?

Or

Aplavin already had?

I think that's both together.

Action 2 wouldn't be what it is without the data.

And yeah, the data is also feeding Exxon 2 first, and vice versa.

Okay, so you can't really, you don't really know or can't comment like what kind of signals is it?

Nobody knows, man.

You're not the first one to ask.

Of course, exactly.

All these questions that I'm asking today,

people are asking me, it's like, guys, only if I know.

The truth is, and Adam also is underlining that, that's one of the best algorithms right now that has been built.

And the keys to this,

you know, castle is very locked.

And I think

it's in the hand of, I think, a very few, very few people.

Because this is gold, to be honest.

Exactly, yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like the Coca-Cola recipe.

You can't get on a flight if you both know the secret.

Yeah, okay, fair enough.

Fair enough.

But then you mentioned an interesting point about the CPI campaigns and the Rust campaigns afterwards.

And now I've seen the evolution from the campaigns that are optimizing for, let's say, day one purchasers towards day seven purchases.

And now Applevin is pioneering for some time already, like the day 28 attribution window.

So, can you talk about the differences and like what is actually

taken into consideration for each of these different campaign types?

I think that the release of the D7 and the D28 models was

not groundbreaking, but it allowed a lot of

new campaigns.

You basically tap into different types of users.

If you have, with games having a longer break-even window, you cannot just rely on a D0 RAS.

You could be meeting your goal at D0, but then retention drops and you're not making it at the end of the day.

So I think it was, it came, the D28 and D7 came out of discussion that

those games have a longer break-even window, they need to be able to optimize toward longer time frame and be able to get those users that are more retained in the times and

you will have necessarily some some overlaps between a d0 d7 d28 but

essentially what they're doing it's it's different type of users you will you see it you run a d0 d7 d28 you'll have completely different data the rows will be completely different the retention curves and

I think they're incremental to each other.

They're complementary.

It's not like you run one and you leave the rest behind.

They really associate themselves together.

And

right now, I think most of the advertisers on our program, they're running all the campaigns together, not only one.

So then what are the different so you are saying that, I mean, makes all the sense, like every of these attribution windows, you're taking into consideration different amount of data.

So for day zero, obviously less purchases, but kind of,

I guess, works well for the companies or games that are optimizing for short payback period.

Within the day seven, I mean, there's obviously more data coming in, and then you're optimizing different curves.

So, I mean, like when and in which type of

like point of time you're able to say this works, this doesn't work.

Because I imagine for day seven, it's also a learning period.

For day twenty eight, there's also a learning period.

Yeah, necessarily the the learning period is longer with D twenty eight, right?

But uh and this is the the mistake to do is like to judge and to assess the the the performance of your campaigns based on the first week or second week of data when you're running a D28.

While

the system should have at least D28 metro data to be able to calibrate efficiently.

Thanks God it's not the case, right?

These campaigns are calibrating on the go, not only when they get 28 days of data.

Otherwise, that's a bit a lot of money.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But I think they're just different models.

You always have different users.

You'll have users that play two hours a day for a year.

You'll have others that play very intensively.

You have different profile.

And what they they do, they essentially tap into those different types of users.

And

why and how they do that, they, you know, again, the bunch of data Applebin is sitting on, being also a mediator, they know which users are staying 30 days, 60 days, 90, et cetera.

So there is a lot of knowledge, the pool of users that they can tap.

Yeah, I've seen, I've seen like what you mentioned, the different LTV curves and retention profiles.

I've seen Adro ask campaigns, day seven, performing way worse than Adro ask campaigns day 28.

And I was like, how is this even fucking possible?

It's, I, it's, it's, but I mean, heads off, like you said, like this algo is gold.

And as soon as you see it works, like, it fucking works.

Yeah.

I mean, I've seen the rollout of D0, then D7, D28, and it progressively the one replaced the previous one.

Like, D7 outbeat D0 from far in retention figures, in ROAS, in the curves, in the way that the ROAS is growing over time.

And D28 eight now is also killing it.

I mean,

all the advertisers shouldn't be running D twenty eight because they literally yield a much higher quality of users.

And you will have a the retention those campaigns yield are insane.

So some of them will a bit freak out because they see a D zero that is half or even a third of what the D seven is yielding.

But over time in D fourteen, D twenty eight, it will pick up and then you'll have a campaign that over times and beyond thirty will be much more thriving and having the best actually every

which is what you're looking for.

Can I ask a question here, right?

So you worked at Applevin for five years, right?

So you probably saw ad spends of probably north of billions in those five years in UA.

And now you're basically a consultant on the UA side.

What do you think are some of the differences, how you structure an Applevin campaign to someone who never worked there before?

I think the the level of automation that applovin has reached now can make it easy for anyone to start on applovin um your your level of intervention has been limited somehow now i think the best you can do is have the right set of creative have a good understanding of your goals and then you know the rest is kind of automated so it's i don't think for someone that hasn't worked at applause or hasn't touched to applovin it's it's not so hard to to get it on and to make it work just listen to your account manager alexis look every even like everyone like literally everyone can set up a campaign on facebook google wherever like that's easy but the fun starts after you know you you need to optimize you need to add the different creatives you need to change the goals like what are the kind of campaign optimization steps that you need to do on uploading and obviously everybody can do it but there are always differences always if you already worked with it you know what you should

yeah and please include things that felix likes to say, Oh, you didn't ask for this, that we have this, because I think half of the functionality will be hidden by this, like, oh, there's this feature.

Oh, you didn't ask for it.

That's on the admon side, not on the UI side.

Yeah, I don't know if it's the same.

But I think you have a set of best practices that will make your campaign work on Aplogin.

And it depends on your type of game.

I think the more you go into IAP games or blended, you know, with hybrid monetization, the more you'll need to stick to those best practices because those are higher higher value users so they are more expensive and machine learning needs data so if you have a low budget and you're hoping to have to make miracle with a low budget while you're acquiring 50 users per day

it's going to be tough right so i think the first thing is and

the the requirement in budget appliana a bit higher than other networks but because if you were starting applying with 100 it wouldn't work right so that's why it starts at 5500 minimum It's kind of push you to go quicker through this learning phase that is necessary for any algorithm.

So

the best practice would be, you know, have a good set of creatives, playables, of course, combine them, make some combination between standalone creatives, standalone playable, and short, long videos.

Long videos are working even better now, like 45 seconds, 59 seconds.

Tap into as much geo as possible.

Like it's not the use, the case where it used to be like, I start with US, then I add T1, then I add T3.

Now you can literally run worldwide a single goal, and the system will find the difference in LTV from all geos and adapt the CPI, etc.

So I think it's it became really smart and automated in the way that you don't need to really

from day one put like a different goal.

You can adapt on the goal.

But I think the

advertisers that are the most successful are the ones that understand that there are different

maturation and different LTV curves per campaign and per geo.

Adapting your goals per geo and also per campaign.

It's not like my D7 is the same on Adros D7, on Adroas Day 28 or a blended D7.

Those are completely different campaigns.

And I think the best an advertiser can do on a proven is setting the right goals per campaign and per geo.

And when you do that, you maximize probably the performance.

And then yeah, when you your campaign, I think caps,

I think there's a the there's a lot of

understatement into how much it's a nice to have to have a campaign caps.

Like, there's a lot of advertising games that would love to spend more, and there's they're not making it right.

So, if you campaign caps and you have a bit of a gut feeling that it's working, you can really like start unlocking, etc.

Because I'm seeing it right now with other clients by being on the other side.

It's like I want to spend, I want to be, you know, growing my game, but right now

it's not capping.

So

two months before it was capping, and now it's not.

Yeah, so what do you do in that case?

I mean, there's not a lot you can do.

You reduce your goal,

and as long as it's within your profitability windows, try to be a bit more aggressive.

This is the part from South Park meme, and it's gone.

Not everybody knows the South Park meme, Mr.

Jakob, but okay.

Well, the thing is, there always is like

the campaign is capping, meaning for the the listeners, like you're spending your your budget within like a couple of hours of the day.

So you could potentially increase the budget and then open up the inventory, I guess.

Then what happened to me multiple times, like, well, look, the campaign is capping, but I don't really want to increase the budget because, well, cash flow is cash flow situation of the company or whatever else.

So there's like

basically not gonna not gonna happen.

Increase the budget means spending more.

No, no, no, no.

Because you said the cash flow sentence, which implies that the ROAS prolongs

not necessarily the ROAS prolongs, it's just the cash flow.

If we spend more, we won't have the money in within like the 30 days, let's say.

It's like it's as I said, like it prolongs.

It's a good point.

I think, Jacob, you're right.

The more you scale and the more you want to scale, the more you're going to have to reduce your goals and the more you're going to extend your break-even window.

So that's part of the game.

If you had a day 90 break-even window and you want to scale more, probably you're going to have to reduce your goal which is going to push your break even to the 120.

is it going to make it is the question right is your game able to monetize until then you know not everybody has like the the content and the game to actually be able to monetize for six months nine months a year etc so yeah but uh good good point jakov could you

let me let me re-ask this question in another way so in your five years working at appleving what were the top three mistakes you saw people make when running ua on that channel

I've seen I've seen I've seen a bunch but yeah I think I mentioned it I think the main one was focusing on CPI I think there's been a lot like my CPIs are too high in the campaign and that would make them freak out you know it's like whether your user is two euro or 20 euro you have a goal in the campaign as long as the goal is reached you know like and you meet your profitability whether the user was two euro or 20, it doesn't really matter.

So, I think that was the first misconception that I was hearing a lot that CPI is the key metric to follow.

That's one.

The second probably that I was saying is

try to grow.

I think that was specific to IAP games, but try to grow an IAP game with a $500 budget.

IAP games means you're going to tap into users that cost like $10, $20, $50, maybe $100 per install.

So, if you have a $500 budget, you have literally

five users or 10 users.

And if you have a conversion rate of 10%, then you have one purchase with your 500 budget.

That's not going to help the algorithm to calibrate.

There needs to be the understanding that those games will tap into Wales and tap into high-quality user, but for that, you need to put the budget frame, right?

You can't grow the same way an IP raw an IP game and an ad-driven game.

That's just, I think, the misconception.

Yeah, learning budget and

budgets in general are going to be more expensive as long as you tap into blended, hybrid, and IP games.

I think that's

a big one.

You have one more.

You have one more.

One more.

You want one more.

I think the biggest mistake, let's call it this way,

was not really to try to overrule the way the system works by controlling the goals.

For instance, you know, it's like you have a D7 or D28 window and you're changing the goals every day.

You're basically sending different signals every day, which doesn't help the system to find the right users.

So one day you're like, my D7 is 50, the next day you raise to 60.

Fine, it's going to calibrate.

Then two days later, you raise to 65.

Then it's like, okay, no, it's not 50, it's not 60, it's 65.

Those types of different in the ROS goals make the system type into completely different types of users.

So, your CPI is going to increase,

you're going to have a completely different behavior.

I think

the understanding of you have a long optimization window of D28, let it at least 10 days or two weeks to calibrate on the goal.

If you see it's not meeting the targets, you can change.

But doing it every two days, three days is only going to hurt it more than anything else.

And yeah, I think that's

that's that's three.

You asked for three, I gave three.

No, I wanted to, yeah, I wanted to say first the CPI, it's always freaks out all like everybody.

I ran a Met 3 game, which got

$30, $40 CPI on Facebook.

And I was like, guys, like, you're fucking lucky.

This game usually is the CPI for these games, like 60, 80, 90, 150.

No, that's, that's, that's the range all over the place.

I started running up Lavin, and the CPI was 100.

It's like, oh my God, it's so expensive.

I don't know what you are going to do.

And then there was one day where the CPI went to 200 and there were a few payers from that campaign.

The ROI was like seven days, like 100% in seven days.

I said, guys, like,

this is your whale.

This is your quality player.

It doesn't matter if it's 200.

It really paid back in seven days.

What are you talking about?

Then the other point you

made about making changes all the time is just like people are always not patient.

It's not going well.

We need to do these changes.

Like, guys, like, chill out.

Like,

you need to leave it for a while, like, not do like the changes like 10 times a week.

It's not going to help.

Especially, I find the algorithm from our point pretty reactive in the changes.

Like, for instance, Google takes ages to adapt to changes.

Yeah, so.

But the point on the CPI you mentioned, I think like $40 on Facebook versus $100

on Apple Evan, I think that's a question a lot of people have been asking.

But

what matters is that this $100 CPI is actually going to actually mature in a much higher LTV and end up in a much better ROAS than this $40

Facebook use.

Yeah, but people are used to see Facebook CPIs, but then this only

the golden cohort kind of CPI.

And what starts at 40 ends up at 120 in a month.

Whereas Apple I mean, it kind of stays within 20%, maybe up or down.

It's still the same CPI across the

life of the campaign.

But then you mentioned not doing the changes that often.

Like, what's the good cadence to actually make those changes, like once a week, once per two weeks?

Or how does that kind of work?

Yeah, it really depends on the type of campaigns and optimization window if you have D0 you can change basically every two days yeah okay

wait at least three four five days if you have D twenty eight at least ten fourteen days but okay again you know you'll always need to have the system as much as you can calibrate on the go

when going toward this

optimization window it will always need kind of mature data so for D seven it needs at least ten days of data to really calibrate or take another direction see if it's completely out of the goal, it will really realize it quickly enough, but you need like metro data to be able to really assess your campaign performance.

And if I'm running Ad ROAS campaign on the UA side, and let's say I have a puzzle game that's 99% driven by ads, how should you think about when you have big gains on the admon side on Macs?

Like, let's say you implement Moloco and it gives you a 15% rise on interstitial and rewarded.

How should you think about your UA ROAS goals for your ad ROAS campaigns then?

You mean adding Moloco will change?

Let's just say like I have a really big win on the admon side.

Let's say I have a 15% rise on ad ARPDAW by adding a new network.

Do you change the goals then for ad ROAS campaigns or do you kind of just leave it or how does that work?

You can.

I mean if you have better ARPDA with the change you make on admon or product changes you make, you can allow yourself to be a bit more aggressive on the goals so that you scale more.

So I mean that's a good win.

If you manage to make make a 5-10-15% ARPDA gain with the changes, whether it's admon or product, I mean, take advantage of that because either you're going to increase your profitability with the same goals, or you can just, you know, reduce a bit your goals and then scale a bit more.

So, that's

but could be address or banned rust.

Okay, yeah, some yeah, some people say, like, oh, well, we increased the ARPDAOs, but didn't change the

campaigns or anything.

That's debatable always.

But then

let's say you made a lot of changes on the on the campaign side and the campaign died.

Basically, there's zero spend.

So, like, what to do now, especially on Apple.

I mean, do you create a new campaign, you reduce goals to like, I don't know, zero percent and just let it let it run?

Yeah,

yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so

creating a new campaign is a bit of a myth.

Uh, It's not going to change anything.

The learnings are, you know, you have a package name and the learnings are hold at this level.

So whether you create one or ten different campaigns, it's not a fresh start.

You have a learning.

And if you want to kind of flush the learnings, if you want to, you know, come back on learnings, you know, if you've set 100% D7 ROAS, campaign diet, because a bit unrealistic.

You're going to have to review your expectation and review your goals.

Now, the truth is, I've seen Apple in a stack of UI channels, Applevin is often able to really give you what's your game KPI.

It gives you the optimal retention of your game and the optimal ROAS curves, etc.

Of course, it depends on the campaign.

Advertised, I would say Applevin needs a 40%

target D7 while it's been reaching 25 on Unity, Facebook, Google, etc.

There's something you're doing something wrong, right?

So it's actually usually the contrary that with better maturation curve, you should, and that's what I was saying earlier, you should have a goal per channel, depending on how those channels and those campaigns mature over time.

So

if your campaign died, it means you probably had an unrealistic goal.

You were setting the bar too high and you need to kind of review it down

to

start it spending again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So then what do you do?

Like you...

really decrease the goals to bare minimum just to start spending or like what okay So there's been a lot of that, and that could make a few people freak out because I understand you have like a 30% goal and you say, okay, go to 15% just to restart the system.

So it's fucking five.

It doesn't matter.

I mean, you just need, yeah, you just need data to make it work.

You need data.

Exactly.

That's a good point.

You need to flush your learnings and restart from scratch.

And as soon as you get users and data, you're going to be able to increase and get again your goal toward your more realistic levels.

But yeah, okay, so but the kind of the step from campaign to dying to restart is just basically go and try to get the the learnings, even though it's gonna be just the goal of let's say instead of 30%, it's gonna be five just to get spend.

And then what?

Like then you increase the target every, let's say, a week or kind of

yeah, progressively.

Okay.

Progressively again, depends on the optimization window, but you know, I wouldn't do you were at 30, you went down to, let's say 10.

I wouldn't go back as soon as you see the start spending

starting.

I wouldn't go back to 30 immediately, right?

Those kind of jumps is completely gonna

exactly.

So, I think the range of

acceptable change is

the higher part, I'd say 20% is a big change already.

So, 10-15% is acceptable.

Yeah,

five percent is maybe too slow.

You know, if you've went very aggressively on the way down, you go five percent every three four days gonna take you a while to go back to your realistic level but uh yeah 10 15 is i think the realistic type

okay yeah it's pretty it's pretty helpful

what also would be helpful to to understand the creative mix and the kind of i mean facebook back in the days back in the days they were always like saying oh playables are the next level shit and they failed so much

because i mean unfortunately there's no kind of proper proper placement on Facebook newsfeed.

It was only in audience network, but wasn't scalable.

Well, uploading, if you don't have playables, you're done.

How come?

What can we do?

Please unpack this.

How are playables kind of being the big part of this uploading campaign?

Yeah.

If you don't have a playable, I'm not sure you're completely done, but you're at least at a disadvantage with the competition.

Yeah, exactly.

Everybody now kind of runs playables.

And, you know,

there used to be a studio that had an edge on the competition back then.

Now it's kind of everybody running playables.

And if you're not, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot.

I can translate that.

That's Alexi saying, if you don't have playables, you're fucked.

Yeah, it sounds to me about the idea.

Thanks for reading between the lines.

No, but it's...

Let's be honest, like, with the quality of the game, it's not the hyper-casual time anymore.

No, no, no, of course, of course.

Any users could fit your games and make it work for you.

Now you have games that have you know break-even window from three, six, nine months a year,

IEP user that cost a hundred.

You want to make sure that those installs and those CPI that you pay or those user you get are valuable and they are they have the highest intent when downloading your games.

So

the playable is just, and I think that that makes sense, right?

A user that is playing and watching a lot of ads per day, if you're the one that shows him a really nice nice playable, which is a like a better window into your games than other games, and he likes the mechanics, when he downloads the game, he has a high intent.

It's going to be high-quality users that probably plays your game for much longer than somebody that just got hooked by a fake play, fake, fake gameplay, and just realized that you fooled him, right?

I will stop it right there.

You were faked by the fake gameplay, but then you have a fake playable, which is even better.

come on but i i i can understand like this is quite kind of like a a qualifying the user playing the snippet of the game and then it stays in the game obviously in these days where you have different mini games

kind of hard to

to to work properly on on this but then like i've seen this in different accounts

and what you're saying i i can understand but it's like i have videos in the campaign, and as soon as I start adding playables and playable end cards, so it's basically video plus playable and then a standalone playable, suddenly I could see a scale happening on uploading campaigns.

So it's not only about like qualifying users, but it's kind of like,

I don't know, like it's the type of inventory that the playables are tapping into or like how does that kind of work?

And what a playable does, it essentially increases CTR and engagement.

So you're basically able to tap into you know higher quality users with with higher CPMs so it's all about signals even in the critics all about the signals yeah it's about engagement interaction so you will have a playable that you know converts better so it attracts more it has more traction than other creatives that might not have the same kind of engagement matrix so yeah I mean

now

again coming back to this but

you want to have playables to self-select the better users.

Yeah, qualifying the user.

Yeah, okay.

They're filtering tools, basically.

You know, like you know, that when you pay a $20 CPI,

you don't want somebody that shown after day one, so you want to make sure that the person that downloaded your game after playing it is going to play it for long and you pay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But reading between the lines and looking at the engagement of the creatives and everything, and there's qualifying users, I would say this is a kind of part of the answer that I was asking

at the very beginning, what kind of signals Axon2 is taking into consideration.

Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's an interesting piece of information for sure.

So I think since you're talking about Axon, the algorithm changed, but also the creative optimization also changed.

So there used to be back then when I was running campaign at Applevin, you'd have maybe out of 50 creatives, you'd have two winners, and the rest would have no traffic and no impression.

Since Axon two, you're now gonna have a lot more creatives that are sampled and used.

You know, you'll have

your spend is gonna divide it between 10, 15 creatives from all sorts.

You're gonna have a banner, you're gonna have a playable standalone, you're gonna have short video plus playables, you're gonna have long video plus end cards.

Ads will tap will have a certain type of user and different CPIs.

Right, so that's the I think that's the future of UA and creative and and and a bit like if we tap into generative ai it's serving the right user the right ad to the right user and that's effectively what's happening now with with uploading creative algorithm is upload a lot of punch and see what the system is able to get out of it tackling and and targeting different type of user at different cpis sometimes different type of performance in this case like how often do you you should refresh the creatives or add new creatives every week

it's a good question it depends i think on your volume if you have a campaign that is blasting you can afford to refresh more regularly and with more what does it mean blasting i mean let's say give us some give us some rough numbers here 100k a day 50k a day 10k a day a day what's blasting is i would say yeah 50k

no i think even with five 10k a day you can be very not aggressive but you can be a bit more active on the creative refresh um because you know you're sending a lot of impressions You know, you want to avoid creative fatigue and renew your stack of creative regularly.

There's regularly, and there's how much you how many creatives you also refresh.

If you have a campaign that spends, you know, thousand a day and you're putting 20 creative at once, like seeing how the algorithm is working, it allocates a part of the impressions within the budget.

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Now, let's get back to the content.

Bye-bye.

Let's say 5% of the impressions to this campaign will go for creative testing.

If you have $500 budgets and you put 5% of those impressions toward 20 creatives, every single creative will have very little room to test and to iterate.

When you have, when you blast, as I said, it if you have a lot of spend and much more impression, and then you can afford having much more creative samples.

And so let's say you spend 10 10k per day.

You should aim, let's say, to add five to ten new creatives a week.

That sounds reasonable, yeah.

Okay, okay, okay.

That

this is fucking gold.

Seriously, like this is really good.

This is really good.

40 minutes in, now we're getting to the goal.

No, this is really good.

No, this is really good.

Because then because so you don't really need to test creatives in a separate campaign.

You just you just add the new creatives in.

Algorithm allocates five percent to the new creatives and then decides based on the early numbers if it's performing better or not.

Exactly.

It's going to allocate some samples of impressions.

If it see it picks up with a better install rate, better ROS and it's meeting the the campaign's goal.

It's progressively going to push this one a bit higher and see how it compares to the other winning creatives that are higher amount of impressions.

I think again,

if you're spending 500, I wouldn't refresh every day.

If you're spending 10k, you have more room to refresh.

If you're spending 100, you can refresh every two days.

Yeah,

just out of curiosity, can you say the biggest campaign that you've seen per daily spend?

It's going to be a couple of hundred, a couple of million a day, right?

Like in that region, right?

I think we went above the six figures per day.

Yeah, I mean, on big launches and the big players, yeah, I think it's

nice.

There's companies that have this kind of budget and have the expectation with new launches.

We're still in gaming, yeah.

Yes, yes, yes.

Are we in China or are we in the US?

There we go.

Now it's fun.

Trying to find it.

Now we're other than that.

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I got all everything I wanted.

Yeah, yeah.

Should we shift skiers here, please?

Yeah, let's go to the questions.

Oh, there you go.

You are here as well.

I'm sorry.

I forgot about you.

Please, Chris.

So, as usual, let's do some ambush stuff.

What's your take on the current offer by Eplovin merging with TikTok?

And what do you take out of that?

I think it's great.

I think

it would happen.

If it would happen,

since I joined Applevin, I think there's been a very smart company vision.

All the acquisitions that had been made, you know, with Mopub, with...

They changed the whole picture.

And it was so fucking great.

Like the whole, yeah, but the whole acquisition over the years had been, had had, there was a vision, right?

And I think Adam has a specific vision.

And for TikTok, the opportunity is there that there is a huge amount of attention with a lot of users that are not so well monetized.

And what Applevin does, you know, it has a lot of demand and it's able to, you know, increase the revenue of you know, I think that the potential of TikTok has been only scratched.

They only scratched the surface.

And with

a company like Aplovin that has this kind of execution, that could really take a company like TikTok to another level in terms of revenue.

But it's also, when you think about it, it's social media.

Aplovin is another type of attention.

It's people playing games.

They would be able to tap into the social media world, right?

Like the Facebook, the Instagram.

So they would be able essentially to kind of double their attention within to reach the user while they are on social media, but also while they're playing games.

So for me,

that's kind of genius because you're like basically extending

your reach and you're able to

onboard much more advertisers on the demand side to scale to an extent that you, you know, like...

That amount of data is insane.

That's insane.

I mean, I don't know how they gonna, you know, Adam was also putting it.

I don't know if you saw the last

there was a new article lately.

Exactly, the last press release where he says

he's turning it as well into like job creation, etc.

I find it genius.

But

do

the

Applause is able to tap into 1.4 billion users, you know, via the SDK, etc.

But now there will be a lot of overlap with TikTok, but it, you know, it's another time of the day.

It's other type of users, other attention might be more fitting for the e-commerce.

That's what I want to say.

Like, for e-commerce, like, that's like now kiss.

now kiss jesus and that's why i think it comes at the right time or while province is trying to to scale up the the e-commerce initiative having tick tock right now under the the umbrella would be great

okay

monetization or do you uh have more ambush questions jakob no no i'm i'm okay like i know that like there's lots of stuff happening there like for instance there's a the initiative or let's say some rulings already trying to dissolve facebook and move it from whatsapp instagram and all these other things now that we have these all like divesting initiatives like TikTok, so we'll.

You know what?

You should leave that shit when we talk about Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's have a separate Facebook episode, maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's go to the meat of this.

Yeah, sort of the meat.

So, in the last five years, max mediation, I guess, has gotten more and more automated with everything moving to header bidding, right?

What are the top three things you'd advise publishers that are sub 10K a day what they can do to boost ECPMs now that most of it is optimized or automated.

Good question.

I think there's a wall behind him where there's like the NDA displayed.

Keep looking there.

Generally, I'm not a fan of seeing the CPM as the North Star metric.

I think there's a lot hiding behind it that you cannot really influence.

The CPM is a factor of a lot of.

Add Arcta, then.

Okay, add Arctas.

Thank you, question.

I think that's that's I like I like that bet.

But I think, you know, with seasonality, et cetera, with how many impressions you show per user, with the freshness of your users,

there's a lot of things that can lower or increase your ECPM.

But to to increase your your adapter, let's put it this way,

the best you can do is

I mean, try to have the most tacked waterfall.

I think it's it's it's a bit basic to say, but

the more network, whether you have eight network or fifteen, there is gonna be a difference.

You are putting more competition in the auction, you're giving chance to much more um networks to bid, which kind of you know pull

the value up.

More networks means more competition,

whether in bidding or in a waterfall.

I think the waterfall is not so much of a topic anymore, but

it works the same way, right?

But no, I think also the other thing is to add

localized networks, like Bengal for Asian traffic,

Line for Japan, Line for Japan, Django for Russia.

That applies only for people that have the audience there, for games that have the audience there, but that's not completely negligible.

So that's the thing to take into consideration.

There are some hacks that you can try, but they are not 100% proven.

They can work on some games, on others, with the refresh rate, etc.

But I think the best for your adaptability and what you can do is to run efficient UI.

It's a bit of a virtuous circle that you won't have good monetization metrics if you acquire very basic CPI users without optimization.

And to have, you know, high-quality users also, you know, show high ROS, you need to have a good setup.

So, one feeding the other.

But if you really want to have the best ARPDAO metrics, you need to run some competitive campaigns, Rust campaigns on all networks.

So, how does UA actually push up ACPMs or add ARPDAO?

Like, how does that work?

The freshness of the users.

You're basically tapping into higher quality users that have higher retention or higher LTV, et cetera, that are more ad engaged or that tends to do more purchase.

So that will, by essence, drive the metrics higher because those users will interact more and engage more with your game than classic CPI users that will not be necessarily driven toward a goal.

So that's cause to effect.

I can't tell you how many times I've worked with clients and then they're like, yeah, our ECPMs, the benchmarks we're getting were way below.

And I'm like, yeah, because you're only advertising to non-payers.

What do you expect?

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, but we want higher ECPMs.

I'm like, yeah, well, you're not showing payers any ads.

So, okay, like they're going to stay low.

I mean, the ECPM DK is a thing, right?

If you only have old users in your game that you show them ads and they've watched 100, 150 ads, it's not going to be the same value of an impression if those are fresh users that just came into your game and that watched five ads.

So

this is definitely a thing.

And with the, you know, comparing your ECPM with the one from the competitor, it doesn't really make sense.

Maybe you show 50 ads, it shows only 10.

So of course, if it shows only 10, the ECPM, the value of an impression is going to be much higher than you showing 50.

So yeah, that's

kind of one other question, right?

So what advice would you give to publishers on Mac, specifically on iOS, where this is a bit more of an issue, where Applevin has taken 50 or 70% of all the impressions?

there's no real advice there's no real advice to that

the game the thing is applovin is is very strong on ios i think there is no mystery to that and if they're able to take 50 to 70 percent it's because they are the only one that performs on this os

google facebook other network were

better or higher performing and more competitive on ios Applevin wouldn't be that share voice, right?

It's just they're feeling a lack that has been set after ATT.

But the only thing you can do is have the highest competitive stack, adding all the bitmachine, Moloco,

and all the other networks that you can.

Even if they take 2-3% of share of voice in your stack, they are essential.

They bring this thing up and

they might be able to

take a few percentage of share of voice to Aplo-Win.

But the reality is, whether you have a game that has 30% or 80% share of voice of Aplo-Win,

what can you do about it?

Like, there's nothing

that

says you're going to have a lower

RTA if this is the case.

And bid floors, when is that a good idea?

2018.

Yeah, it's it's something publishers have been playing with.

Transparently, I haven't seen a lot of like successful cases.

The thing with bid floors is you are basically saying, I don't want to show an impression under a certain level of CPM.

So you'd rather not show an impression and hurt attention if it's not higher than a certain value that you set.

But how do you set this value?

It takes a lot of experimentation to know that your bit flow should be at 0.15 in T3, 0.50 in T2 and 1.5 in the US.

You need to adapt and you might actually

lose on a lot of traffic because if you put your bit flow too high, maybe you start like removing 10% of your impression or 15% of your impression

potentially this will have a positive impact on retention but it might also hurt your revenue so you know that's a that's this trade-off where it takes a lot of testing good if you've managed to see an outdo lift with this kind of test but it's it's not so straightforward to say okay i put a bid floor and everything's gonna go

yeah

and i guess the second last question i have for you before uh at least i'll be done uh one of the things right that everyone's noticed in the last two years is how much longer rewarded ads and interstitial ads are getting and how much harder they are to click out.

I think the longest ad format on App Love in is probably, I think it was 115 or 118 seconds for rewarded ads.

When is that a good idea?

When is it a bad idea to have these aggressive end card formats?

Yeah, I think actually I have the thing now.

I mean, Applevin was one of the precursor and one of the driver into

Iron Source has started and then it kind of became an arms race.

I mean, the truth is, everybody's doing it, right?

Even Google started doing it, so they understood that they were at a disadvantage with the other network.

And there was kind of the acceptance in the industry that users now are more okay with ads.

As long as, you know, the ads can be 59 seconds, 100 seconds, as long as you

prompt a skip option for him to exit it before the end.

If he wants to watch it until the end, fine, but you know, the thing to do is probably to prompt early enough.

But the maximum on a plane, I think, is still 59 seconds.

That's the longest a rewarded video can go.

59 months.

I heard recently that other networks can do one minute 30, etc.

Yeah.

Looking at you, Unity.

I'm not pointing any fingers.

No, I think that's

something to manage as well with what type of games you have.

If you have like very long retain game and ad-driven games with six months, nine months, You want to retain your user as long as possible.

You don't want to make them fed up after three days because your ads are unskippable.

So we'd rather keep those users long and adapt the templates to make them a bit more conservative.

I think every network is giving those options, right?

There is a default template that

are set, but if you can request to all networks lower and make them a bit more conservative.

That's

the part where

you actually ask something to be done, but you don't know if you don't know.

Yeah.

So

that

all right.

Last question.

Banner refresh rates.

So, Google, 30 seconds.

Every time you, if you're like mediating on admob, if you go lower than 30 seconds, you get horrible results.

If you go lower than 30 seconds on Apple and you get really good results.

What's going on?

Just talk to me about banner refresh rates.

It's a tweak that allows you to basically show more impression and have an easy PMDK.

You know, there's no truth.

It might work better.

I mean, there is some kind of understanding that today everybody's kind of between 10 and 15 seconds on Macs.

You kind of need to test as well.

It's always been the answer.

Test, see it for yourself.

10% might work better for you on iOS and 15 Macs might work better on Android.

Other different networks handle differently the refresh rate.

You're showing more impression.

Maybe they don't have time to actually

be competitive and refresh in the auctions.

You know,

try both 15, 10, maybe even 20.

I can't tell you why Google performed better at 30 seconds.

I don't have this answer.

But yeah.

The standard option, right?

The max optimize, that's 10 seconds, correct?

Max optimized, I think, was 15.

15.

Cool.

Nice.

I think we covered a lot of really good stuff.

Yeah.

Majority was UA, which is the interesting part.

The admon, not that much, but

yeah, I mean, yeah.

I think we'll leave that decision to our listeners.

Alexis, any last comment you want to share your contact details?

They're obviously going to put them into the show notes as well.

But anything else you want to share?

No, it was great.

It was had a good time.

If anybody needs anything, can reach out to me.

But yeah, you guys are the gurus, so I think you you also have the the answers to everything

we try to have but we don't always necessarily have all of these interesting bits and pieces so that's why we have extra special guests like you extra uber special guests

appreciate it yeah we really appreciate you coming on thank you very much so guys thank you for listening as well uh this was another episode of two and a half gamers please subscribe share your comments under the youtube or join the slack channel and yeah see you next time.

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Alexis.

Cheers.