September 7, 2022

UA Campaign Checklist for Mobile Games

Running successful user acquisition campaigns for your new mobile game can be a daunting task that requires years of experience to hone. Fret not as we’ve put together a UA campaign checklist for you to follow through with some guiding questions that dive deeper into each step.

Step 1: Start with your goals

  1. Align your internal goals
  • What does your studio want to achieve for this game?
  1. Define your target audience 
  • Who are you building this game for? 
  • Which markets are they in? 
  • What is their spending power?
  1. Define the success criteria
  • Will it be based on vanity metrics (e.g. No. of installs, game play duration)  or actionable metrics (e.g. LTV, ROAS, RR)? 
  • What is the industry benchmark?
  • What are the Day 1, 3, 7, 14, 30 targets? 
  1. Knowing how to monitor and measure
  • What kind of marketing tech stack do you need?
  • Which tool to use for tracking, performance analysis, automation etc?
  • How much does each SaaS cost?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

Step 2: Know your market

  1. Understand your audience behaviour
  • What is their average LTV? 
  • Does it differ from country to country?
  1. Identify the primary and secondary ad networks that target the right profiles
  • Which are the common ad networks?
  • What type of campaigns do they support? CPI, ROAS, CPA etc
  • What is the average cost 
  1. Research on your closest competitors’ content
  • What are the top keywords for app store optimisation?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

Step 3: Plan, create and execute your campaign

  1. Prepare your creatives
  • Which kind of creative style should you go for? For UA - Text, image (mandatory), video, playable (IronSource, Facebook, Applovin etc)
  • Should there be music?
  • How many creatives should you prepare?
  • Do you need to localise your creatives for the targeted countries?
  1. Budgeting 
  • How much budget should you allocate for each ad network, per campaign, per country, or per bid?
  • How long should the budget last?
  1. Scheduling
  • Which ad networks and countries should you first roll the campaigns out to? 
  • Should the campaigns be scheduled in phases? How long should each phase be?
  1. Review & Launch
  • Are the campaigns configured correctly on the ad networks and integrated fully with your marketing tech stack?

Step 4: Post-Launch review

  1. Check on data integrity
  • Is all the data consistent across all sources and your performance analytics platform?
  1. Daily monitoring of campaign performance
  • Is the target audience reacting to your campaigns?
  • Are the key metrics improving over time? E.g. Installs, LTV, Revenue
  • Are you maximising your budget?
  • Are all the countries performing? If not, which ones are not and why?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

Step 5: Continuous Optimisation 

  1. Monitor the overall performance for each ad campaign
  • Are all the ad campaigns bringing good performance?
  • Should you continue with the underperforming ad campaign?
  1. Adjust your budgets and bids 
  • Are you allocating too much budget for a low performing campaign?
  • Is your bid too low or too high?
  1. Testing new creatives
  • Is the audience reacting better to a certain type of creatives?
  • Try other topics and themes
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