Pete Novotny, the business development director for monetisation and user acquisition network W3i has been discussing the challenges and changes to user acquisition in a session at the Mobile Games Forum 2013.
"Advertisers are getting smarter," he started. "They aren't just looking for the cheapest cost-per-install they can find anymore."
The quality of installs is becoming increasingly important, and that isn't the only way that user acquisition has changed. Tweaks to the makeup of Android and iOS themselves have affected the way that developers acquire users in a host of ways.
Spare change
For instance, the App Store redesign that accompanied iOS 6 changed the onscreen presentation of the top free and top paid rankings, and the shift to a horizontal, card-based search results made it more important than ever for studios to ensure their games correspond to key search terms and have great screenshots.
On Android, search plays a larger role generally, and it's a more frequently-used discovery method. "It is Google after all," observed Novotny.
Whichever platform you're talking about, though, the power of brands is on the rise. Brands have a greater power to ascend the app store charts organically, and can reap greater benefits from targeted burst campaigns.
Temple Run 2, for instance, accumulated 6 million downloads in its first day on sale, and 20 million in its first four days in the App Store.
The success of brands such as this will "bring up the barrier of entry," Novotny said. "Higher production quality and IP will make it harder to stand out."
What's next
That wasn't the only prediction that Novotny made in his session. He foresees a greater proliferation of targeting attributes appearing, along with better real-time bidding and native ad formats.
In particular, he said banner ads aren't very useful at all in terms of user acquisition, and W3i generally avoids them.
Novotny also expects media rates on Android to close in on iOS, although he noted that fragmentation remains an issue for the platform.
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