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Winter Nights 2013: User acquisition trends; from pricing, to decline of the charts' organic power, and rise of Facebook

#wnconf Thoughts from the panel

Winter Nights 2013: User acquisition trends; from pricing, to decline of the charts' organic power, and rise of Facebook
There are a lot of figures thrown around about user acquisition, but so how much does a US customer cost these days?

That was how the final session of first day of the White Nights conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, kicked off.

Pepe Agell from Chartboost, said "It starts from $1, but I've seen up to $8 charged."

"It depends on the quality," added Wooga's Sebastian Kriese. "As Pepe says, there's really no ceiling, depending on how specific a user you want."

Limvirak Chea from ad network InMobi reckoned that greater supply in 2013 meant he thought costs would be stable during the year.

"Developers are getting smarter. They are looking at CPI costs and their lifetime value rates and are understanding better how the system works," argued Agell.

"They're getting better access to their data and that makes them smarter."

Value of a user

Steel Media MD Chris James - acting as - was keen to ask the panel about how the quality of a user is changing.

"Publishers are keen to segment their campaigns. They're really digging down into their activity. It's not about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars without knowing anything about the users, as they used to," said Chea.

Switching the subject to incentivised downloads, Agell was quick to explain how Chartboost was different.

"We're totally against incentivised downloads. We're about creating a network of valuable users not about volume.

"And the value of being top of the free charts is decreasing anyway, " he added.

"It's all about the quality of game," Chea reckoned. "If you have a quality game, incentivised downloads can provide quality users, but its impact is certainly decreasing."

Kriese said incentivised downloads hadn't worked for Wooga. "We have high quality users and we've found that if we exchange users with other developers, it often doesn't work for us. Their users are lower quality than ours," he added.

Decline of organics

Taking questions from the audience, CEO of Russian publisher Game Insight, Alisa Chumachenko, said her company had seen a big drop in the number of organic downloads generated from the top of app stores.

"Is this good or bad?" she asked.

Chartboost, InMobi and Tomasz Kolinko from app store SEO optimisation outfit Appcodes thought the change was positive because it demonstrated a maturing of the industry, and that companies' focus was changing from revenues to than chart position.

Another question was about the value of advertising their games via Facebook.

One developer said they were seeing a click-thru rate of up to 50 percent for a maximum install cost of 50c in Russia, via Facebook.

Andrey Tertisky from Social Quantum publisher said, driving his game's Facebook audience to mobile had worked well for the company.

"We hear there's plenty of volume and good conversation on Facebook, but we're not sure how long it's going to last," said Chea.

Answering another question about different ways of acquiring users, Kriese said that Wooga was now doing TV advertisements for Diamond Dash in Germany.

"It's working okay, but the analysis [in terms of ROI] can be tricky," he said.

Then the topic turned to how starts ups - who don't have a lot of money to spend on campaigns - can operate in the environment.

"App store SEO is a great way to build up an audience," said Kolinko.

"Then you look to do cross-promotion," he said. "App store SEO isn't expensive, but you have to take your time."

He also spoke to the wider issues of developers focusing on building a community for their games, and talking to the games press - all things that can create buzz around a game.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.