Figures and trends in the mobile game advertising market: Apptopia research
How to advertise a mobile game in 2019 to attract the attention of a mass player, Apptopia experts told. The App2Top portal made a squeeze from their research.
Current figures
- Over the past 365 days, 46 titles have been constantly in the American top 100 highest-grossing games. According to Advertising Intelligence from Apptopia, almost all of them were advertised somewhere for sure.
- The average price for creating an advertising video is $1,250 for bulk orders of more than 10. The actual price is close to $2500.
- Facebook and Google are the drivers of the growth of 85% of all online advertising. It is to them that developers and publishers usually turn on issues of user engagement. Most publishers spend 30-60% of the monthly budget allocated for advertising on Facebook. By the way, another 10% of the budget is allocated for testing new advertising formats or placements.
- Medium-sized gaming companies (about 100 employees) usually hire a team of 8-10 people who make about 10-20 units of advertising content per week. Their work is distributed as follows: 85% — video creation, 10% — static advertising, 5% — interactive advertising.
- Large companies like Wargaming have the opportunity to maintain marketing studios of 150 people. They can produce 5-10 advertising units for the future and, if necessary, replace ineffective or burning advertising with them.
- Small gaming companies produce 15 videos and one interactive advertisement per month.
- 95% of all creatives created are unable to surpass the more effective advertising already placed in the portfolio. That’s why testing is necessary to achieve and maintain the metrics of payback of advertising expenses.
- Now the optimization of advertising models is mostly automated thanks to machine learning.
Recent trends
- App advertising in general is getting smarter, faster and shorter. The biggest trend of 2019 is very simple advertising videos in terms of content. They last from 3 to 6 seconds and include only one slogan and speak to the user using visual content. So the user manages to catch the meaning of the advertising video even when scrolling the tape quickly.
- Two categories of such videos are suitable for games: demo showing (the video contains only a screen of the game gameplay) and brand showing (especially effective in the case of games on an already promoted IP).
- The second interesting trend in the world of promotional videos is emojis instead of the usual text headers. According to Apptopia, content with emoticons attracts much more attention.
- At the same time, the content may contain only gameplay or be a CGI video, or even involve live actors. All of this is equally effective.
