Unlocking Success: Strategies and Insights with Jatin Mittal of TapNation - Episode 3 of The App Marketing Show by Appnext

Welcome to the third episode of the App Marketing show, brought to you by up next. Joining me on this episode is Jatin Mital, Head of the user acquisition of TabNation. Jatin is a seasoned user acquisition professional boasting over 3 years of expertise in the mobile marketing area with a keen eye for identifying key user audiences and implementing tailored marketing strategies. He is consistently driving impactful results in the realm of in app purchases and user engagement. Jatin's dedications to the day, staying ahead of the curve of user acquisition methodologies coupled with his leadership in highly competitive markets. Today, Jatin joins us to share insights, strategies and his vision for the future of the user acquisition in the dynamic landscape of mobile gaming. Can you tell us a bit more about ClubNation? Sure. Thanks a lot Lucien for having me on this podcast. It's fantastic to have you in Paris, although the weather is not so great, but I hope you enjoy the city. It's a beautiful city. Myself like I've been working in mobile gaming industry for over three years. Earlier before Tapation I was at Homa Games. That's where like I got introduced to gaming as the industry but also like the growth marketing as a as a profession to work in and I joined App Nation three years ago where like I had a chance to evolve myself like as a user acquisition manager to the head of user acquisition as a company and the portfolio of our games group definition as a company. We started as a hyper casual mobile gaming company over four years ago. But as the industry is evolving and the hyper casual is starting to become more and more segmented, we are trying to pivot towards the hybrid casual space and today we stand as one of the leading publisher in this space as well. Recently you are celebrating 1 billion installs of your games as a drawer. Obviously I guess you are getting much more now. No, that's absolutely true. Like today we stand at 1.3 billion actually and it has definitely been a journey over the last four years and certainly it took a lot of determination and hard work from everyone in the team, whether it's the publishing team, the user acquisition, the LiveOps and data and tech. It's a collective effort and the collective result of everyone at AppNation. And today we stay strong at like 50 plus games in our portfolio that contributed towards this astonishing outcome of 1.3 billion installs that we have today. That's a great achievement. Tap Nation is making an instant and impressive growth in the gaming space. Can you share some of the key factors that brought you to the point that you are. Sure. I mean As I was highlighting, it's definitely the team and the dynamic evolvement of the team. As we have pivoted towards hybrid casual from the hyper casual, it took a lot of evolvement whether it's on the live up side like building the game economy that's more and more like purchase reward rather than the ad driven. So certainly like it's the dynamic evolvement of the team that has certainly helped us to pivot where we stay. But also like, like everyone in the industry, like the great challenge we face today is the increase of the user acquisition cost which like made us to pivot towards the hybrid casual because as what we have seen, the cost per acquisition has increased over time because they are more games than ever available in the market. But the supply of players has not increased at the same pace. And at the same time the ad monetization has not increased at the same pace either. So which made us to think, go back on the drawing board and think like how we can tackle this problem. And one of the solution was like pivoting our games towards more purchases inside a game like motivating the users to make some more purchase which technically helps us to increase the lifetime value or the LTV of the user. So yeah, like double downing on that strategy is definitely paying off today that we started to invest in this strategy over a year ago. From getting those games in our portfolio to building the team that are like specialized in those sort of games. And today as I was saying, the efforts are paying off. Tell us one thing because we see also as you are telling about the gaming market, the user acquisition market is constantly involved. This is the fact is there's nothing to discuss about a lot of changes are coming. What is your strategy approach? I would say even key strategic approach to the user acquisition to bring you the success to stay always on the top and to make the next steps. Yeah, you are absolutely right. Like user acquisition is evolving. It's certainly not the same as it used to be. Four years ago when I started to work in user acquisition space or the gaming space per se, the cost has been way higher than what it is today. And as I was highlighting to you in my previous answer, the ad monetization has not increased at the same space. So one of the way we are trying to tackle this situation is to be more data driven which basically helps us to go in the direction to catch as many opportunities as possible at a rapid pace to acquire the users at scale. And technician is heavily investing in that space as well. Like just last year we acquired a UA automation tool called UA Hero that helps us to predict the lifetime value of the users in real time coming from the different user acquisition channels. Not just by the channels but also by the sub publishers. That becomes like sort of a layer it in the every user acquisition channel but also creatives is certainly one of the important part as well. Like we are trying to make the creative testing and creative refresh process to be very data driven as well and as much as automated as possible. So certainly like one of the key sector where we are investing a lot is the data driven and the tech side side to help us to stay ahead of the curve. So understanding the user and the user behavior. That's right. As you're aware we in App next are running app recommendations on directly integrated devices, Android ones like Xiaomi, Bovivo and others. And we are able to show this recommendation from the very beginning when the user is opening the device, setting up the account through his user journey on the device. How do you find this channel working for you? If you can tell us a bit more how the recommendation engine. If you can compare the recommendation engine with the other sources of traffic you are using. No, that's a very good question you asked because the first we saw the increase of user acquisition costs while at technician was through the introduction of privacy scan from the iOS over two years ago. It might sound enticing like what iOS has to do with Android, but it very much do because back then not many marketers or publishers were aware like how this privacy error is going to unfold, what are the implications of that? And since there is no data available on the users, like many advertisers and publishers are a bit pessimistic about doing the investment on the iOS and some of the publishers I know they transferred most of their budget from the iOS to Android, which led to another increase of competition on the Android side. Because of that we went back on the drawing board to understand, right, this is the new landscape, like more and more publishers are transferring from iOS to Android how to tackle this problem. And back then we started to look for new opportunities, new channels to distribute our games at massive scale. And I remember like that's when we got introduced to AppNext and we started to distribute the games that are enjoyed by millions of users through App Next App discovery platform, which was certainly like a new sort of inventory and we were not competing with the traditional video or the programmatic inventory where like most of the advertisers were populated. So it definitely helped us to stay ahead of the curve like in terms of not competing where the massive crowd was already competing and in terms of the performance, definitely like as you mentioned in the very beginning, we have around 1.3 billion installs in our portfolio and AppNext certainly has some role to play in our success because we saw a huge amount of scale coming thanks to AppNext at a competitive cost per acquisition. And today as we saw in terms of the scale, the Latam and the Asian countries are very like interesting for us, like because these are the markets where more and more people are getting penetrated with the mobile phone devices which means like a more source for distribution of our games. And from our experience what we have seen like App Next stands at the forefront of distributing the games in these markets due to the strong foothold that you guys have and certainly like it's helping us to basically penetrate our games at a mass scale in those geos. Good to know. But I would say that some other GEOs probably also works for you. Is it true or not? And can you tell us if it was from the perspective of working together, it was a good choice for you guys? No, certainly as I was highlighting because there is an increased cost per acquisition that has been happening since the introduction of SCAN and the privacy changes from the iOS. And like today like we are certainly happy because we know as a, as a Geo, India, Brazil, Indonesia, these are like the strong emerging markets and strong emerging economies where like we would like certainly like to distribute games at a rapid scale. So we work with many partners like yourself, like App Next to distribute our games in those markets. And during this phase since we saw a great traction from AppNext, we decided to look for similar players or the similar advertisers that exist in that space to distribute our games. And we work with more or less around 25 user acquisition channels. Many of them are location based and not like a global players but more like some networks specializing in the traffic in Brazil, some networks specializing in traffic in India and so on. So definitely like App Next, seeing the great potential of the results from the App Next, it helps us to broaden our scope to look for the similar UA channels as well to continue what we started with App Next but at a more rapid scale. So from your perspective and business experience, followed by the massive success of Tab Nation, what would you recommend to other game marketeers? Yeah, I mean the first thing I could recommend is definitely to have fun. Game marketing as an industry is quite dynamic. Having said that like it's also important to stay competitive because it's evolving all the Time it possesses a lot of new challenges whether it's like the scan and the iOS changes, whether it's like the upcoming Google Sandbox challenges or it's either like the rise of user acquisition cost because of lot of competition. So there are a lot of challenges challenges to work on as a digital marketer which possesses like an opportunity to challenge yourself to grow something new every day. So it's not a monotonous job to have. So definitely like first thing I would advise is to have fun, evolve with the challenges that you face in your day to day job. And second like I could recommend is like having the the data analysis skills under your belt can certainly come handy. It was not very essential when I started working in the marketing four years ago, but due to the rapid development of new changes that are coming in the market, it's becoming more and more important for the digital marketers to have data analysis skill set to understand where the users are coming from, what is their lifetime value, what is their cost per acquisition, what's the CTR, what's the CBR. And as we know on iOS the availability of data is a bit challenge. The data is scattered around different platforms so it's important to merge all that data together to make the sense out of it. So definitely like having the data analysis skills is the second advice I would like to give to digital marketers today. What about risking and testing new channels? Would you also think that it's a good advice to tell the guys don't be afraid, don't stay in your comfort zone or you think that is not time for risking? No, for sure. This is something I foster very aggressively in my team at Technician to test new channels, take that risk. And Technician as a company really pushes us to take those risk driven decisions. And this is also one of the reason like we are where we are today because the company as an organization is quite lean and we are able to take decisions quite rapid at a rapid pace and certainly like it worked out for us. So backing up from that experience I would definitely recommend like taking risk. Trying to look for new user acquisition channels to distribute your games can certainly pay off. Thank you for staying with us, sharing the experience with our listeners, sharing your thoughts about the industry. It's definitely worth to let people know how to do the business. It is a pleasure to have you on the postcard and thank you to you guys, the listeners for tuning into the Upnet podcast. Stay tuned for seeing and listening to the more episode.