Felix Janzen, Director Performance Marketing at InnoGames, presenting at Mobile Spree Berlin 2019 - InnoGames is Germany’s leading developer and publisher of mobile and online games. The company based in Hamburg is best known for Forge of Empires, Elvenar and Tribal Wars. InnoGames’ first mobile title Warlords of Aternum is a fantasy turn-based strategy game. InnoGames’ complete portfolio encompasses seven live games and several mobile titles in production. Born as a hobby, InnoGames today has a team of 400 employees from more than 30 nations who share the passion of creating unique games that players across the globe enjoy for years.
In this session, Felix talked about Hyper-Casual: How a genre takes over the ad sales market and what challenges it implicates for the UA activities of a mid-core game.
2. INNOGAMES
400 employees
from >30 nations
Founded 2007
in Germany
Located in
Hamburg
Millions of players
>30 language versions
Germany’s leading
developer and publisher
of online Games
>750m hours of
playtime in 2018
3. FELIX JANZEN
Director Performance Marketing
> 7 years @ InnoGames responsible for UA
channels
> 12 years online marketing expertise
Previous companies: Beiersdorf, AOL &
Goodgame
6. THE COMPLEXITY BEHIND
RETURN ON AD SPEND - GRANULARITY
Country Device Creative
LIFETIME VALUE - PREDICTION MARKETING FUNNEL -
OPTIMIZATION
Campaign Profit
Cost per Acquistition
Lifetime Value
7. THREE PHASES OF MARKETING AUTOMATION
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY AUTOMATED BUSINESS LOGIC MACHINE LEARNING
Clear Processes
Cross-category
optimization standards
Optimized reports
with clear target KPIs and
benchmarks
Integrated predictive modelling
Bid management based
on LTVs and other
performance measures
Automated A/B
testing of creatives
Pattern recognition and
decision management
Automated campaign
creation and controlling
13. 360° MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOLS
C.A.T
(Creative Administration Tool)
Store, search and access
creatives
Request new creatives
Evaluate current and future
creatives
15. „Provide ONE APPLICATION…
…that can be used with every partner, containing all the KPIs that we
need…
…to efficiently analyze, create and manage campaigns…
…with the help of automation and a customized interface to suit the
needs of InnoGames.“
THE MAPI PROJECT
Vision
16. 360° MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOLS
(Marketing API)
Create, edit, analyze campaigns
Pull partner data directly via API
Rules Engine – decrease the
amount of manual work
CREATE
EDIT
Analyze
19. FACEBOOK CASE STUDY
Challenges
Detailed campaign structure
High demand of creatives
High data volume / complex
reportings
Scaling also depends on team
size
&
20. Time Savings:
>1,5 hours day per manager
FACEBOOK CASE STUDY
o Shared and automated reporting
o Creative process automation via CAT
o Facilitated campaign management via MAPI
o Automated/Common optimization via MAPI
Team Efficiency (accounts/manager):
Before = 1,2 After = 1,8
Scaling:
Ad Spend +40% (2.HY -YOY)
21. SUMMARY
01
Get the TECH right
Tracking, interfaces and reporting
02
03
CHALLENGE & OPTMIZE your PROCESSES as you
need a solid base
04
Find your team with more time for optimizing the
campaigns resulting in improved KPIs and growth
AUTOMATE & OPTIMIZE time-consuming TASKS
Operational, analytical tasks
Build a SMART SYSTEM
Decision engine, machine learning,…
In the past years colleagues of mine had the honor to speak at the mobile spree, so I am happy to continue this tradition.
This topic should be on the top of the prio list of every company. The whole ecosystem is getting more and more complex and your marketeers need automation in order to deal with all the information and to work efficient towards your goals.
I would like to show you how we handle this topic at InnoGames and what we have achieved so far.
First something I am sure you all know. A simple equation. You calculate the Customer Life Time Value, you have a CPL/CPI per User, so you can calculate your campaign profit. Yes, at the end profit is our ultimate goal. We dont have reg goals or CPL goals, at the end the profit is deciding – as long as the LTV is higher we a willing to pay a reasonable price – our CPI differ from 1€ to up to 100€ for selected audiences.
Thats the math behind – looks simple, but it is way more complex….
Why? There is a complex model behind every KPI.
Starting with tghe Lifetime Value:
We have a complex live time value calculation, a topic I could talk another 20 minutes about – in a nutshell, we take the actual customer value of the first 30 days and than we (our analytics team) multiple it with a factor wich refelcts the development over the lifetime. The factor is different per game, platform and country.
Cost per Aquisition – its depending on the whole marketing funnel, so there are many triggers to watch and to oprimize on.
Campaign Profit – also many different layers, as we are optimizing in Game, Country, Device, Creative level – easly you have more than 1000 combinations for one channel.
So you see, this is very complex and its a hard job to monitore all the „right“ CPIs and to make the right decisions. So we want to support our markeers…
So we started with the definition of different phases. Everybody is talking about AI, but you shouldn´t start with implementing AI, you first need to do your homework and set the base in order to be ready for automation.
1. Operational Efficiency:
You need clear processes, otherwise you will be never able to automate them. Its a lot about documentation, but also setting cross-category/department standards, as you don´t want to have different processes for the same topic.
2. Automated Business Logic
Predictive modelling – LTV forecast, churn prediction (CRM)
3. Machine Learning
Beispiel AC from Google (App Campaigns)
What are the next steps?
We have definded a alligned process, starting from the planning and concept of campaigns and creatives to the execution, reporting and learnings.
Its not „automation“ when you talk about tech, but when you talk about process management, as most if it runs „alone“.
Ad-tech important role.
Ad-tech – there are many tools out there which can help you on the listed topics and its up to you if you use third party tools or create your own tools in-house. Its always a question of resources, cost effictivness and know-how.
One think what is really important, I mention this on every conference I am when I talk about this topic is tracking – this is the key to have clean data you can work with. As this is an AdJust event, I am sure you all have a solid tracking solution in place
First step we want to allign processes with technology – honestly this was a side-product within the develeopment of a bigger tool, I will talk about in a few minutes.
Every morning our maketeers have to update their reporting, as on the one side we have data (buying KPIs) in the tools (e.g. facebook) and than we have the in-game performance in our internal BI System.
So they have to download the data and match it, to see the full funnel. And this looked like this….
7 minutes in real time! You can really see how someone is turning the screws – right?! But I would not want you to turn screws, I want them to build the greatest campaigns in the world!
Calculate this effort per employee every day – a lot of time to save to be more efficient.
And now – we open one file and we have the data.
We are pulling the data over APIs, automatically every morning and if the marketeers are coming in they open the dashboards with all information from yesterday – combined!!!
Our main goal was and is to create tools which makes us more efficient and faster, to stand up against the competition.
We have create a tool, which stores all our creatives, you are also able to see the stats of every creative – so you know the peformance and can order it for your campaign/category. But also very helpful for the graphic artists, as they see the performance and can learn from it.
Look for newest creatives
Filter on game
Check performance of this creative in categories that have already used it
The MAPI-Project. Our Vision is to develop a tool, with which we can create, edit and analyse all our marketing-campaigns across all of our different partners. Currently, the tool already enables us to create, edit and analyse campaigns for two of our partners: Facebook and Outbrain. Let’s have a closer look at how it works:
As I already mentioned, the tool consists of three parts:
The create-part enables us to create campaigns fast and less human error-prone.
The edit-part enables us to apply changes to our campaigns. We’re able to edit a single campaign or bulk edit many campaigns at the same time
The Analyze-Part automatically matches our internal BI-data with the buying KPI’s of our partners and enables us to quickly analyse the performance w/o putting in any manual work.
Add this new creative to a campaign in MAPI
Select ad copy is translated automatically
Select creative
New ad is created that can now be uploaded to our partner (facebook in this example)
What we are working on
Last point I want to show a case study – as the tools are since beginnig of 2018 in use for all FB campaigns.