In this interview Clark Buckner from TechnologyAdvice.com spoke with Fiksu’s vice president of new market and media solutions about strategic actions that generate loyal users, and overcome mobile marketing industry challenges.
Clark Buckner: Now we’re looking at where the digital industry is today. Where do you think the biggest challenge is? Or maybe where some of the biggest misconceptions are today in the mobile marketing field where in the end specifically with gaming?
Glenn Kiladis: There are a lot of answers to it. I think… So one thing to note is prior to me joining Fiksu. I was actually the VP of marketing and monetization for a big social app called Haywire. And so I was doing mobile user app acquisition about 3 years ago when there were a lot less tools and technology and traffic to take advantage of to build an audience.
So today, i think the biggest complexity in the ecosystem is having the user acquisition managers, or the VP’s of marketing or the CMO’s for these brands or for these games specifically to figure out how to build user acquisition team and how to best take advantage of all the tools, technology and traffic that’s out there.
So Fiksu as a company, decided to build a lair with the mobile marketing ecosystem or over it. So through Fiksu, a game company can do media buying through multiple sources. We’re integrated with a hundred and fifty different ad networks and Facebook and Twitter.
And we also have our own mobile DSP (demand-side platform) with a real time bidding platforms that allows us to take advantage of this programmatic buying that lot of companies are doing. Where basically it’s an auction day’s approach to buying mobile marketing media to promote your game.
That platform also contains optimization and so which really key for mobile marketers today in games is to find right tools and technologies and platforms. It will allow you to optimize your media spend. Because there are too many media channels. Some maybe very effective for your media game and some may not. Some ad networks may work well, some may not. So the idea is, as long as you have the ability to optimize your media spend, the ability to acquire users more easily.
Which leads to me to the next point of the ecosystem which is that as a mobile marketer or game company you have to have a really solid partner for attribution and analytics. So attribution allows you to type a media spend back to your results and understand where your users have come from, what channels they were driven from and then figure out which ones are giving the longest long term value and figuring out how to best optimize your media spend with the proper attribution.
And then, when you’re actually going into to that whole initiative of acquiring users. You also wanna look for partners that have what I will call BIG data or a lot of first party or third party data that will help you acquire users that are more targeted. So as an example, Fiksu, we’ve been acquiring users on behalf of gaming companies and apps for the last 3 years. And we have tracked over three hundred and eighty billion mobile marketing events. And we’ve leveraged those mobile marketing events to BUYMEDIA in a smarter way through optimization prior to launching campaigns.
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And so there are a lot of challenges today that are in the ecosystem. So a lot of companies that try to do it themselves. They have to make sure that they pick the right attribution and analytics player. They have to figure out when their buying traffic, are they buying SURE traffic or are they buying corporate trash traffic. And that’s a big issue in the industry because there are a lot of companies that will represent added inventory as their own but that added inventory is actually being bought from two or three other sources and sometimes they are two or three times removed. And so what some companies find when they do it themselves is if that they haven’t spent the time to vamped up the traffic sources, they’re spending a lot more to acquire user than they have to be if they were dealing with the original traffic source directly. So that’s something that companies have to be careful of in the ecosystem. And then just obviously understanding all the mobile ad tech to that address the media buying, attribution, optimization etc… that’s also the challenge.
CB: So, you just mentioned, you gotta be careful of which network are you gonna be joining and there’s a lot of questions of what is the best way to reach your target audience? It seems like you all help your client through that process of not only delivering the results but showing them how to get there.
GK: Yeah! We, our company or Fiksu as a company does a lot of research on the space. So many companies have gaming acquisition will come to Fiksu’s resource area and look at some of the whitepapers on best practices for mobile marketing etc.
So we do provide tips and tricks on… less than the tricks side but more on the tip side to appropriate mobile marketing. And it’s just understanding the value of the channels as well.
So you and I talked about arbitrage traffic where a lot of ad networks were buying from other ad networks when you could be buying original traffic and it’s costing you more. It’s also understanding the value of doing an incentivized marketing versus non-incent marketing.
Because incentivized marketing can potentially deliver a slightly lower quality of user or less users that will be of high quality. But that being said, if you’re paying the appropriate cost per install you’re able to achieve a very good return on investment. Because the ones that are keeping the game on their phones and spending money are actually able to provide a good roi based on what companies are spending on a specific channel (…)