Mobile games are constantly and rapidly evolving. The Covid-19 era, global crises, and the growing popularity of remote work have led to mobile games having an incredible reach and a dedicated audience, with more and more developers turning to this area, and as a consequence, monetisation of apps, including through advertising as the main source of player reach, is growing. Where mobile games and apps will be advertised was revealed by Gamesindustry.

A side note: Flexion Mobile engages gamers through opinion leaders in TikTok

TikTok promotes mobile games at the highest level

This popular platform for mobile games adv has had a real path to stardom: TikTok’s story of becoming a social network, and a source of fabulous audience for advertisers, has lasted the last few years.

TikTok has gone from virtually no publishers working with it two years ago to a platform that is now on the budget of almost every game marketer. I’ve never previously seen anything grow so fast, both in terms of prevalence and percentage of companies in TikTok, and the size of the budgets people are putting into the platform.

Adam Lieb, CEO of Gamesight

TikTok was hyper-popular in 2022, and the same fate awaits it this year. What’s more, the scale is so large that there is essentially nowhere for it to grow.

mobile games

Lieb attributes the importance of the social network in part to its focus on performance marketing from day one. Where other social networks created an advertising business and then gradually began to offer advertisers more data about who clicked on ads, whether those clicks led to purchases, etc. D., TikTok has always been focused on achieving results and conversion rates.

Speaking of conversion rates, on the other hand, TikTok is not that impressive at first glance. Gamesight Ad Network’s 2022 report states that TikTok’s average conversion rate was 0.96%, well below that of more established players such as Google (3.79%), Twitch (5.5%), Facebook (3.48%) and Twitter (7.1%). However, its popularity is shaped by lower advertising costs than competitive social networks.

Twitter and Twitch as possible options for advertising platforms

While Twitter may have a higher conversion rate, it is actually a relatively small player on an overall scale. By comparison, Twitter’s advertising revenue last year was $5 billion, compared to Facebook’s $115 billion and Google’s $210 billion. With the rollout of a new product for performance marketing and some aggressive fund-matching programmes for advertisers, Twitter is very stable, especially given what’s been happening at it since Elon Musk bought it. But it’s worth realising that advertising for mobile games on Twitter is not the most interesting thing to do.

What about Twitch? You can look at the conversion rate and decide to show ads there, but the type of ads can vary greatly in both cost and effectiveness.

You can’t just say, “How important is Twitch?” You have to say, “How important are each of these different types of content?”

Adam Lieb, CEO of Gamesight

There are also Twitch Drops, which allow you to give in-game rewards to a content creator’s audience when that creator streams your game. It costs less, but it also makes conversion drop by 20%.

Reddit is the most underrated advertising platform

If you’re looking for a platform where people can consider advertising that can offer unexpected results, it’s definitely Reddit.

You can’t just take your Facebook ad unit, put it on Reddit and expect it to work. It’s a different audience that you talk to differently, and it’s not like TikTok, where it’s more obvious… Maybe it either scares people or they don’t know it and use outdated creative from another platform, and it won’t be as effective.

Adam Lieb, CEO of Gamesight

If there are fewer mobile games coming out in 2023, publishers will need all of them, and it is realistic that there will be more focus on performance marketing, things that will work and can be proven. This means less investment in overall brand building and less experimental testing for new advertising concepts.

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