Josh Vowles: Hi Clary, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Clary Zhang: Hi everyone. My name is Clary and my Chinese name Xiaodan Zhang, which might be a bit of challenge. I have been in the field of UA and monetization for gaming for about two years now. It was completely by chance after school I landed myself at Home Games as a UA and growth manager. My one year and a half experience there really taught me all about UA very specific to gaming and probably very specific to hyper casual gaming which is a lot to scale and a lot of things at stake from the GetGo, and that was very exciting. It really made me passionate about this field per se.

Now I find myself at ELIA games taking care of UA and monetization for a bit of a different theme. We are working more with word games and casual gaming. There's different challenges, but also share similar learnings from hyper casual gaming. So very excited to work on all of these projects and to share with you today.

Josh Vowles: When you're not running UA campaigns and exploring monetization what are your hobbies? What can people find you do?

Clary Zhang: I think I have two main hobbies that really take a lot of time. First of all, I'm really passionate about sports. So very recently, recently I've been doing sports at home and in the gym for like five, six years now. And I am very passionate about body weight training. Only very recently I got into CrossFit, which is a completely new field, very challenging. So that's probably like my major passion.

Secondly, I really love, since I actually moved from China to live in France five, six years ago I'm really passionate about learning language and the culture. So two things that really takes a lot of my free time.

Josh Vowles: What led you to join ELIA Games?

Clary Zhang: I had been working at Homa games for like one year and a half, and I think hyper casual gaming is super interesting. There's a lot of things that we can learn and do as a UA and monetization manager, but at the same time, after one year and a half, I really was looking for some sort of changes. I wanted to deepen my knowledge in UA and monetization, and I think I was looking to go from hyper casual gaming to other types of gaming and also from gaming to potentially utility apps. So by chance I landed myself at ELIA games and now I'm working on something exactly what I wanted to work on, word games, and casual gaming instead of hyper casual gaming. So looking to be an UA expert any day now!

Josh Vowles: As a smaller team at ELIA, how are you competing against some of the big guys? What are you doing to ensure you keep that competitive edge?

Clary Zhang: Mm. I think there's two angles to keeping the competitive edge for ELIA games. I think first of all, it is like finding a specialty, a niche of our own. So, we're a small team but we're pretty specialised even though we're experimenting with different types of games all the time. We are very strong in word game in the casual sphere. So, benefiting from previous experience and deepening our knowledge in this very particular field is what helps us maintain a strong level of growth and a strong level of revenue and profitability through time.

And the second thing that makes us compete with bigger player is also on the employee side, we really try to hire the best talents possible and we're very particular and meticulous about the team and culture fit so that we ensure everyone works together with a lot of trust and agility.

Besides that, we really look deeper into automation and  techniques to help us maximise our efficiency when we are working. So that's why even though we're a small team, we're like doing a lot of revenue and having quite some success in our particular field.

Josh Vowles: I'm glad you mentioned automation because I wanted to dive a bit deeper, how are you working with automation at ELIA games?

Clary Zhang: I think in terms of automation at ELIA games, I think there are two levels of automation. The first level is still you could say pretty like hands-on even for UA managers. Because when we talk about automation, you think that automation is something that's only done by engineers, with coding and everything. This is not always true. There is a lot of like local tools that can help you automate your workflow be it like notion, even Google Sheets when you employ a lot of the more advanced features, functions and dashboards. You can build tools for yourself that makes your daily workflow and makes your daily UA monitoring pretty automated and streamlined. So that's the first layer.

The second layer of automation is of course we have an amazing automation engineer that helps us with everything we do like in terms of like creative uploads, in terms of campaign creation and automation and all that. So two things added together makes it so that just with two persons we are able to handle like UA and monetization for all of our games.

Josh Vowles: As you mentioned your role is divided across UA and Ad Monetization and I wanted to find out how you balance the priorities of user acquisition and monetization at ELIA?

Clary Zhang: Yeah, I see these two together, they really work together so well. You have to really be aware of the synergy of the both. And for, in terms of our daily prioritisation, let's say that UA is like the part that has more time sensitivity, let's say, and then in monetization, we work on it since we're very few in the team, we work on it more punctually and we also employ the help of amazing monetization consultants to help us with optimising the monetization side from time to time.

And so we look at UA campaigns on a daily basis and look at like monetization AB tests and all kinds of different tests that we're doing on a biweekly basis.

So really working on both in a punctual manner, this is what helps us balance out the workflow and this stems from the stability of monetization and how it ensures that you have room to work on the UA side and take some risks with launch campaigns, et cetera, et cetera.

Josh Vowles: As an expert speaker at Gamesforum Hamburg, what can our audience expect to hear from you at Gamesforum?

Clary Zhang: I think there are three little things that you can expect to hear from me. First of all is the creative and UA best practices for Word games, since that's where we are very strong.

The second thing that you can expect to hear from me is really how we employ automation and how we stay on top of the trend and stand out in the crowd of like a million gaming companies and compete with big players as a small team.

And the third little things, which is very personal that you can expect to hear from me is the experience as a minority woman in gaming and how I try to find a footing in the very traditional like male centric gaming industry.