Josh caught up with VP of Sales at Prodege, Craig England, to discuss the benefits of rewarded traffic in mobile game user acquisition and retention, key advertising challenges in 2024, and much more.

Josh: Hi Craig, thanks for joining me! Feel free to introduce yourself?

Hi Josh, thanks for having me. I’m Craig England, currently VP, Sales at Prodege. I’m from Kent, UK. I’ve now been in the industry for 12 years having various roles, Product Management, User Acquisition, Marketing and Sales. I joined Prodege 6 years ago to help grow our flagship rewards property Swagbucks, and after one year I moved 100% of my focus to selling our full suite of performance marketing products, including our flagship Swagbucks as well as MyPoints, UPromise, Inboxdollars to name a few.

Josh: How did you start working in mobile gaming?

Prodege had worked with mobile gaming partners long before I joined, though it had historically been a small part of our revenue mix. When I moved to the sales team 5 years ago we began to see success in gaming, and Prodege continued to invest further into the category. I have always enjoyed partnering with mobile game studios and developers, I love the industry. In the last 2 years we’ve seen a real explosion in gaming, these days it’s my main focus.

Josh: Talk to us about Prodege, what’s your MO?

Prodege is a unicorn company based out of Los Angeles. We own and operate some of the largest reward platforms in the US & globally with 20 million MAUs. We reward our users for completing surveys, shopping online and in-store, completing offers and of course, playing games. As of January 2024, $2.3 billion has been given to users so far. We founded Swagbucks in 2008 with the concept of giving back to members while driving great results to advertisers. Unlike most companies in the rewarded space that simply arbitrage, we have a direct relationship with our users and they’ve built a very active community..

In the mobile gaming world to keep things simple, we promote our partners' games on our apps and websites to drive user acquisition on a performance basis. Leveraging our audience and rewards to drive clients high engagement, retention, purchasing users, and of course ROAS.

Josh: Good to see the UK team is growing! What is it like working at Prodege?

Thank you! Honestly, it’s kind of crazy, Prodege was a 200 person company with 3 of us in the UK when I joined. Now, there are 30 of us based out of London with 700+ in total. Prodege is all about bringing good people together to do good things for others. Once new prospects meet the team and get to know what Prodege is about they are surprised because it’s so different from your usual company. The leadership really does care about its people, and it’s a fun company to be a part of. That being said, I think my favorite part is knowing that we are changing people’s lives through the rewards and opportunities we give them.

Josh: Let’s talk rewarded UA, a two part question:

1. How is rewarded traffic helping publishers acquire new users?

The reward space has changed a lot in recent years for mobile gaming studios. I recently read an article from Matej Lancaric that studios should be using at least 20-30% of their budget for rewarded advertising. I remember a time when people were worried about the performance of reward, and now we’re seeing millions of advertising dollars pumped in daily from the leading studios.

There’s two key positives to rewarded advertising.

1 - More often than not, these users are an untapped market that you can’t reach through social, google, or your ‘traditional’ sources. So you’re almost instantly increasing your overall impressions and scale.

2 - By rewarding users and keeping them engaged you can see much higher LTVs through users seeing more ads and way more likely to spend money on IAPs.

Rewarded traffic should be considered a subset of Performance Marketing. Studios can set up campaigns with end goals in mind, such as being ROAS positive. That means much of the risk is removed from advertising, which is hard to beat. The trick is to set up the campaign correctly so the user incentives are aligned with the ROAS and payback goals.

I can’t speak for other rewarded platforms, but at Prodege 84% of our members exclusively use our platforms to find new games to play. Then on average, we see 13-21% of our users make a purchase depending on the genre of game. Which is significantly higher than non-rewarded traffic.

2. What difference do you see in the retention and LTV of users who use rewarded?

I touched on this a little bit in the last question. We certainly see much higher LTVs and retention across the board, especially in the first 30 days of the install. Giving specifics is difficult because it totally depends on the genre of the title, the quality of the game and how the campaign is built. Having ownership of our sites is a significant advantage over other platforms, as we can tailor campaigns towards a client’s goal, whether that focuses more specific quality metrics, or larger scale volume pushes.

Our audience is also pretty unique. We have a mature audience with high household incomes due to our marketing strategies, which results in our members spending both a lot of time and money on mobile games.

Josh: And for the users, can you share more about the user experience generated through incentivised play?

I love our members. They are so passionate about the products and services they discover through our programmes. You can always count on them to tell you when they love something or when they don’t. Ultimately, a lot of us love what we do because we know that we are touching so many people’s lives. A game is not just a campaign. It’s the ability to help a mum who may be tired after working and taking care of her kids to unwind at night or pass the time during the train ride. And we know that the rewards also add up with her cash back shopping and survey earnings to make a difference in her life. In our blog we feature thousands of stories of how our members benefited from the programme. We’ve given out over $2.3 Billion in rewards so far and that means we’ve changed so many lives around the world. Can’t beat that feeling.

Josh: When purchasing such high quality traffic how can advertisers feel confident that they are buying real traffic? That fraud has been mitigated?

It’s a good question and a very common one we get when speaking with potential new clients. We have various protection measures and securities put in place to avoid fraud activity. Firstly, users have to go through a verification and identification process on their mobile so it’s impossible to have more than one account attached to a mobile device.

We are also integrated with various fraud tools which monitor users' behaviour which will flag to our dedicated team if anything is popping up. In the rare event that any fraud does slip through, we just simply make sure we don’t charge the client for it.

Josh: From your conversations with advertisers, what do you see as being their biggest challenge in 2024?

Time and resources. Our partners and potential partners seem to be busier than ever. Why this is, i’m not 100% sure but maybe because UA managers have so much the choice of so many different platforms, they need to figure out where their energy is best used. This is something we try to help with by automating campaigns to optimize, we do what we can to make our client's lives as easy as possible.

Josh: Having joined us at Gamesforum Barcelona on our Alternate Growth Channels panel, what were some of your key takeaways?

This was my first time on a panel, it was a lot of fun - even though I was very nervous! I love Barcelona, it’s one of my favorite cities to visit and it seems to be a very fast-growing hub for gaming studios which is awesome.

I think we’re in an interesting time in the industry right now. We’re coming out of a downturn in the economy, just previous to that we had a global pandemic and a period where gaming company valuations were ridiculously high. One thing is for sure, mobile gaming is a consistently growing market with various rounds of investments, acquisitions and start-ups popping up.

I think we’re seeing that marketers are becoming much smarter by utilizing AI, data, market research and coming up with out-of-the-box ideas. As well as exploring other ways to grow, a few years ago UA was dominated by 2-3 companies, that’s still somewhat the case but nowhere near like it was 5 years ago, and now there are challenges that can come with it. Everyone seems to be looking for other ways to grow with the market being very crowded and competitive. Standing out is more important than it’s ever been.

Josh: Thanks Craig for your time and insight on Prodege and mobile gaming User Acquisition! 

You can hear more about mobile games User Acquisition at Gamesforum Hamburg!