By Ben Kaplan, MoPub

It’s never been more competitive for app publishers to drive consistent performance, and strategies that worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. MoPub recently partnered with Gamesforum to host a four-part webinar series covering steps mobile publishers should take to help succeed in app monetization, and hundreds of participants attended. If you missed these webinars, you can #ElevateYourGame by catching up on the full webinar series here. Below you can find a quick recap from each session, featuring expertise from the top players in the industry.

Step 1: Acquire

MoPub and Gamesforum started off our series with tips and tricks for user acquisition across different buy strategies, including exploring platforms beyond Facebook and Google. In session 1, you can learn how to build a successful user acquisition (UA) strategy to increase your chances of app discovery and finding success in programmatic advertising. MoPub’s Julia Martin, Senior Programmatic Demand Lead, was joined by panelists Daniel Lopez, Director of Quant Marketing, EA, Jenny Taran, Head of Growth, Call of Duty Mobile, Activision, and Faith Price, Head of UA, DoubleDown Interactive. Watch as we run through typical mobile game life cycles, genres, launches, and how to fail fast and follow the data.

It’s all about the process — trust what the data is telling you and be flexible enough to change your approach on marketing. Follow the data, do what’s best for the consumer at the end of the day.

Daniel Lopez, Director of Quant Marketing, Electronic Arts (EA)

Step 2: Retain

In session 2, MoPub’s Alison Deverian, Business Development Manager, was joined by Noelia Lopez, Ad Monetization Manager at Tilting Point, Terry Koh, Head of Ad Monetization at Kabam, and Albert Custodio Martinez, Director of Product & LiveOps at Square Enix. The panel discussed how to maximize initial app usage and how to retain users, while incorporating in-app purchases and ads monetization to drive revenue. Watch as we run through how to increase user retention, ad format diversification, user segmentation strategy and more.

Let’s not forget, you build the game for the users, not for yourself.

Albert Custodio Martinez, Director of Product & LiveOps, Square Enix

Step 3: Earn

Next, we tackled one of the ever-present questions facing the mobile industry: how can you maximize revenue and establish trusted partnerships? In session 3, MoPub’s Boram Ku, Head of Korea, was joined by panelists Taehun Kim, UA Team Lead at Netmarble, and Kerim Figanioğlu, Game Designer at Ruby Games Studio. Watch as we run through which decisions can lead to quick success and scale when it comes to monetization efforts, KPIs and retention metrics, strategies for in-app advertising and in-app purchase models, how to balance maximizing revenue and maintaining user experience, A/B testing, and more.

We came to view in-app advertising as a way to adopt a new business model. After experimenting thoroughly, we found that in-app advertising did not have any negative effects on the game ecosystem.

Taehun Kim, UA Team Lead, Netmarble

Step 4: Reinvest

In our final installment of the Growth Engine webinar series, MoPub’s Kim Bolsoni, Publisher Account Director in EMEA, spoke with Josh Hartwell, CEO of Mobile Deluxe, Enric Pedro, Head of Social Gaming at Zitro Games, and Elizabeth Lauer-Lopez, Director of Product Advocacy at Singular to help mobile app publishers better understand what (and how much) performance information is critical to make business decisions and inform future acquisition. The group specifically covered the upcoming iOS 14 launch (now delayed — but still coming), including if and how companies can begin to prepare. Watch the recap here.

Once you get as much data as you can, you want to surface it to everyone in the company, because everyone can benefit. Whether you’re talking about user retention, user monetization, user engagement, or how many times a user interacts with a game in a day, data touches every part of the organization.

Josh Hartwell, CEO, Mobile Deluxe

There you have it! There is, in fact, a formula for long-term, durable growth for your business in the short term and the long term. If you want to improve your app monetization strategy, following along with these four broader strategies and heeding advice from the top industry experts are great first steps to take. You can watch the full webinar series here, and if you find that you have any questions after watching it, you can always reach out to us at www.mopub.com/contact.

About the author: Ben Kaplan, Head of Business Development, Americas

 Ben leads a national team focused on new strategic partnerships to enable total monetization as well as marketing for publishers across Latin America, Canada, and the US. Ben brings over a decade of experience across media publishers, advertisers and agencies.