Warren Woodward of Upptic joined Josh Vowles Gamesforum's Head of UA to talk user acquisition strategy. Discussing ASO, iOS 15 and Google Privacy Sandbox. As well as the best places to eat in Seattle ahead of Gamesforum Seattle 2022.

What’s your name, what company do you work for and what is your favourite mobile game currently?

Warren Woodward co-founder and CGO at Upptic. I've been having a lot of fun with Disney Mirrorverse lately, just launched by our partner Kabam. It's a super polished and well-paced game.

The last two years has seen increases in people working from home. How do you think this has changed the mobile gaming industry?

As a younger start-up it's been really great for us, allowing us a much more diverse pool of talent that we can recruit people from. I'm also optimistic that work from home culture will lead to more merit based growth opportunities for those working in our industry.

Has your perception of UA changed since the pandemic?

Our high level objective has stayed the same, a focus on highly measurable UA optimizing for incremental profitability for each dollar spent. That said, the tactics and opportunities have shifted wildly during the last few years probably the most violent shift during my years in the industry.

What tips do you have to share with colleagues in the industry regarding best practices in working with IOS 15?

My best advice is don't let lack of perfection lead you to inaction. I've seen far too many teams simply ignoring current iOS opportunities because there are not easy plug and play solutions for measurement. Use the lack of performance buyers on iOS to your advantage, it's open season for iOS profits if you can come up with a "good enough" strategy right now.

As for the upcoming Google Privacy Sandbox updates, what is the feeling within Upptic? Are you already preparing for its release?

We're preparing for a range of potential outcomes right now. At worst we believe a lot of the tactics and tools we've developed for navigating iOS in recent years may function as fall-back solutions.

App store optimization is a useful tool to publishers, are you leveraging ASO and custom product pages? If so how?

We're huge on ASO, the first software our team built was actually an automated ASO optimizer, which we had to lean on heavily for iOS testing before the recent iOS changes. It's nice that you can at least do some bare bones ASO native on iOS now, but Apple has not provided close to adequate solutions yet. Icon testing is a pain and there is no ability to AB test promo images which are a massive conversion driver. Custom product pages I think will have more niche use cases in gaming (our main focus) but broad usage in other categories like ecommerce.

What advice would you have for a smaller company looking to establish a UA strategy?

Be careful trying to "save money" with a low cost agency. There may be a lower up-front cost but most agencies do not act with your best interest in mind as their primary business model is tied to convincing you to spend more ad dollar. A resource like Upptic's Growth Services makes sense for larger projects but for a smaller team I would focus on 1-2 UA hires with complementary specialties (i.e. a social channel expert and an in-app traffic expert).

For our Gamesforum Seattle attendees and partners, what restaurants are a must visit?

Hotel Albatross in Ballard for great food and Tiki Drinks or Cafe Mox for bar food and board gaming!

If you could only play one game genre for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I'm a huge CCG / Magic: The Gathering nerd. It's a game of infinite depth and creativity, it's really engaged me my whole life and I don't expect that to change!

By Josh Vowles, Head of UA Portfolio, Gamesforum