Not long ago, I wrote a guide on launching advertising campaigns, setting up sources, and monitoring payback. There’s an additional question that arose after publication: if you follow all the recommendations, test every step, and act thoughtfully, is it worth contacting publishers, or can you handle marketing on your own? Good question, so let's look at the pros and cons.
Short answer: If a studio wants to spend $1-2 million a month, they can try to manage independently. I've met people who earn a certain amount and are content without scaling. But if the goal is to grow to $5-10 million and leverage margins, a publisher or additional finance is essential.
The first thing you need to do is to rationally evaluate your project. A common belief among developers is that a high-quality product will sell itself. Some think a small spending budget and a single UA manager launching campaigns are enough to make a project soar.
Unfortunately, this is not true — there are exceptions, but that's the survivor bias.
The price of a mistake
When we analyze the ad campaigns of studios before they come to a publisher, we show where strategic mistakes were made: here you have a UA downtrend, and here you made a mistake in a product. This is where the average session drops, and this is where conversion to purchase or another targeted event drops. Therefore, optimization for such a conversion is below the threshold, like 1-2%. Let's adjust the bids, work with the balance in this specific instance, increase by 5%, reduce the average order value, but increase conversion to payment, which will allow for better learning of advertising campaigns.
There have been cases where developers mistakenly spent huge budgets on non-paying markets because someone mixed up the country in an ad campaign. This money was not returned, and the cost of such a mistake is much higher for a small studio than for a publisher.
The most expensive aspect is testing and finding working hypotheses on your own budget. On complex projects, tests can cost tens of thousands of dollars just to find the right vector.
Product changes and a clear outside perspective are very valuable. Then, the resources of the publisher come into play, such as producing a large volume of creatives. As mentioned in the guide, creatives are a major part of UA success. But finding a working concept is challenging, and they quickly burn out, requiring constant market monitoring and testing of numerous hypotheses.
With this approach, developers avoid dealing with problems, spending vast amounts of money (which can be fatal for a limited budget), and nonstop operational flow. You'd need to increase your marketing department's payroll to cover the need for creatives, not to mention managerial and HR resources for finding employees.
A publisher quickly evaluates and understands if a product is good or needs improvement, without requiring much from the developer.
The main question is whether the developer wants to promote a game they like or one that potential players will like. This article and this guide help the former navigate marketing, and in the latter case, publishing can help.
Data-driven is the key
Another case is when a project reaches a certain income level, and the developer wants to increase it but thinks they have hit a ceiling. With a monthly income of a million dollars, it might seem pointless to approach a publisher, believing they can't break through this figure. For instance, different hypotheses were tested, but none worked. However, good, mature projects often scale up tenfold thanks to extensive expertise, impressive budgets, and analytics.
Analytics and a data-driven approach are crucial. Let’s say the project appears to be doing well and generating profit. This might seem fine at the moment. However, if you examine a cross-section of purchases, as we've experienced, the purchases for the past year might be negative or zero, with all the profit coming from the whales attracted during the pandemic. This is a completely distinct group of users, and without properly configured events, this insight would be impossible to uncover.
To make this data work, you need to build more than one payment profile, curve, and accumulation, and have benchmarks of different products. The more data you have, the more accurate forecasts can be made, simplifying the generation of hypotheses for the product department.
Basic benchmarks for retention and average retention are collected on dozens of high-turnover projects. At the fine-tuning stage, intermediate metrics are most interesting — from the average number of reward views to the minimum threshold for payback, considering playtime.
A good product can generate very decent profit in the moment, but the project's capacity may allow for even more, though it might not be obvious. With a large data array and tested hypotheses on tried-and-true projects in acquisition, this potential can be uncovered.
Marketing is about changes and testing hypotheses
Benchmarks, hypotheses, and even some genres are constantly changing and evolving. Everything must always be questioned and tested anew. It's impossible to monitor everything alone, and the approach that works will eventually stop working. Marketing is an ever-changing field.
You can set up campaigns, cover all networks, connect top MMPs, and let everything run smoothly. But this is a flawed strategy. TikTok was once at the top of the US market but is no longer there. There are countless changes like this. Long-term survival requires diversification of expertise, continuous testing, a flow of new hypotheses, and monitoring the latest practices from major market players. If the market shifts, you should have additional resources to help adapt to new conditions.
So, you need to decide if you're in the business or if you just like making games. Both paths are valid, and there's no universal answer. If you're content and don’t want to scale massively, use the guide and try marketing yourself. Just monitor your spending to avoid expensive mistakes.
