digital marketing for gaming

Programmatic advertising or Programmatic marketing is an automated technique of Real-Time bidding on a specific inventory for a specific set of people. The ad marketplace runs the auction for the ad slot available on a specific publisher’s webpage (and apps) and selects the one with the highest bid to place their advertisement on the virtual space. Programmatic advertising has emerged as the future of online advertising due to the immense possibilities it holds.

While there are multiple programmatic platforms, Google Marketing Platform (GMP) has a powerful suite with GMP’s DV360 (Display Video 360) being the market leader. The advantages of leveraging programmatic advertising through DV360 include delivering faster and smarter marketing based on Google Marketing Platform’s machine learning algorithms, gaining control of your investments, and understanding the audience at a granular level.

What is Fantasy Cricket?

Most of you might already know what fantasy cricket is and how it works. But for a better understanding, fantasy cricket is an online game of betting on the players who are playing the actual game of cricket and we will be rewarded with cash in terms of points based on the performance of the players we bet on during the actual game.

About Gamezy

Gamezy is the latest offering from Gameskraft – India’s fastest-growing gaming platform. This app is a fantasy cricket platform designed for the user to select their choice of eleven players from both the teams in a cricket match. Based on the performance of the cricket players in the real game, the users of the app will be rewarded with cash prizes. 

How is Gamezy different from other apps?

Gamezy allows the user to change the playing XI at the end of the 1st innings based on the actual performance of the cricket players.

USPs:

-  Available in 8 languages

- Players can be changed before the 2nd innings starts

- 5-a-Side (an option to play without having to choose 11 players a side)

-   Daily Contests and Head to Head games.

Campaign Strategy

• Platforms Used: On Display and Video 360, which is a Demand Side Platform (DSP) on the programmatic space, we have leveraged both display and video networks. Display network with static and GIF format creatives were run initially followed by YouTube which has worked well with different video categories that helped in increasing the number of installs and in-app actions.

• View Through Conversions (YT): Videos have played a major role in scaling up as well as improving the performance of the campaigns. View Through Conversions refer to the installs that happen after a person has watched our video as an ad on YouTube. We have seen a significant rise in the number of purchases or Add Cash through the View-Through Conversions.

• The most important targeting which has helped the performance of the campaigns is the targeting on DV360 through the interest category of “Fantasy Games”. By selecting this, we were able to relax all other demographic filters applied.
• One important feature to mention is the accuracy of the post-click conversion numbers on DV360 was far better compared to the numbers on Google Ads. This was the power of insight-driven marketing.

• Different creatives (Animated/Influencer): As mentioned, the different categories of videos which were used include Brand videos, User Generated Content (Influencer Videos). Animated Videos, USP based videos, Event/Theme-based videos etc.,

Themed Influencer Campaign refers to an example where we have used a “couple as influencers” to talk about how to earn money on Gamezy which makes it easy for them to buy their Valentine’s day gifts.

USP-based videos where the advantages of using Gamezy over other competitors like 8 Languages, 5-a-Side, and 2 Innings were shown as short stories or a slideshow to increase the Install rate.

• Automated Bid Strategy: “Maximize conversions” was used as the bidding strategy to increase the number of conversions and to scale up at the same time. This was the main advantage of using AI for better audience targeting.

• Managed Placements: Optimizing the placements on YouTube Channels/YouTube Videos to exclude the junk placements and run separate campaigns with top converted placements. This helped in improving the overall performance.
• Retargeting is not possible on Google ads for Real-Time Money based businesses to run campaigns but it is possible on D360 due to the server-to-server integration.

Results:

Within a period of 2 months, we were able to see a 226% increase in Installs with a 50% decrease in cost per Install. Since this is a real-time money based application, ‘Add Cash” is one of the most important in-app events to achieve. We have been successful in getting a 378% increase in Add Cashes with a 66% decrease in cost per Add Cash.