Tips on choosing the best MMP for mobile games

No matter how well-made your game is, it is meaningless if players don’t play it. How do you effectively promote your awesome game to players all over the world? What can we do to make sure these users become fans of our game? If you’re gearing up for a game launch, you should definitely consider implementing MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner) to get the most out of your marketing strategy.

Why we need MMP for our games

In the past, running ads on a handful of major platforms and measuring their performance was enough. However, the marketing landscape has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, and surviving in the global marketplace now demands more than just a few publishers. As running ads across diverse channels, it’s essential to select the most efficient ones within a limited period. Marketers also need to pinpoint the right publishers for their target audience and app among numerous options.

To run ads across multiple ad networks and platforms, you need an App Attribution Tool / MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner). Once you install MMP’s Software Development Kit (SDK), you can manage all ad networks at once without installing each publisher’s SDK. This simplifies the process for marketers to quickly assess and analyze the performance of multiple publishers at a glance through the MMP dashboard. 

The significant advantage of MMP is its ability to provide fair and accurate data from a third-party perspective, bridging the gap between the publisher’s data and the data marketers see internally. Additionally, publishers known as SAN (Self-Attributing Network), such as Apple Search Ads and Google Ads, use their own algorithms to attribute the conversions, making it challenging to compare with other publishers on the same page. MMP helps you grasp the data insights from multiple sources in one integrated dashboard.

The ideal time to implement an MMP is during the soft launch phases. You can collect all data in one place from the early stages to detect user drop-off points and proactively improve the game before the official launch. Utilize an MMP to quickly and effortlessly run ads across channels and introduce your app to as many users as possible.

Airbridge SDK enables you to run ads across multiple channels without the need to install each publisher’s SDK separately. The Airbridge SDK's size is less than 1 megabyte(MB), ensuring it has no impact on game performance while allowing marketers to manage ad networks in one place.

Seamlessly explore diverse data with MMP’s reports

Once you’ve brought users on board through ads, the next step is delving into an in-depth analysis of user actions within the app. This involves looking into metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV), and cohort-based churn rates. Airbridge's funnel reports help you understand various aspects, including determining where users are dropping off, spotting the quickest converting channels from app installation to item purchase, and providing a comprehensive overview of conversion rates for each funnel in the last seven days. 

MMP also facilitates publisher-specific ad Return On Investment (ROI) analysis, providing visualizations of performance and cost data such as CPI, CPC, CTR, and CVR. Gather and optimize costs to conversions and revenue data for partners, countries, and platforms in one place. You can identify the specific campaigns and channels that fetched the users who like your game the most and even reduce marketing costs by disabling the less effective publishers.

In Airbridge’s funnel report, you can explore the user journey from the app installs to events. LUFT, Airbridge’s self-developed database, allows you to quickly generate specific cohorts and analyze behavioral patterns by channel, country, period, and OS with GroupBy.
👉 Learn more about funnel analysis for mobile games 

It’s crucial to examine how long users are sticking around in your app. A Retention report provided by Airbridge offers a detailed analysis of user engagement in cohorts based on minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Furthermore, by segmenting user retention based on channels, campaigns, creatives, countries, etc., you can also investigate pLT (Predicted Lifetime) metrics. This sheds light on when users who launched your game typically churn, as well as patterns related to purchases and events within the app, all through data-driven conversion rate analysis.

Harnessing an MMP not only grants you insights through the dashboard but also provides the flexibility to extract raw data for further analysis. You can easily filter and load specific data into your database to combine internal data and execute retargeting campaigns. Consider creating user groups based on specific cohorts and implementing personalized marketing strategies as a new approach. People who think your brand message speaks directly to them might come back and turn into big fans of the game.

With Airbridge’s Audience Manager, you can access and export around 220 types of log data directly from the dashboard. Additionally, you can preview the raw data set before extraction using the preview function.

MMP’s role in the privacy-first era

The movement towards enhancing user privacy has brought instrumental changes to the marketing ecosystem. With Apple introducing SKAdNetwork (SKAN) to ensure app tracking transparency without advertising identifiers, the industry is undergoing a significant transformation for customized marketing in response to evolving privacy frameworks. MMPs adapt to these changes by interpreting SKAN conversion values received from publishers, providing aggregated data for each publisher on the dashboard. You need MMP integration to verify more precise SKAN performance for key publishers by combining GroupBys and diverse SKAN metrics. 

Airbridge supports an intuitive and easy-to-use tracking set method to help you configure conversion values easily. You can set SKAN conversions in preset form with just a few clicks.

When choosing an MMP, it’s vital to check its support for flexible SKAN conversions and the ability to combine various model types. As we expect another challenge with Google’s Privacy Sandbox, Airbridge, as an MMP, is collaborating with major partners to proactively respond to the evolving marketing landscape.

From game launch to ongoing success, MMP plays a pivotal role in ensuring your game’s marketing strategy aligns with the data-driven decision-making era. Consider factors such as the flexibility of reports, meaningful metrics in provided reports (cost data, cohorts, and retention), and overall suitability for your game. Embrace the power of MMP for a successful mobile game journey!