Max Mikhedov is User Acquisition Lead at Easybrain, a mobile game developer with more than 750,000,000 downloads. Max has 10+ years of experience developing and promoting products in different markets such as mobile games, fintech, automobile and consumer electronics.
Read Max's blog in Russian here.
It’s natural to be afraid to start something new. We might be scared of failure, or we might feel that we lack the right investments and resources. But even when conditions are less than ideal, there are exciting opportunities that are worth testing—and you will never know what works unless you try.
I apply this idea to both my work and my personal life. In my user acquisition career, I have tested plenty of new traffic sources, types of campaigns and approaches to creatives. To be successful, you have to test widely and consistently to find what will boost performance. In this article, I explore best practices for testing that drives performance.
1. Learn What’s New on the Market
Always keep an eye on what’s new on the market. Look at the latest trends, analyze competitors’ campaigns & creatives and dive into similar markets. This will help you stay on top of upcoming trends and what’s popular with audiences. To keep informed about the latest developments in the industry, I recommend the following:
- Attend industry conferences—both offline and online
- Stay in touch with other marketing professionals through organizations and events such as Liftoff’s Mobile Lunch Club.
- Subscribe to the newsletters of companies that are thought leaders in topics like traffic sources, creatives producers and analytical systems.
2. Analyze Performance Early On
There are many opportunities to test. Start by trying a new campaign or creative type with your current partner instead of launching a new traffic source. In my experience, new types of campaigns (optimized for retention, event or ROAS) tend to improve performance faster than completely new sources. Keep an open mind, but I wouldn’t recommend testing something new just for the sake of testing. Before implementing a new test, you should always consider the potential value that testing will bring.
3. Choose What To Test Wisely
When a channel is new, it means that only a limited number of companies on the market have tried it. On the one hand, embracing the new can mean a performance boost while your competitors are still hesitating. On the other hand, trying a new channel means adopting something that hasn’t been proven as a reliable source of traffic by the majority of the market. I would encourage you to examine your figures closely early on. If you see that your ARPU or ROAS figures are much lower than expected, you might reconsider how much to invest in a particular test.
To sum up, test regularly. As a rule, I would recommend investing 5-10% of your resources into finding new opportunities and testing them.