Kate Duong

Q&A with Kate

This Q&A reflects Kate's time as Senior Manager User Acquisition at Jambox Games. Currently, Kate is User Acquisition Manager at Ather Labs.

Kate Duong is Senior UA Channel Strategist at Amanotes, a rising mobile app publisher in Southeast Asia. Kate first dabbled in growth marketing when she managed and optimized client ad campaigns at Google. After learning how to drive performance for apps in Southeast Asia, Kate joined Amanotes in 2019. At Amanotes, Kate combines her musical interests with performance data to lead user acquisition for their top music gaming apps.

In your own words, tell us about the app(s) that you manage?

I manage performance for Tiles Hop, Amanote’s second smash-hit game, and Besides Magic Tiles 3, which topped the music game charts in over 190 countries. As of 2020, I oversee all Amanotes apps in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

How did you get started in mobile marketing?

While I was working at Google for UAC clients, I gained first-hand experience developing mobile apps in the SEA market-—particularly in Vietnam. Being a consultant for various businesses in the app industry enriched my marketing knowledge and paved the way for my career path in mobile marketing.

What do you like most about mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing is the newest field amongst all other channels in the digital marketing sphere. A mobile marketer’s responsibility is to scale apps profitably and effectively reach users through concise and meaningful messages—on the right platform and at the right time. As a data-driven individual, I am always curious about finding and matching users with their values. Mobile marketing was the perfect place to combine data analytics and user psychology!

What does it take to succeed in mobile marketing?

Testing repetitively is the key to success.

Creatives, new channels and campaign testing make up the main bulk of my day-to-day as a growth marketer. I utilize my time to hypothesize over ideas and update new features, including marketing insights of each channel and market. Combined together, I help create a good and detailed user acquisition strategy. If you want to lead and succeed in mobile marketing, be the pioneer—fail, learn, and repeat.

What strategies work best to convert installs into engaged app users?

Before testing any ideas, evaluate your current status to manage possible risks with stakeholders including the internal teams like Product, Monetization, Data Science, and of course, external ad networks and vendors. Communicating and assessing your footing helps to properly evaluate user flow and understand what the insights behind the metrics mean.

In the past year, what is one tip you can share which made the biggest performance difference for your UA strategy?

Take a closer look at how users interact with your app. Based on our historical data and consulting with the product team, we were able to define and segment by user journey. Combined with SRN channels like Google ads and TikTok, we successfully lifted 30% user value.

What’s your top tip when it comes to mobile ad creative?

Make use of social and seasonal trends like Christmas and Halloween, or even TikTok viral trends. Clearly define your hypothesis, test, and apply improvements. In order to do that, you will also need a hands-on creatives team.

What advice can you offer to help marketers combat mobile ad fraud?

I have a couple of pieces of advice to share:

• Work closely with your MMP. And don’t forget to leverage the protection tool—reduce the risk of suspicious channels by making a validation rule.
• Regularly check common metrics (impressions, clicks, installs) in the new testing channels. You want to preemptively detect any abnormal data.
• Work with the product team to review product metrics, such as playtime per daily active users and retention day / sessions. The longer users play a game, the more revenue is generated from ads they watch. Product metrics will help define ad channel users as qualified or not (real vs bot) compared to organic users.

What are your top 3 go-to resources for keeping up with the mobile ad tech industry?

• App Annie, MMP, and SDK ad network blogs such as Liftoff and Ironsource - Level Up
• User acquisition Slack communities like Mobile Heroes and ASO
• Gaming industry podcasts on Spotify and webinars from popular ad networks