David Philippson

Every bid that goes to cross-promo comes with a price. There is no money exchange within the company but you still bid $X and recognize how much you spend on cross-promo monthly so that you can calculate the “return on opportunity cost”.

A potential objection to doing cross-promo is that you don’t want to serve ads to high-value users, you want to retain them. But consider churn and likelihood to churn for these users: there might be a specific time where serving cross-promo ads to high-value users is beneficial.

It can be hard to make cross-promo work when there is low affinity between game genres. But if you have two relatively similar games, they will most likely cross-promote well.

ATT has been a catalyst for cross-promo. Cross-promotion is important again because the data advantage that advertising platforms had has been taken away.

You can cross-promote by taking the ad network capability in-house, and run it yourself but only for your products. This involves blacklisting your own publisher sites with ad networks so you can stop serving your own ads inside your own inventory (i.e. you do that yourself).

Re-engagement measurement in AdKit is limited to 35 days post-download, even though the most valuable segments (more incremental) have usually lapsed a longer time ago.

Re-engagement measurement, introduced in SKAN 5.0 at WWDC and now in AdAttributionKit (AdKit), is often misunderstood as re-engagement enabling. However, it does not allow to target a specific cohort of users. Instead:

• It allows you to define an ad as a possible “re-engagement” ad (e.g., leading to an offer via a deep link “re-engagement” URL) if the app is already installed.
• It allows you to measure/know which ads are seen by users that already have the app installed (via conversion-type = re-engagement)

It is still significant for big advertisers because you can measure new touch points. Example: Expedia or King can now know how many of their ads are served to users with the app installed.

AdAttributionKit (AdKit) becoming cross-channel (app and web) and (potentially) cross-device can be a unique selling point (USP) for developers to publish on the App Store rather than an alternative store. The integration of WebAdAttributionKit (“web” AdKit), previously known as PCM (Private Click Management), into the AdAttributionKit, enhances the App Store’s value proposition for developers.

In AdAttributionKit (AdKit), only one view-through-attributed impression can be opened at a time: an impression starts, then stops, then another one begins.

In the past, intelligence was on the demand side. In the future, intelligence is going to be on the supply side. Cross-promo is just one example of that.

Cross-promo ads should be in the monetization stack and compete against other external revenue. For that to be the case, it has to be supported by mediation.

When doing cross-promo, bidding companies themselves can start including their own first-party data in the bidding logic: how long have they been playing, are they a depositor, have they come through a paid or an organic channel (it’s a strong positive signal if they came from paid), etc.

Cross-promo within a game company/portfolio should be reciprocal. There should be this virtual circle of high value users remaining within the portfolio “walls”. It needs to be a top objective of C-level to think about portfolio LTV, which requires rethinking the strategy, especially for companies that have acquired studios (that each have their own goals).