Ep. 89 Arming Your Retargeting Playbook

Today’s guest is a mobile games marketer whose focus is on retargeting. He shares his insights on important considerations for your retargeting playbook - from using promos and leveraging incrementality to potential solutions to retargeting on iOS14.5.

Stephen Siegel is a User Acquisition Manager at Scopely, an interactive entertainment company and a leading mobile games publisher. He cut his teeth in the mobile gaming sphere at Machine Zone and hails from a background in math and economics.

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• You’ve been in the mobile gaming space for 4 years, how many different platforms and networks do you think you’ve tested in your career? And how often does someone reach out to you to pitch a new product?
• Where do you spend the majority of your time as a UA manager?
• Is there anything that really interests you about retargeting or that you find fascinating about these campaigns?
• What are some of the most successful ways that you’ve found to message users when it comes to retargeting?
• Most people that come to us in the mobile gaming industry want to retarget churned users. Would you say that’s the most predominant form of retargeting in the industry or do you see other game studios or yourself testing additional audiences outside of the lapsed players?
• How do you see game studios effectively retargeting churned users from a messaging perspective?
• Do you have any experience or have you heard of studios leveraging promos to drive engagement?
• Why do you think having a retargeting strategy is not yet ubiquitous among performance marketers or gaming studios?
• Do you think that the industry is doing a good enough job of leveraging incrementality for acquisition campaigns as well?
• How is retargeting being affected by what’s happening with iOS14.5 and the ATT prompt? Have you heard of any solutions that will allow you to keep retargeting or are you exploring them?

• 4:06 Stephen’s background & current professional focus
• 7:58 Retargeting messaging - knowing your audience
• 10:18 Figuring out why users lapse
• 12:00 Using promos in retargeting
• 14:40 Industry barriers to owning retargeting strategies
• 17:16 Leveraging incrementality in acquisition campaigns
• 19:30 Solutions to retargeting on iOS

(7:33-7:50) “With new UA, you don’t have quite the same ability to meet users where they’re at. And then with retargeting, you know so much about these users and about their past behavior, so we have more opportunity to message them in ways that we think will be more successful.”

(19:34-20:10) “I think it’s going to get harder to retarget on iOS; that you’re going to lose IDFA access to some percentage of users, which will be some percentage of the audience that you want to retarget. You also need the opt-in on the publisher side, which you have no control over. So, it’s an uphill battle but it’s not going to eliminate retargeting on iOS entirely. It’s a run-what-you-can and then try to find creative ways to continue to reach users you can’t retarget through the traditional IDFA method.”