What does a bloody third-person shooter sport about robbing banks at gunpoint have in widespread with a hyper-casual sport that entails flipping a strip of cartoon bacon from a skillet to attempt to make it land on random objects?
The reply: Not a lot, however each are categorised as “motion” video games, in response to Apple and Google of their respective app shops.
(“Bacon: The Sport” is an actual factor, by the best way, and it’s oddly satisfying.)
Privateness modifications on iOS and Android, specifically Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework and the SDK Runtime API coming quickly to Android 13 (a part of the Android Privateness Sandbox), imply that contextual focusing on is changing into extra vital inside the app shops.
However contextual can’t be all that efficient for focusing on or monetization if writer apps are categorized too broadly, mentioned Puneet Gupta, co-founder and chief product officer of Kayzen, a Berlin-based startup that helps builders take their cell programmatic shopping for in-house.
Broad strokes
Most sport advertisers are additionally builders, and the aim of promoting in different video games is to drive downloads for their very own. Consumer acquisition managers are deeply analytical and data-driven people who all the time have efficiency on their thoughts.
However the classes on supply inside Apple’s App Retailer and the Google Play Retailer haven’t modified a lot since each shops launched practically 15 years in the past.
And the gamers of “Armed Heist,” the third-person shooter sport talked about above, are impossible to be the identical individuals enjoying that very informal bacon sport. But these audiences are lumped collectively as a result of the video games they play are being broadly categorized.
To be truthful, the app shops do additionally supply some extra tagging primarily based on subgenre, however this isn’t constant throughout iOS and Android.
“They only don’t go deep sufficient,” Gupta mentioned. “They’re restricted, and the actual context isn’t there.”
Ironing out the small print
Earlier this yr, Kayzen launched a brand new instrument that makes use of a mixture of guide tagging and machine studying to categorize apps extra precisely and with a better stage of nuance.
The function, referred to as sensible app categorization, classifies writer apps primarily based on a hierarchy of three ranges: class, style and subgenre.
Take “Armed Heist.” Relatively than choosing “motion” as the first class and calling it a day, Kayzen would possibly tag it as “motion” or “core.” (Core video games are video games that usually require some stage of ability and observe and sometimes monetize by way of in-app purchases.)
On this case, the style could be “shooter,” and the subgenre might be “third-person shooter,” with the intention to differentiate it from first-person shooter video games.
By comparability, a attainable hierarchical categorization for the bacon sport might be “hypercasual” because the class (as a result of, actually, bacon flipping isn’t an motion sport, nonetheless you wish to slice it), “arcade” for the style and maybe “dexterity” for the subgenre.
Having manually tagged a big handful of apps itself, Kayzen has been utilizing them [specify what them is here] as seed information together with information from third-party companions, together with Sensor Tower, to feed a machine studying mannequin as a option to tag different apps routinely.
The apps Kayzen has been in a position to categorize signify someplace between 70 billion and 75 billion programmatic advert requests per day. Kayzen can be engaged on including to the variety of classes, genres and subgenres it has on supply.
On a roll
JustDice, a German developer of rewarded cell sport apps, has been working with Kayzen for simply over two years.
Since beginning to goal campaigns primarily based on sensible app classes this yr, justDice has seen a 2.5x improve in its set up quantity and a 6x uptick within the variety of apps put in per thousand impressions.
All of justDice’s apps are rewards-based, which signifies that low cost hunters is considered one of its most lively and profitable audiences. However to search out that individual kind of consumer up to now meant scraping by way of the app shops to search out titles much like its personal and creating whitelists, a course of that was not automated in any respect.
Now, justDice can goal apps which have “rewarded provides” listed as a subgenre.
This “actually offers considerably higher context in focusing on,” mentioned Miika Kenttämies, managing director at justDice.
Though programmatic isn’t its largest media funding, justDice handles all of what it does run in-house, which is why it began working with Kayzen within the first place as “an extension of our in-house workforce,” Kenttämies mentioned.
“With DSPs, we require 100% transparency versus a managed black field,” he mentioned. “We see working it in-house as a big worth add to our different media buys as a result of transparency and skill for hyper-targeted campaigns throughout exchanges.”
That’s one option to deliver dwelling the bacon.
