Video: AppHacks—Why You Need Marketability Testing

In this video, Dominic Minogue, director of product marketing at Lion Studios talks about the importance and benefits of marketability testing for your app. 

Check out more AppHacks and other videos on the AppLovin Youtube channel.

Learn more about marketability testing in this article: How to Master Marketability for Your Game’s Prototype

Transcript

Hi, welcome to AppHacks. I’m Dominic Minogue, director of product marketing at Lion Studios, a mobile games publisher, launched by AppLovin. 

This video will cover what marketability testing is for ads and why it’s important for your app. 

What is marketability testing?

In your ongoing efforts to reach more people and have them spend time in your app, improving the relevance of the ads your users see through marketability testing provides a meaningful way for you to acquire effective cohorts of users overall, improving the way you monetize.

Marketability testing is the process of understanding which types of ads your target audience is most engaged with. Understanding this helps drive your future decisions for what kind of ads to produce in order to create the best user experience for your app — and ultimately, drive conversions or purchases. 

Testing marketability for ads can provide the following specific benefits:

• Provides the data you need to reinforce which ad concepts you believe are best. This helps sway the types of ads you want to continue delivering and scale back the ones that aren’t working. 
• It allows for a better understanding of your audience and helps set strategies for further segmentation of groups. This includes male versus female, location, age and behavior. 
• It helps you make quick optimizations and iterations with maximum impact. Say you’ve made a few design tweaks and your test results show that you are about the same in terms of level of engagement with group A and group B. Perhaps then you decide to change the copy to further test how that impacts the effectiveness.

How to Run an Ad Test

In order to run an effective test, you should first have an hypothesis in mind. What is it that you expect from the results? 

Example: You see that your current demographic is heavily male, but you believe that your game could resonate with a female audience as well. So you want to create ads that will attract female users, but you aren’t sure what those ads may look like. 

First, you want to break out your game into its various features and narratives. This is the driving content that’s going to make up the ads that you want to test. 

You have defined your target, a female audience, as well as defined what variables you want to AB test, which is the different game features. Create the ads with each ad highlighting a different feature of the game. Now segment your audience into groups and expose them to the different versions of your ads. 

Afterwards, you can analyze the results and look at all of the metrics holistically. Make the necessary adjustments, and based on your results, you should see some sort of directional data after your first test that can guide you into future rounds of testing. Then, start it all over again.

The goal here is to find out what works and what doesn’t work. When you find out what works, you want to optimize the ads based off of your findings, which each round of AB testing should get you closer to. And ideally, you will find your optimal marketability.

Making Quick Decisions 

At the early stages of marketability testing, it’s all about understanding user interests. And if you see engagement, keep going. If you don’t, move on. Either way, the testing will help you make a quicker decision and eliminate guesswork. 

Here are some questions to ask when you’re testing:

• Design and appeal — Are all of the colors and layout enticing?
• Message — Is it clear? And does it make the user want to engage?
• Motivation — Does the ad make the user want to buy?
• Relevance — Does the ad make sense with your app? 

Overall, avoid clutter and keep things simple. You want to guide their attention, not fight for it. 

Choose the Metrics you want to Measure 

Metrics can help you decide what makes one ad more engaging versus another. Some common metrics include click-through rate, install rate, and any engagement metric that allows you to understand how much of an ad they’ve watched or interacted with right before churning.

As you can see, marketability testing for ads means constantly optimizing for the most engaging and relevant ads. Set benchmarks, test, and iterate to make the most informed decisions and ultimately grow your app. 

Well that’s it for now. I’m Dominic Minogue, and thanks for watching. See you next time.