Espresso Publishing, a fresh new publisher for hyper-casual games launched in March of 2021 under the wing of MY.GAMES, shared statistics collected on its hyper-casual hypothesis-testing platform during the last quarter: for tests in the US, on Android, on Facebook, the average CTR of the projects is 4% with a CPI of $2.5. Most of the time the traffic is spread across the Audience Network.
With the new iOS policy the cost of user acquisition has increased. This is most noticeable in Android projects, which are the most tested on the platform. CTR is still a metric that is used for picking ideas: one can find a CTR of 10% or even more, but that doesn’t improve the games’ chances of success. As such, CTR as a metric is becoming less and less important for developers.
Espresso Publishing launched its platform this Summer: it gives access to CTR, CPI, and R1 tests, as well as all the capabilities and functionality for testing prototypes of any kind. The team also uses its own analysis tools to test projects — namely, Robusta and the Barista SDK, which can be easily built into any engine by the developer. There’s also a special PRO dashboard that displays data about the project’s monetization and traffic metrics.
Zakhar Serebryannikov, Espresso Publishing’s CEO comments:
“In our methodology, we consider a benchmark of 4% CTR to be good for the hyper-casual genre when testing FB-based projects in the US. However, we always analyze where the traffic goes, and only then make conclusions about each particular project. We see a trend — 2 out of 3 test requests are about CPI. Our strategy recommends teams test R1 on our platform right away to get a better understanding of the project — you’ll get access to CTR for each video, as well as the CPI and R1 metrics at the same time. At this point, the CTR metric is more of a supplemental one, pointing at the project’s best qualities rather than its general feel. That’s why it’s much more important to test four to six creatives at a time and see the results of each.”
With regards to the CPI metrics on FB, there’s a noticeable, constant growth. The alternate project testing sources are having more of an impact, as well — different publishers use different channels to accumulate their statistics. For example, every third project Espresso Publishing tests on TikTok with the help of Tenjin — accessible in the PRO functionality of the Espresso dashboard on the Espresso Publishing platform: it is often the case that results from alternative channels look different and provide ways to develop the project further or help rapidly grow it. The PRO dashboard now gives access to LTV tests with full data on total spending, ROAS, and Revenue. In addition, each developer can quickly open Tenjin to check on attributions in their project.
Roman Garbar, Tenjin’s Marketing Director adds:
“The business of publishing hyper-casual games is undergoing rapid changes. Where before it was enough to do a couple of Facebook tests with well-chosen creatives to see if the game will succeed or not, the process is now much more difficult. This isn’t just due to the increased levels of competition in the hyper-casual game segment, but also due to global changes to iOS which make it more difficult to both advertise games and monetize their ads. If in 2019 we saw 64% of the marketing budgets of hyper-casual publishers spent on iOS, now (IIIrd quarter of 2021) this number has fallen as low as 45%. The market is changing very rapidly. In order to stay relevant, publishers need to have a powerful internal tech stack available to the marketing team. That’s the reality of today. The advantage will always be on the side of those publishers that are quicker to adapt to market changes.”