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Bringing the power of marketing data to indie devs

June 4, 2019 in Games | 4 min. read
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The Kochava SDK is free and easy to integrate into games. With it, game developers can gain insights into player performance and which marketing campaigns drive the best growth.

Driving game growth, building your brand

With millions of game titles in the app stores already –and more added daily–  indie developers need an advantage so their games stand out and grow. Real-time analytics help them understand how players are engaging with their games. Marketing measurement (also called attribution) enables them to see which ad campaigns are delivering new, quality players. This data is vital for driving sustained growth and building a lasting brand. To introduce developers to marketing analytics, the Unity Asset Store and Kochava have partnered to bring developers the Kochava SDK for FREE.  

“Unity has made app development more accessible, and likewise, we want to further advance the marketing of those apps by providing free entry to our analytics and marketing toolset,” said Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava. “Developers can scale their apps by using our tools to better understand what their players are doing inside the game, in order to create new audiences for the game.”

An SDK for gaming devs by gaming devs

The Unified Audience Platform by Kochava gives developers access to the same marketing tools that mainstream gaming companies use to analyze, optimize, and advance their games. Kochava began as a company that provided these tools for game developers to understand the feedback loop of user acquisition and engagement while targeting quality users.

They’re also conscious of limiting the technical impact on indie apps. “The gaming development world is filled with resource-hungry plugins. From my background as an indie game developer, I’m happy to say the Kochava SDK is very light and barely touches the CPU,” said Nathan Darst, SDK Engineering Director at Kochava.

Developers can integrate the SDK and be up and running with no code required. With near-zero CPU usage, there’s no impact on game performance and player experience.

“Having Kochava on the Unity Asset Store provides our developers with additional tools to make the most out of the content they’re building in Unity,” said Peter O’Reilly, Head of the Unity Asset Store. “We know how much effort goes into creating compelling, engaging, and quality content, which is why we believe in partnering with companies like Kochava, who provides the tools necessary for developers to achieve success.”

In terms of the SDK’s major functionality, developers can:

  • Easily track installs, purchases, level completes and other player actions
  • Visualize campaign performance with real-time analytics
  • Re-engage players likely to churn/uninstall

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The Kochava Unified Audience Platform

Why measurement matters

Measurement allows you to see what works and what doesn’t in your game or app and your marketing. It enables you to optimize and reach quality players vital to making your game a success.

Real-time tracking of app installs and player activity, such as sessions, level completes, and purchases, reveal how users are interacting with your app. In some cases, it may inform user experience enhancements.

For example, one Kochava client, the maker of a world-building game, used analytics and saw that their players were dropping off during the onboarding tutorial or not going on to play the game. This observation prompted them to shorten the length of the tutorial drastically; almost immediately, player conversions in real gameplay improved.

The Kochava SDK supports over 4,000 media partner integrations, so you can easily launch campaigns with a wide array of ad partners (including Facebook, Google Ads, Twitter, and others), reaching new potential players across the globe. Kochava tracks every ad viewed (called an impression) by a player and every ad clicked (or tapped) against all your campaigns. When a conversion occurs, Kochava correlates (a.k.a. attributes) each conversion back to the precise marketing campaign that drove it.

Install validation and fraud protection

Ad fraud costs marketers billions of dollars every year, and gaming, in particular, has been targeted. With Kochava, you get a comprehensive suite of anti-fraud tools. Among them, is install validation, which flags fake installs through a combination of install-receipt verification on iOS and other security protocols [ADD LINK to webpage identifying other security protocols). Other anti-fraud features detect, flag, and block various forms of abnormal activity.

Thousands of gaming clients served daily

Kochava serves thousands of mobile gaming firms, including MZ, MobilityWare, Skillz, DoubleDown Interactive, GSN, and Random Logic Games. These brands rely on Kochava to precisely measure in-app performance against their paid and non-paid marketing efforts. Kochava data then drives decisions and strategy impacting millions of dollars in advertising spend as brands strive to capture a share of the 2.1 billion mobile gamers around the world.

MobilityWare, developer of the first Solitaire game to appear in the app stores, uses Kochava to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. With the complete Kochava fraud prevention suite, they also offer premium defense from mobile ad fraud. Measuring installs and in-app gameplay activity, they’re able to understand player performance trends in relation to their partners, campaigns, and channels to fine-tune marketing strategies.

Learn more

To get started with Kochava for free (and upgrade with the push of a button when you’re ready to grow and monetize), download it from the Asset Store.

June 4, 2019 in Games | 4 min. read

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