With the gaming space more competitive than ever, it’s becoming increasingly difficult and expensive for game studios to acquire new users who are of high value. That’s because gaming studios are continually running advertisements, attempting to vye for their target market's attention in order to grow their user base and increase return on investment.

This means it’s never been more important to deeply understand the efforts of your marketing campaigns and user acquisition (UA) efforts in order to win amongst the crowd.  

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What is Cost Center?

Cost Center is an intuitive platform connecting marketing utilities, designed for game studios to scale up and simplify their user acquisition efforts. With a focus on efficiency, the overall goal is to enable UA managers and developers to collate raw data from existing ad networks and calculate individual campaigns, such as whether certain countries are profitable or which low-performing campaigns need to be optimised.

New research conducted by Adjust found that marketers handle on average 19 advertising campaigns across approximately 14 different networks, highlighting the scale and complexity behind current marketing campaigns.

The connection between data sources is the core of Cost Center with analytics, attribution, mediation and ad network data sources available to showcase valuable gaming data. These include the popular Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Unity Ads, Apple Search Ads, Applovin, IronSource Ads and Vungle platforms. Cost Center knows best that keeping analytics in one place is vital to your success and so has developed the Campaign Center, one of their greatest applications.

It has been designed to display pivot reports and allow UA managers to interact with them to draw actionable insights that will guide your marketing, product and business decisions for the long-term success of your app. These include understanding your users' journey, from the time they find your game right up until they generate revenue, so you can make profitable decisions about increasing UA spend, optimising products and more!

What are Campaign Center's features?

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Unified Dashboard

A unified dashboard in the Campaign Center allows UA managers to access, compare and manage information and performance on campaigns from all ad networks and channels around the globe. With more than 80 dimensions and metrics at your fingertips, it covers the following and more:

• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) at the campaign, country and site ID level.
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
• Retention.
• Accumulated Ad Revenue (Acc. Ad Revenue).
• Accumulated In-App Purchase Revenue (Acc IAP. Revenue).
• User Qualifying Information such as the duration which shows how long users played the game in a day or a session.

This can bring a deeper level of perspective and help you answer important questions, such as how much revenue has been generated from a single campaign, how much profit was acquired from a single campaign and when you will break even.

Your team can then continue to work smarter not just harder by having access to this dashboard through Member settings. By deciding which information to grant teams or individuals, you can allow them to visualise and understand how their individual and collective actions are producing your shared business goals.

Campaign management

Further data from Adjust uncovered that when asked about their three biggest pain points, marketers listed merging and acting on disparate sources of data, individually updating bids and budgets, and accurate campaign management.

With smart technology behind the Campaign Center, you can track and compare the performance between campaigns, countries, ad groups, ads and source app levels in near real-time.

That’s why the Campaign Center has been developed to give you instant access so you can quickly batch adjust the bids and budgets for individual campaigns, ad groups and countries in seconds. Forget all the time spent logging in to different networks, checking independent campaigns and separately updating them! Using the Campaign Center Bid Formula settings, you can even fine-tune your campaigns by defining rules which will automatically be calculated and applied, ensuring everything is functioning behind the scenes as it should.

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The platform also keeps a history log of all your bid and budget information so you can inspect and evaluate the efficiency of every cent spent per ad when needed.

Pivot Report

With dynamic and interactive pivot reports, you can drag and drop fields into columns or rows to create custom reports using your most preferable metrics. By combining various analytics sources, you have versatile datasets to analyse your campaign’s performance from different angles and explore data insights. You can then use Account Report settings to view an accumulation of all report data, giving UA managers and developers an overview of all UA campaigns in their organisation.

Data is only as valuable as your ability to understand and act upon it, which is why these reports have been designed to share with stakeholders and other third parties. With all of your app’s analytics in one place, you can focus on building a high-performing business and put your raw data to work; by making data-driven decisions about whether to prioritise game design, better understand customers or optimise marketing activities.

Having a well-defined gaming analytics strategy will empower your team to make data-informed decisions and grow your app. If you are an indie developer or game studio looking to take it to the next level, get in touch with us or sign up for Cost Center now to give your games a boost.

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