Running successful user acquisition campaigns for your new mobile game can be a daunting task that requires years of experience to hone. Fret not as we’ve put together a UA campaign checklist for you to follow through with some guiding questions that dive deeper into each step.

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Step 1: Start with your goals

1. Align your internal goals

• What does your studio want to achieve for this game?

2. Define your target audience 

• Who are you building this game for? 
• Which markets are they in? 
• What is their spending power?

3. Define the success criteria

• Will it be based on vanity metrics (e.g. No. of installs, game play duration)  or actionable metrics (e.g. LTV, ROAS, RR)? 
• What is the industry benchmark?
• What are the Day 1, 3, 7, 14, 30 targets? 

4. Knowing how to monitor and measure

• What kind of marketing tech stack do you need?

• Which tool to use for tracking, performance analysis, automation etc?
• How much does each SaaS cost?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

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Step 2: Know your market

1. Understand your audience behaviour

• What is their average LTV? 
• Does it differ from country to country?

2. Identify the primary and secondary ad networks that target the right profiles

• Which are the common ad networks?
• What type of campaigns do they support? CPI, ROAS, CPA etc
• What is the average cost 

3. Research on your closest competitors’ content

• What are the top keywords for app store optimisation?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

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Step 3: Plan, create and execute your campaign

1. Prepare your creatives

• Which kind of creative style should you go for? For UA - Text, image (mandatory), video, playable (IronSource, Facebook, Applovin etc)
• Should there be music?
• How many creatives should you prepare?
• Do you need to localise your creatives for the targeted countries?

2. Budgeting 

• How much budget should you allocate for each ad network, per campaign, per country, or per bid?
• How long should the budget last?

3. Scheduling

• Which ad networks and countries should you first roll the campaigns out to? 
• Should the campaigns be scheduled in phases? How long should each phase be?

4. Review & Launch

• Are the campaigns configured correctly on the ad networks and integrated fully with your marketing tech stack?

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Step 4: Post-Launch review

1. Check on data integrity

• Is all the data consistent across all sources and your performance analytics platform?

2. Daily monitoring of campaign performance

• Is the target audience reacting to your campaigns?
• Are the key metrics improving over time? E.g. Installs, LTV, Revenue
• Are you maximising your budget?
• Are all the countries performing? If not, which ones are not and why?

Source: Tenjin Benchmark 2021

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Step 5: Continuous Optimisation 

1. Monitor the overall performance for each ad campaign

• Are all the ad campaigns bringing good performance?
• Should you continue with the underperforming ad campaign?

2. Adjust your budgets and bids 

• Are you allocating too much budget for a low performing campaign?
• Is your bid too low or too high?

3. Testing new creatives

• Is the audience reacting better to a certain type of creatives?
• Try other topics and themes