User Acquisition Insights with Miloš Radovanović of Megarama Games

In this series of articles, UA managers will answer 6 questions to share their insights on UA and industry trends.

Miloš Radovanović is responsible for user acquisition at Megarama Games, a leading indie developer focused on the creation of social casino games with hit titles that include Ape Slots and Slots WOW. Miloš has over eight years of experience in mobile marketing, specializing in user acquisition, monetization, and ASO.

1. Can you tell us more about your role in driving growth for Megarama?

I’ve been with Megarama since September 2019. As a young company, they offered full-time, fully remote positions, which was very unique – and I have to admit, strange at the time. Those close to me tried talking me out of the position since “no serious company has a fully remote team.” However, we all know what happened in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone started to work remotely, and they were loving it.

As the first person in the company fully dedicated to marketing, I worked on ASO and monetization – but mostly on user acquisition. I was very lucky to be given the freedom to work on growing this part of the company based on my knowledge, experience, and insights (with the supervision and huge support of the company owner, of course).

Thanks to the success we are seeing, our UA team has grown in 2020, along with the team creating video and image content, making me really proud to be part of this growth.

2. What are the challenges within the UA social casino landscape?

Megarama wanted to create a concept where you can actually watch ads in order to keep playing instead of paying. Therefore, most of our revenue comes from ads, which is totally opposite to what other social casino publishers do. So, that’s a challenge in itself, but we adapted and are doing a solid job, I’d say.

Moreover, it goes without saying that lately, the biggest challenge for all publishers is the iOS 14 update. Targeting new users without IDFA on the iOS platform requires education on current affairs and constant communication with literally every account manager you are working with to try and adapt to the new era of UA on iOS.

3. How do you evaluate and test new countries to launch your titles in?

Unless you have a product or an app that has never been made before, the first thing you must do is conduct competitor research. Everything you need to do has been or is already being done, and these GEO launch strategies have very likely been tested for quite some time before the process became successful. Therefore, if your competitors are advertising their product in some Tier 3 country, they are either testing or they already have a market there.

There are many other types of online research one can do, but I believe that – especially for young companies with limited budgets or experience – this can be the most accurate way to evaluate new countries to launch your titles in.

4. Can you tell us a bit about the ideal user for Ape Slots?

The ideal user for Ape Slots is a female user between 35 and 45 years of age. adjoe has account managers who are very forthcoming and dedicated to helping you optimize your targeting in order to find the best users for your game. This makes the job of the UA manager a lot easier with suggestions based on user profile targeting.

5. Given the changing mobile landscape, how have you adjusted your mobile acquisition efforts?

At Megarama, we have shifted a part of our UA budget to Android, yes, as many publishers did. This has made the competition for acquiring Android users harder than it used to be.

We definitely see changes in revenue coming from iOS, but I believe they will be even more obvious in the following months. We definitely need to wait and see what happens in the near future.

6. What do you think we should be looking out for in the next few months?

Retention rate is decreasing across app and game categories on both Android and iOS platforms due to different reasons. I guess developers will dedicate more time to UX to stay original and provide a better experience to keep their users longer.

I believe that the trend of big publishers buying smaller publishers will continue. The same goes for big ad networks going into the game/app publishing business.

Also, I’m curious to see how Apple Search Ads are developing their strategy after the iOS 14 changes to get more publishers to do UA with them. Privacy has been a big thing and the main topic lately, so I believe iOS 14 was just the beginning. Let’s see what Google is going to do next.