User Acquisition Insights with Viktoriia Boichuk

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

Viktoriia Boichuk is the User Acquisition Lead at MysteryTag, a casual games publisher and developer based in Kiev. Viktoriia has been working with MysteryTag for the past three and a half years and is responsible for a range of activities across the Marketing Team. MysteryTag’s impressive portfolio of games includes Harvest Land, Paris: City Adventure, and Merge Defence 3D. Their titles have achieved over 30 million downloads worldwide.

1. Tell us a little bit about which apps you are responsible for at MysteryTag?

My current role covers all aspects of marketing including marketing analytics, UA, monetization, and working with creative teams. For now, we don’t divide our team into different groups managing different apps. Therefore, our team structure is one large marketing team that collectively works on all apps together. Today, we have around ten live apps with many launched worldwide and a few in soft launch.

Working in this structure helps us in different ways. First, we have different genres, and genre-to-genre marketing strategies can be completely different. Therefore, working in this way makes everything more interesting. I think the main benefit when working as one large team is that the results in each network become more profound with the different apps and strategies. The second benefit is that we can learn from the creatives of all the different apps. This helps us apply good creative ideas from one app to another.

2. Harvest Land is among your most popular titles. Who are your core users for this game?

Different users have different values and that’s not a secret. However, knowing the value of each user is not so obvious. Here at MysteryTag, we have a great model to calculate the value of each user demographic, which helps us to expand our UA possibilities.

Targeted GEOs, ages, and genders depend on the specifics of the user acquisition channels and goals. If we put all UA channels together and look at the bigger picture, we are targeting everyone and everywhere.

However, despite that, when testing brand new channels we begin by targeting women aged 30 and above in Tier 1 countries if it’s possible. These users are usually the most likely to give the best performance when looking exclusively at in-app purchases.

3. How do you use adjoe’s advanced targeting information to optimize your UA efforts?

When working with adjoe’s Playtime, we test all of the advanced targeting options available to us. To begin, we launch Android campaigns that are divided by a user’s age and gender. In addition, we run some campaigns with advanced targeting including app vertical targeting. This means that we can target users based on their mobile interests.

When we see that some campaigns have higher performance, we then analyze them further by the user’s interests and scale the campaigns. To do this, we share post-install events so that an adjoe growth manager can help evaluate which user demographics are performing well. Then, we can optimize campaigns accordingly.

With the Playtime ad unit, we can receive good-quality traffic not only from our main target audience but also from other demographics. So, we work to create a campaign structure targeting all ages, genders, and genres.

4. What advice would you give to studios looking to test playtime as a user acquisition channel?

The Playtime ad unit brings you highly engaged users, so it’s always worth trying. My experience shows that it’s better to start with the target audience and GEOs you know work well and after that move forward by adding more granular targeting. It’s too important not to miss trying another audience that usually does not work that well since Playtime can show impressive results there as well.

5. How have you adjusted your mobile acquisition efforts?

A huge part of iOS traffic is already iOS 14.5 and above, so we’re running campaigns and analyzing iOS 14 traffic. For now, less targeted campaigns and lower budgets are one of the ways. Android user acquisition strategy hasn’t changed for us, as we already had a strong presence on Android. Due to this, iOS traffic doesn’t affect us much.

6. Is there something the industry should keep its eye on in the coming months?

Definitely! We have a few titles in different genres that will launch this year and a lot of ideas to implement in the future. We’re currently trying new game genres and developing new games in the genres we are already established in. We are always looking for interesting games to publish as well as develop new projects on our own. MysteryTag grows extremely quickly each year.