Data-driven Method for Mobile Game Publishing Marketing Promotion

Marketing is vital for game businesses. However, it is hard to reach the target audiences and choose the right marketing strategies for different user acquisition channels in mobile game publishing. This paper shows how business intelligence can guide independent (indie) mobile game developers to do marketing promotion based on a data-driven method. We apply and extend the ARM funnel model from social game publishing to mobile game publishing and provide a data-driven method to evaluate the marketing promotion performance. First, in order to address indie game marketing challenges, we propose a data-driven method by defining key metrics and applying two different analysis methods for assessing mobile game marketing promotion. Second, we apply our data-driven method to an indie mobile game project and guide the indie game studio to determine the potential marketing promotion issues. Third, we also provide suggestions on improving marketing performance based on analysis results, especially by differentiating between channels. Finally, we summarize how our method can be generalized and used to guide indie mobile game marketing promotion, find high-quality channels for user acquisition, improve the marketing promotion effect, and discuss future research work.This research was supported by University of Skövde, Sweden Game Arena and the Game Hub Scandinavia 2.0 (NYPS 20201849) project under the EU regional development fund Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak.