A profitability analysis on user acquisition in free-to-play mobile games

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School of Business | Master's thesis
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Date
2018
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
44 + 12
Series
Abstract
Mobile games are a booming industry with fierce competition between game developers for the screen time of players. Digital advertising is also a growing field, expected to have surpassed traditional TV and print advertising in monetary terms for the first time in 2017. During the same period, mobile advertising is estimated to have accounted for over half of dollars spent globally on digital advertising. Mobile game developers wish to attract audiences that have high likelihoods of spending money within their games. This is a study on the return on advertising spend in the realm of mobile game marketing. We find strong evidence for a relationship between geographical and digital contexts in which ads are shown and the profitability of marketing activities. The findings support an existing framework on the efficiency of mobile marketing and expands it to the domain of mobile game marketing. The findings presented herein are specific to the three games included in the study. Each of the three games are published as versions on both the Android and iOS operation systems, all of which are included in this study. ANOVA models for the six versions of the games are fitted to infer the relationship between ad context and ROAS. The methodology presented herein can be utilized by third parties to understand and improve app marketing profitability. Beyond the results of this study, the presented ANOVA model can be used by app marketers to test for a relationship between other categorical variables and profitability.
Description
Thesis advisor
Tuunainen, Virpi
Keywords
mobile games, mobile advertising, user acquisition, ANOVA, return on advertising spend
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