Match Masters' Influencer Marketing Playbook: 8 Years of Always-On Growth
46m 49s
The transcription discusses influencer marketing as a core growth channel for mobile games, emphasizing its role at the intersection of brand and performance marketing. Marion Ballonoff, an influencer marketing consultant, and Aviv, influencer marketing leader at Candyvor (studio behind Match Masters), share insights. Marion highlights that influencer marketing should be a permanent pillar, not a seasonal experiment, as cutting spend can accelerate install decline. She stresses that attribution requires longer windows (e.g., 7 days) and proxy models for organic uplift, since content has a long tail that generates installs and high-value users over months or years. Aviv details Candyvor’s strategy: running influencer campaigns since day one, using a blitz model with giveaways and dedicated in-game assets (e.g., custom art, leaderboards) to drive performance. They track results via internal analytics, seeing ~30% organic uplift and improved store rankings. Aviv also emphasizes agency partnerships for non-English markets and the importance of cross-team collaboration (product, marketing, influencer) to create full-funnel campaigns. Both agree that influencer marketing reduces CPI, builds trust, and attracts warm, high-retention users, making it a growth engine that complements traditional user acquisition rather than competing with it.
We start the promotion with, hey, you want a chance to win two tickets to the Volka final? That's why that's exactly it's getting attention. So what do you need to do? Hello, everyone. Welcome to Deconstruct Reflon interview series. I'm Jen Donahoe and on today's episode, we are going to tackle influencer marketing again. We did the podcast last year. So what I wanted to do was actually go deeper into influencer marketing because this is a channel that has moved from a nice to have to a core pillar of mobile game growth. The best studios treat it as a brand moment, the rare place where you can get a little bit of attribution of the performance marketing and a little lift of brand awareness all in the same campaign. So this episode is about going into the details. We're going to talk about how you run them, measure them. This isn't one or one anymore. We're going a lot deeper. So I'd like to welcome Marion. Well, Marion, Ballonoff. So Marion joined me on a podcast last year and she's an influencer marketing consultant who works with mobile game studios like WUGA and Supercell on so many great influencer marketing campaigns. We actually had a chance to work together with a client too. So that was like super fun. So I wanted to bring her back, but I also wanted to bring someone new. So Aviv is joining us. He is the influencer marketing leader at Candyvor and they are the studio behind matchmasters. If you haven't played, it's an awesome PVP match three game. So you all have been running influencer marketing as a core channel for the last eight years. I know you've been there two years, right? Aviv is that what you said? But I mean, just amazing to talk to somebody who has had a team that's really believed in this as a channel for such a long time. All right. Attention app and game developers, the difference between scaling and failing comes down to one thing, intelligence. 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Apps fire is like having a cheat code for mobile marketing pinpoint attribution real time insights and analytics that actually make sense. Stop flying blind and start flying smart apps flyer because your data is your best co-op partner. So welcome and we are going to jump right in. So our first question Mary, I'm going to direct us at you since we're going to talk a little bit of strategy first. Insolence remarketing fuels almost as important as traditional marketing and traditional user acquisition, especially as you think about all of the challenges that we're facing and getting attention. So I like to call this brand for months. I think one of our friends, Sara, I used to say this and taught me this term and now I use it everywhere, which is the combination of their intersection of brand marketing, which is awareness marketing a little bit harder to track with performance marketing, which we all think is absolutely attributable to every single person and penny. We all know that the real answer is somewhere in between that. And I think influencer marketing is a great job of literally sitting in between those two things if you were to put them on a spectrum. So let's start with you, Maryann. What role should influencer marketing play in today's growth stack? And how do you see this as a key strategy as we look at game growth, as we look at how do you bring more players into the game? Hey, Jen. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me again. So as you said, I think it really is about how do you see influencer marketing, right? So it sits at the intersection of both performance and brand. So you do get that you read it in stools, but it's not the full picture, right? So many of it comes organically and it's really important that you take that into consideration when you look at the performance because otherwise you have no chance of reaching profitability. The biggest problem that I see is that a lot of us use till treaty as an experiment, right? So it's less traded ones. We have some budget left and then it doesn't yield the results that you want and then basically they cut it. But the winning studios, the one that make it work, are the ones that have been having it as a permanent pillar and not as just a seasonal add-on. This is a great graph here where we see a company that was investing in influencer marketing for a very long time. This is again that it's 10 years old, right? So the decline in install is just what this life cycle of that game was. And so during the time when we had influencer marketing investment, you could see that the installs were declining at around 2.56 percent per month, right? Over the last two years. But then once they cut the influencer marketing spend, the decline actually increased and so the decline actually was 2.7 faster just because it was not influencer marketing. The correlation between influencer marketing that sits in a way at the top of the funnel, it does do branding, it does create trust with the audience and that does help with installs and with a lot of things in the growth stack. So the thing is that it should not be competing with PGA. It just makes it more efficient. Yeah, I get that a lot, which is, are these channels in a sense competing with each other? I think sometimes you have to think about them separately in order to kind of prove their benefit. But what I try to tell people is that marketing campaigns have to stack all boats rise. Exactly. Yeah, like influencer marketing really fills the whole growth system. It will generate you a creatives because you have content creators creating content. It will lift up store rankings. It will stabilize the use because you have ongoing content where influencers are talking about it. And obviously as we were just saying, it reduces CPI. So I understand the need to identify the impact of each channel's individually, but at the same time, if you look at it holistically, it is much more powerful. That's a good segue to the V. Let me get you in on the conversation. So Candyvor has really stood out because you built influencer marketing for Match Masters from day one. Super impressive that even eight years ago, you know, the team really thought about that being such a dedicated piece of it. So I think you have a three-person team too and you use a Blitz model where every creator goes live on the same day and you do a split test, markets where you evaluate always on potential and establish countries that run on a monthly cadence. So first, what has been the influence and the impact of this strategy on the channel? So let's talk about that first and then you're walk us through it like how you think about this. When we talked offline in our pre-meeting, I was super impressed with the way that you all think about the strategy to the planning to the execution. It feels different. So walk us through that. So first, Jen, thanks for having me. Super exciting to be here. So yes, exactly as you mentioned in Candyvor, we run influencer campaigns since day one of the marketing, which is eight years ago. It's an incremental part of the marketing budget and we saw the influencer marketing, not an issue. We saw it as a growth engine for all the marketing activity. We are a performance driven company and influencer is not brand awareness for us. It's another performance tool for getting very high-value audience and track them and analyze the results and improve. We can see the result. We track them on our internal analytics tools. There is a lot of impacts for influencer campaigns. First, we can identify high retention and influencer campaigns compared to any other media source, especially for user acquisition. The user that came to the theater is really intent. They are warm. They have more time to hear about the game and not like seeing an ad and click it again as a Marion chair. We see organic lift also, which contribute to all the dow everything. And it's also the productivity and the store ranking. Regarding the process, exactly as you mentioned, we have a method of always-on campaigns in few countries that works really good for us and we try every time to promote the app with different creators and different verticals. And we have always test new markets for penetrating them. It's really to other topic that is very interesting about agencies. We are usually working with agencies, especially for non-English speaking markets. There is very high impact and power for local agency. They know their market better than all their creators. And in some cases, they have like much better rates for the creators. We want to run with them. And also, they reduce all the bureaucracy. As you mentioned, we are free people at the team and we have a lot of tasks on the table. Yeah.
So walking with an agency, provide good relationship with them is something that is critical for the success of the campaigner can mention some agencies that we are working with. I'm sure they would appreciate you giving them a shout out if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So cherry pick talent from UK, OMG for me as well, actually. Oh, nice. We have like weekly meeting with them, strategy meeting. We decide together based on our data and their accommodation and their knowledge, especially with other mobile gaming apps, about new creators, new verticals that work to try. Vertical if someone is not familiar is like the type of content of the creators could be like DIY or fashion or travel or gossip. We always try to test new verticals. I love that process. I want to go back on something you said because I really need people to understand this and you are willing to share a number with me. Talk a little bit more about organic uplift and what numbers you have seen kind of be successful. I can talk about the ranges I've seen, but what have you seen on or like general organic uplift when you run I am campaigns. Yeah. So here we can see the contribution of organic lift of inputs or campaign in this graph. The red line is influencer and we see the installs over the date. The blue one is the organic and the yellow is the paid. So we can see the direct impact when we see the spike on the influencers install immediately. It affects their organic installs. What we see here is for the campaign that we made in Israel and again, it makes sense. Sometimes it's like something that catch you and you'll go to the stall or just share to a friend or anything else. And we can see that there is a correlation between the influence activity and the paid, but the contribution for the organic uplift is much higher. And like the delta here is all the environmental lift that relate directly to influencer. So like this is why we see the spike in two days and then the decrease. Awesome. Can you generally see about a 30% organic uplift when you're running these tests? Is that about how it works? Usually yes, where we do like a blitz or mini bits to one country. It affects positively on the upsters when like we'll go or our upsell see like an increase on the installs in specific country. It automatically like you are rising the leaderboard of the top charts of the country. Okay. So it's like a cycle. It's like positive effect that affects one of each other. Something important to mention I think is about this organic uplift because it will vary from one game to another, from one audience to another, from one country to another. Yeah. If I live is around 30%, it's also because a lot of the campaigns that they run at much masters are with giveaways. And so those in that sense, they are forcing the audience to click the link to be part of the campaign. A lot of the traffic is already going to be attributed directly because they're clicking the link for other campaigns where you don't necessarily run those giveaways or like where you have a gift link or something like that. You might have a far higher share of organic traffic. I do sometimes 100% of the attributed traffic. Oh, understood. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, attribution is a topic I really wanted to get into because it is my life every day. I'm sure yours as well as everyone asking you how did it do? Very much. So let's get into that. So it's a key reason why actually many, I mean, you and I both, Marianne, as we talk to clients, they're like, I don't really want to do these campaigns because this UA stuff, I tend to know what how it does. It also runs on a very short click window in many cases 24 hours. Influencer content needs a longer window, although a VV, you're showing us that in some cases in some countries, it can actually move the needle very quickly. But in general, it needs a little bit longer. You need to have discovery. You need to have time for that download. So Marianne, can you walk us through? How do you approach modeling the direct attribution piece to help showcase the value of influencer marketing? I know we've talked a little bit now about organic. So let's talk about the form and side of the brand form and sub-influencer marketing. Yeah. So I think something we touched upon briefly with Aviv example. The key inflammation there was that it was Instagram stories. So we know Instagram stories are only like for 24 hours. That's why in that specific case, it was interesting to look at the performance only on such a short window. But when you look at other pieces of content, the live for so much longer than 24 hours, they get views seven days after, 30 days after, years after sometimes. And so if we look into the attribution, it's basically broken for influencers because as you said, like in traditional user acquisition, you look at it on a 24 hour window. But we know that those videos are being watched long after that. So what I recommend is at least a seven day minimum click window. And then on top of that, a layer of a proxy model for the uplift because if you do not look at that, there's no chance for you to reach profitability. So look at what happens to organic install volume in a market like before, during and after the campaign. And this graph is really really important because it shows you from a day to say, from one of the clients that I was running campaigns for, you see the amount of views that you have at day seven and day 30. And what you see is that at day 365, you already have 50% more installs than what you were accounting for at day 30. And in that case, it was only two years. So imagine if you've been running that for so long, it is really important that you look at the performance outside of that day, seven day, 30 window because yes, on paper, your CPI day 30 is going to be far more expensive than what you see on on metal or Google. And if you look at date 365 or T or even lifetime, it's going to be far lower than what you were accounting for. And this still generates a lot of traffic and a lot of exposure for your game or your app. If you think about it, you still have those tracking links in those bursts that people can still click on. So you still get attributed installs, but then you have to look into that long tail. It is going to be harder for you to estimate, but it is really important to at least consider all those additional attributed installs beyond the campaign window because when you stop investing in influence on marketing, your campaign don't stop. They keep on living almost forever. The other thing I do when I make a style guide, so a lot of times people will yell at me, they're like, you want to spend $200,000 to make a style guide. And in one case, when I was working on team fight tactics, we spent money up to create a style guide and six, seven, eight years later, they're still using those same style guide, the same logos, the same lockup, the same character art. And so in a sense, that investment amortizes over time. It becomes almost evergreen. And so I think this is the same kind of ideas where you invest in this. It can still work for you over time. 100%. Awesome. I have a great example for that on one of our campaign in the UK. The initial results wasn't good at all in one of the creators. And when we check it like after three months, four months, we saw a spike in our line in a purchases. And I've checked, so we caught the whale. So I deep into that to see when this whale wasn't wide, so much time to convert him. And what I revealed that this whale installed the app around 40, 15 days since the published date. So it's a long tail that lifts all the results. So I'm absolutely agree with Marion, especially for YouTube. Yeah, it's something that can happen. I love that. I love that influencer marketing. It allows you to go fishing for whales too. It's not just UA, it's not other things. I think that's awesome. Actually, Viva, I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, some of the attribution concerns and tracking links in the seven day window. You talked a little bit earlier about, and Marion mentioned that you have this giveaway mechanic. So I think that's what I'm going to do. And I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a giveaway. Exactly. It's not like great. Clear and download the app is if you're not click, you don't have a chance to win this awesome prize that I showed you. And we are usually in that case, we use like a hook. We start the promotion with, hey, you want a chance to win two tickets to the bulk of final. I'll play that. Exactly. It's get that attention. So now it's to me to the slides we see here. We build like a full funnel, which is kind of product marketing funnel that is dedicated for the creators. Product people, please listen. Yes. If we had that in other games, you would make a killing and much more success is doing it so brilliantly. Yeah, this is again, I just, I want people to understand I preach this all the time. It is one team, one dream. Product marketing influencer, everyone has to work together. And when you do, you can really unlock magic for everybody. Okay, sorry, Avie, we have just given you the floor and go for it. So here in that case, I can show you an example of one influencer that is in Israeli influencer called Kevin Rubin. This is like the part of the first time user experience when they enter the app. So at the first time, the user gets a welcome pop up with an art that is dedicated for the influencer audience. Okay, we can see here like a character. They were like a kind of Savannah. And he get like an exclusive gift for on the creator. After that, the user is getting to the leaderboard. The leader board is part of like the stories that are metad here is to earn stars each win your own few stars. And the most stars that you have you climb high in the little bot and then you can win the grand pies again here as well is only for the users that click the link and came from Kevin promotion. And Kevin is also here here in the top of the leaderboard. You can see it here. It takes like a few days. And after the winner and the loser as well, they also get a dedicated pop up with the same dedicated art. And after that, the stars, which takes like as I mentioned 10, 40 days after that in some cases, we proceed with another kind of product marketing tools. We can run sales with the same art of the creator. We can run calendar or data school something like is more additional events in the game. And we can trigger it only for the users that install by using the link of the creator. Beside that, we are using it in kind of a retargeting method. We checked it. And in some cases, especially in cases that we walk with the info and sort of like more than one time for a long term collaboration existing users can also join the race. And we see very positive impact in a purchases during the race period of existing users as well. So imagine someone that installed the app play and then churned. And after a few months, he can see the promotion in the info that he or she likes promoting another giveaway with cool prizes. So it makes the user return to the app play. So it's again, it's kind of retargeting method that we use. And it's some secret secrets that I can share. But I invite everyone to download Matchmasters and you will probably reveal it at that coming months. Oh nice. Something secret. So super cool. So when you use this actually also for retargeting, those players come in and they not only re-engage, but they respawn. They start spending and they spend at a higher level too, right? Is that so that's kind of the other benefit that you're seeing? Exactly. In some cases, we see like churn some of them well, the positives. And now it's it's easy to monetize them because they use to to make the purchase in the app. So the side effect of that is like the inner purchase during the the storage period is like in average six time higher than what we see on the data of new users that will each form the creator. So again, it could be kind of retargeting. It could be like existing users that some of their friends share with them or just existing users that also follow the creator. It's mainly happened in kind of bleeds campaign that we mentioned. We are like running could be like 20 creators at the same day and they run the same race, the same competition. Okay. So it's not separated by creators. It's a bit complex, but I was I just didn't know how to deal with it. So they promoted the same day at the same time. And then we can see like a blast. So Mariet, I'm super fascinated by this because you and I we've always talked about gifting, right? Like, hey, you click on the link who download the game, you get a gift, you get $5 value, whatever that is. And that's kind of a no brainer and obvious. The innovation here is that you are leveraging the influencer to bring someone into a longer engagement event. And the event has not only an in-game reward, but like you're saying an out of game reward too, like a vave did I get that right? Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Like Marian, like, is this the innovation? Like I haven't heard of this before. Like I'm done. This is the sound. Yeah. Yeah. It is really great because it plays on, you know, people's, you know, some some of strength in the sense that you have a lot of giveaways that are just like random and look based, where you're like click and maybe you have a chance to be selected. In their case, it's skill based because you play the game, the more you play better you are and the more stars you earn and the more you're at the top of that data board. And so people feel like they hold the power to actually decide of their destiny type of thing. So that's a massive difference. The problem is the rules for giveaways and contests like that vary from one country to another. Yes. So if you're doing that, please, you know, lopen your legal team because you will need to be very specific, especially in terms of wordings. I must say something here. Yeah. There is some specific country that not allowed to round give-o with tangible prizes. And we need to find like a very creative approach to overlap it. So it's really good point, very young like I highly recommend to check with your lawyers and the legal restrictions. Yeah. And then in terms of like prizes, obviously, you need to have the incentive for people to download the game, which can be an in-game item, whatever. What you translate the value of that into a currency that they understand, especially if they've never played the game before. But what Aveva is doing and what he was talking about before is like all those giveaways where you have the influencer having all their items that they want to give away, which can be related to them. I don't know if it's a cooking influencer. Maybe you have a robot. Maybe you have something else like a rice cooker, whatever that is. And they have tons of items and it's like, wow, there's a lot of things to win. I might have a chance. I don't talk about that, but I'm the one playing the game. So the more hours I put in, the more chances I have to win one of those items. And so it makes it really, really tangible because you see those items. You see that it's related to the influencer. The influencer has chosen the item themselves because they know that's going to appeal to the audience. And that makes it just more personal than, okay, let's win a hundred dollar Amazon voucher or something like that. That makes sense. Kickass live ops, Nate, kickass tools. That's where Heroic Labs comes in. They just released a massive update to their satore live ops platform. And having done my research, I can say with confidence that it's second to none. In a single product, you get everything you need, including event captured, player segmentation, feature flats, remote configuration, AB testing, experimentation, live events calendar, messaging retention, graphing analytics, and so much more. 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And then usually we like doing kind of audit to the agencies. We are reaching few agencies, kind of interviewing them. It's like in conversation, but we want to see if they check if they want to with previous mobile games, case studies. And then we start in the general progression of recording progress and stuff. In some cases, these countries provide good results and then we try again if it's provide good results at the second time. So like we are moving it to like the always on component. Israel wasn't like one of our major markets at all. We tried Israel. We tried campaigns in YouTube and Instagram. YouTube campaign provides very low CPI but very low ROI as well. Instagram campaign is the opposite with high CPI and IROI as well. So the second campaign we try only Instagram, usually YouTube is our main channel. And in Israel again, we try again, Instagram and we saw that it really works. We received very high retention and we see very good in a purchases amount. And then we like again, move it to always on model. And something that interesting about it is we have struggled at the beginning to reach the earliest influencers in Israel because they didn't knew about that. They didn't want to walk with like apps. Maybe they thought it's like suspicious or gambling or I don't know why it's not. It's not so common to publish apps in Israel. So they don't want to walk with us. They refuse. And after the fair or the full campaign, they sold the buzz around us and the so that we hire new quitos and then they reached us. Hey, I want to call out with you. Hey, I want to work with you. Yeah. So yeah, that's like the kind of positive effect about it. Awesome. So you've got always on and then you're using countries to try to unlock new areas. You also not only are you doing a country, you're doing channels within it. So you have YouTube, you have Instagram, anything with TikTok or is it mainly YouTube Instagram that you're seeing your most successful channels? Yeah, TikTok. I didn't find a way to crack it. One of the highest struggles and Merrianda would like to hear your thoughts about it as well is that they don't have like a good placement for adding link. The linky bio is not working. It's not like part of the family and they don't have the option to add a stick link like Instagram and I think it's going to be in YouTube shorts as well. So the only option to promote with TikTok is with the Spark ads, which means that you pay W pay for the influencer and you pay for the media. It's not worth it. So yeah, we are not promoting so much in TikTok. Interesting. All right. Maybe that's some feedback for our friends at TikTok. If they could only put the link into that, it would probably become a killer channel for you. I'd have to imagine. Yeah, but the thing is that then people would spend less in ads and that's not what they want, right? So yeah. So the idea with TikTok is like you work with very, very small creators like almost UGC because you don't pay for the content much and then you put the paid media behind it. But then as Avi said, you work with big TikTok creators and you're not going to be able to attribute any of the traffic coming from them. And then on top of all, you have to put media spend behind it to then be able to have a tracking link. Then it just doesn't make sense. That's why we don't really work with TikTok. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. For the performance campaigns. But the Spark ad component, I have friends at other companies that maybe not as much for influencer, but Spark ads have been really really successful. Like you said, you're not double paying in a sense. It's a good method for UGC. You feel like you work with the UGC and not something that someone that is famous. So you feel like someone really talking with you and something is a good fit for a TikTok platform. Something more for the UA team. So does your UA team do UGC and that's kind of how you divide it? Oh, okay. Got it. You guys are both nodding. Yes. On that one. I think so for people that understand really the full context, I think I've even seen influencer marketing as you pay people to create content that goes live on their own channels that reaches their own audience organically. But then you have a GC where you pay someone to create content. But then you're going to put media behind it so you know the audience that content is going to reach. Yeah. And that has been immensely successful for a number of my friends. In fact, in so many ways, were that as a content creation, everyone talks about how difficult it is to make you a content. It's actually what I think is probably what can make or break many of these game companies, the Chinese game companies for 4x games have completely just dominated the fact that they can turn out thousands and thousands of ads including UGC is really helping them to win and dominate. And so the divide here is that this is more working directly with creators who are creating their own organic content. I have a quick slide on that because I was presenting that and talking about UGC and everything here you can see those are UGC ads, right? But they take all the codes from influencer marketing directly. And so what they combine all together, it's gameplay, emotion and social proof. And so that's why you really see all those UGC ads performing really well, but at the same time it all comes from influencer marketing. So if you can work around birth together, then you have a winning strategy basically. Oh, that makes sense. Maryann, do you want to talk a little bit about, you know, we've talked in a sense, testing in the region. So what do you test and how do you think about it? Because creator and market testing can actually create some of these surprises. So for matchmasters, true crime, so verticals going back to what are the channels that work true crime creators with a female audience age 30 to 55 delivered consistently tech reviewers flopped. Despite looking like a natural fit, I actually was like, of course, they're going to flop. This is not your audience. Small and medium markets read cleaner than the US. So Maryann, can you explain a little bit about how to test verticals kind of the equivalent of what we in gaming say is a subgenre on YouTube? So talk more about that. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think it all comes down to looking at those verticals. And why are we talking about verticals is because if you look at influences individually, if in different paper, they're exactly the same two of them. So you have one performer, top performer, you find it look alike, it might not perform the same at all because there's so many things it can differ from one campaign to another, right? And so that's what's really important for you to take us back and analyze the performance on a vertical level, right? So true crime, family, gaming. But then again, in gaming, this is very broad between someone that plays the sims to someone that plays Jabra, those are not the same people, right? So you need to really classify the type of influences that you're working with and type of content that it produce. And when you go around, you know, launching your influencer campaigns and then testing it, maybe another year's, it all comes down to testing those verticals, having enough influences in each of those verticals in order together enough data to back up your decisions. So for me, usually it's at least 10 videos within a vertical and at least half a million views combined because otherwise you might have some outliers and that's going to bias your results, right? So looking into that performance and then understanding which of those verticals are showing potential versus the ones that are not basically looking into the components of the error. So CPM, how much you're paying the influences, conversion rates, how many views, how many installs are there bring per views, and then the LTV and the retention, so the quality of the users that you're acquiring. And it's really, really important to have this sort of global picture of all the influences that you've worked with within all of the verticals so you can accumulate that data and say for sure, okay, well, there's vertical that seems to be performing this one, not because we've tested 10 family channels. We had a million views and we see that the CPM is really high conversion rate. It's quite poor and also the LTV and the retention of those users is really poor, right? So there's nothing you can do versus maybe a vertical where you see a care that the CPM is on average, the LTV is really good, conversion rate is really low, right? So there's a lot of changes.
you see, okay, you don't have three alarm bells, you only have one conversion, right? So how do I improve that conversion rate? And that goes down to the techniques that much mess is using. So having giflings, having giveaways, so incentivize those users to go and download your game and play your game. Awesome. Makes sense. So, Aviv, just, you know, it was a perfect segue to you and how you're thinking about your vertical testing approach. What do you think it teaches you about gaming marketers and how to pick creators in countries and what are you testing next? Yeah, so first we have kind of a structure method. We can see it here. First, one of the key points in marketing, but especially in influencer marketing, you need to know your audience, okay, gender, age, countries, which social media channels in their relevant country that you want to promote, okay, you need to know it, which audience you want to target. I really contribute like using surveys in the app or even out of the app to get as much data as you can. And then understand what is your core audience. After that, we have our our our our audience. We need to know their interests. Okay, what they like to do in the free time. In most of the time, that's a tip. Their interests are not familiar with your product or with your app. For example, if your app is poker, it means that your audience probably like poker, but they probably like other things. Based on the interests, you need to find the verticals. Okay, as we mentioned, the verticals and like the categories that the creators provide content based on this category to be aligned with the interest. And after that, again, you need to find the best creators or the must-read event creators based on the vertical. And again, I totally agree with you. In some cases, you need to test like in bulk of five or more. And it's different from country to country. Okay, for example, true client vertical works very good in US Canada, you okay, but in Eastern Europe, we didn't provide good results with the true client creators. So it's not something mandatory. You need to try it again and again and find the vertical. And also you need to find always new verticals to test. And based on that, you can find like, like look like creators based on these interest. For example, I can give like an example. Now we are found like in some DIY or reconstruction, create all the provide very good results. So now we want to scale it. And again, as you mentioned, I personally doubt that tech reviews could be a blast because they have like the liable and their audience believe and they have like a consistent views. But it's it wasn't this after. Okay. Didn't didn't didn't provide good results at all. But we learn for that, you know, it's you don't have guaranteed to success, but you can't walk like in a method of spray and pray. I love that. And I love that you've been given the freedom to do this type of testing, you know, Mary and one of the challenges we ran into in the past is, you know, you run your first campaign and then the client is like, no, all right, we're done. Implementing marketing doesn't work. Yes. So what do you say to that bullshit? The thing is that what I try to do is even before we launched the first campaign, I'm like, this will take time and this will take budget and efforts to make it work. So if you just want to test one campaign, let's just not do it because it's not going to work. It's not going to drive the results that you want. We will get learnings and that's what you're paying for for the first few campaigns and that's what's most important, but you cannot expect it to work. So I think it's really about framing it and just like setting the right expectations. So if there's one key learning from that conversation, I think it is that you need to invest to get those learnings, learnings as as valuable as, you know, getting your AI, because if you get to that learning phase, when you optimize your campaigns next and then they become profitable, then not only you have unlocked a user acquisition channel, but on top of that, you'll see how influencer marketing impacts everything else in your growth stack as we were mentioning before, you know, abstract rankings. It helps with your other user acquisition channel by lowering your CPI. It can help you get more creatives out of the content made for influencers. It's really all as in like a holistic view of everything that it impacts not only as a as a performance channel. Yeah, I like to also say, hey, with user acquisition, you don't turn it on and it just works right away, right? Like, don't, doesn't your UA team tell you that we have to test multiple creatives? I mean, back in the day for me, we would only keep 10% or less of creatives in after a week or two weeks. You're throwing all of that work out. You're literally, it's done. It's gone. Yeah, I guess it's also like looking at the initial results. If you only look at the attributed traffic and you only look at the performance window within, I don't know, seven, 30 days, the performance looks absolutely crazy and you're like, I'm going to kill this channel right away because I'm throwing money out of the window. But it is so biased because the attributed installs are only just a small portion of what you're actually getting and the performance long lives outside of those 30 days. So you're really essentially comparing, you know, traditional UA with influencer marketing, but really not on equal grounds because those are two completely different channels. Awesome. Well, Aviv, Marianne, this was amazing. Thank you for sharing so much data, Aviv. That's why I was like, oh, somebody who wants to share data, you know, so thank you again, matchmasters, Candyvor and Marianne. This was, this has been awesome. See you guys next time. Thank you so much, Jen. Have a great day. Thank you very much. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, one small action in your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the deconstructors of fun/slack group? If you have five years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructuralfund.com/slack and apply to join. During the game's industry, best professional community field appears always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructors of fun content creators. Thanks for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Influencer marketing has evolved from a "nice-to-have" to a core pillar of mobile game growth, blending brand awareness with performance marketing.
Successful studios treat influencer campaigns as a permanent strategy, not a seasonal experiment, as cutting spend can accelerate install decline.
Influencer marketing generates organic uplift (often ~30%), boosts store rankings, and reduces CPI by filling the entire growth funnel.
Attribution requires longer windows (7 days minimum) and proxy models for organic lift, as influencer content has a long tail that yields installs and high-value users (e.g., whales) months later.
Candyvor uses a "blitz" model with giveaways, dedicated in-game assets (e.g., custom art, leaderboards), and agency partnerships to drive performance and track results.
Collaboration across product, marketing, and influencer teams is crucial to create full-funnel campaigns that convert users and unlock long-term value.
Summary:
The transcription discusses influencer marketing as a core growth channel for mobile games, emphasizing its role at the intersection of brand and performance marketing. Marion Ballonoff, an influencer marketing consultant, and Aviv, influencer marketing leader at Candyvor (studio behind Match Masters), share insights. Marion highlights that influencer marketing should be a permanent pillar, not a seasonal experiment, as cutting spend can accelerate install decline.
, 7 days) and proxy models for organic uplift, since content has a long tail that generates installs and high-value users over months or years. , custom art, leaderboards) to drive performance. They track results via internal analytics, seeing ~30% organic uplift and improved store rankings.
Aviv also emphasizes agency partnerships for non-English markets and the importance of cross-team collaboration (product, marketing, influencer) to create full-funnel campaigns. Both agree that influencer marketing reduces CPI, builds trust, and attracts warm, high-retention users, making it a growth engine that complements traditional user acquisition rather than competing with it.
FAQs
Influencer marketing sits at the intersection of performance and brand marketing, providing attributable installs and organic uplift. It should be a permanent pillar, not a seasonal experiment, as it makes other channels like UA more efficient.
Candyvor uses a blitz model where all creators go live on the same day with split tests across markets. They run always-on campaigns in key countries and test new markets, often working with local agencies for non-English markets.
Organic uplift can be around 30% on average, varying by game, audience, and country. Influencer activity creates a cycle that boosts store rankings and installs beyond direct attributed clicks.
Use at least a seven-day click window and layer a proxy model for organic uplift. Consider long-tail installs beyond 30 days, as influencer content can generate traffic for months or years.
Long-tail installs can be 50% higher at day 365 compared to day 30, and influencer content can drive high-value users like whales who convert weeks after initial exposure.
Candyvor uses hooks like winning tickets to events to force users to click links, ensuring direct attribution. They build a full product funnel with dedicated art and leaderboards to engage users.
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