How To Lower Your Game's Advertising Costs with Conversion API

As you want to get more advanced, there are different kinds of events you can send to the conversion API beyond just the conversion. Now each CAPI has its own set of events that it uses.

For example:

• Facebook: AddPaymentInfo, AddToCart, AddToWishlist, CompleteRegistration, Contact, CustomizeProduct, Donate, FindLocation, InitiateCheckout, Lead, Purchase, Schedule, Search, StartTrial, SubmitApplication, Subscribe, ViewContent
• Reddit: Page Visit, View Content, Search, Add To Cart, Add To Wishlist, Purchase, Lead

All of those are standard events the specific API has built in. But you can add your own custom events as well. Now here is where we can start to get a little bit advanced with the API. Sending events like PageVisit are good for retargeting (we will cover that later), but installs are always the main metric to focus on, especially for Free To Play Games.

Training the CAPI

These events allow you to train the CAPI by sending it data for every person that installs the game—it will show your ad to more people who are likely to install. A step further is targeting people that are likely to retain. In turn, the ad platform will then start to send you more people that exhibit the actions that you're sending back.

For Free2Play Games, in marketing we do something called Whale Hunting, where a tiny percentage of the users make up the vast majority of revenue. We care about acquiring those users, so we can train the CAPI not just on the install but with Custom Events on how long the user retains for (Day 7, Day 15, etc). This is how you can improve your ROAS.

Re-Targeting

Another important function the CAPI helps with is re-targeting. Notice that all CAPIs have the standard events for viewing content. When advertising, a person might be interested in the product but not ready to purchase. So people do their research.

They look at the reviews of user players, visit the website, check out their social media, read the wiki and everything else about the game. Side note: we've built wikis for games and found that people spend an average of 9 minutes and 40 seconds on a wiki. So to help your game's chances of conversions, it can be beneficial to put together content around your game so people can research and influence their purchase decision.

As they are researching it, this data can be sent back to the CAPI, which then lets it know to retarget a user that has shown interest but has not yet made a conversion.