MASA CGO Warren Woodward, CTO Mike Haze, and Marketing Director Xander Agosta unveil MASA’s new Game Growth Platform to the world. We start with an overview of what MASA is and who our hosts are before diving into this new Game Growth Platform and its core components – including a predictive buying model with an iOS buying solution; automated performance reports for mobile, PC, and web3; creative development and management tools, and a community growth module.

Want to get onto the platform? Reach out to us!

Full Webinar Summary

Introduction to MASA

  • We grow games
  • Host introductions
  • What is MASA?
  • MASA’s proven track record

Introduction to the Platform

  • We set out to automate the solutions at scale
  • Our platform empowers your team to make smarter marketing decisions
  • We’re not a data piper, but we are a “dream product” of growth marketing tools
  • Core tools include:
    • Predictive buying model with iOS buying solution
    • Automated performance reports for mobile, PC, and Web3
    • Creative tools and creative workflow management
    • Community growth measurement for Discord and Twitter
    • App store page rank tracking and optimization

The Buying Model

  • Profitability goals with other tools were too static and broad
  • We wanted a tool that would allow us to drill down into player segments and see specific LTV curves and monetization trends to understand per-segment profitability goals.
  • We build the Buying Model with this functionality in mind.
  • This has allowed us to drive more profit for games by going after more disparate pools of traffic, such as low-quality pools or whale-driven pools, and understand what we need to hit for profitability. It provides more coverage and accuracy for attaining users profitably.
  • You can also add an Organic Uplift effect to the model.
  • The buying model is dynamic and parses vast amounts of data from any disparate sources you want to provide accurate results that can be compared to each other.
  • You don’t need a specific data stack to power these tools. You can use mobile, PC, or web3 games, any MMP you want, and any custom data sources (such as internal databases).

Performance Analytics

  • Filter by various factors – such as channel, campaign, ad group, region, date range, etc.
  • Easy to see how your high-level performance and cohorts are maturing.
  • It only takes a second to see if something is going wrong somewhere and to drill down further and find out what is causing the problem.
  • We try to take complex problems and simplify them for our own mental bandwidth. There is a lot of complexity on the backend, but on the frontend you know from a glance what’s good and bad.
  • After the release of ATT and SKAN, we saw a lot of channels going into the red on iOS. So we built a solution for this.
  • For iOS, we go beyond just showing data in interesting ways and do some really cool prediction modeling. This can be turned on or off at the click of a button.
  • We model out LTV – not just D1-D7. This is something that largely sets us apart from current MMPs.
  • We use ML logic to model back in missing revenue from users on a per-segment basis.
  • We are UA plumbers doing work day-to-day. This isn’t a theoretical concept, we are using this daily to operate our own UA and understand iOS channels.
  • Dirty secret: It’s cheap to do iOS UA right now. You just need a viable methodology.
  • We’ll continue to iterate on this, but it’s been battle-tested and we spend 2x on iOS vs. Android, and generally with much higher margins of profitability.

Budget Management Dashboard

  • Simple but effective tool. See what your monthly budget is set to, who the big spenders are, what you’ll end the month with based on current trends, etc.
  • Use to easily discuss with teammates about optimizing budget, reallocating dollars, managing funds, etc.

Creative Development & Management Tools

  • At a high level, this is a lifecycle management tool and lightweight DAM (Digital Asset Management).
  • It keeps people on the same page regarding new assets, what’s coming up, what’s going to factor into campaigns, etc.
  • It can also be combined with our UA tools to help more easily see what creative concepts are working.
  • You can set up email and/or Slack notifications for creative requests or updates.
  • Creatives can be easily tagged, assigned, viewed, rejected, downloaded, etc.
  • We built this because there aren’t really any DAMs on the market built with growth marketing and performance marketing in mind.
  • We also needed a place where our team, third-party teams, clients, et al could all work and collaborate in a single place and see and access everything together.
  • You can easily track a creative from concept to end-of-life in an easy workflow, with easy deployment, and with everyone working together in one place.

Community Growth Module

  • We built this not because we wanted to, but because we had to because our team was early in web3 marketing – which differs in many ways to traditional web and mobile marketing.
  • There are two components to this: An MASA Discord bot, which is easy to install and pulls your analytics data from Discord over to the Growth Module dashboard. Then there is the Growth Module toolset itself.
  • You can see stats like community lifespan, user count, daily re-engagements, etc.
  • You can also segment data by roles, geo, language, etc.
  • You can list partners in the Growth Module and build specialized tracking links for them to use. This allows you to see which partners are performing well and which are underperforming. You can even see where the codes were individually used.
  • You can break down data by campaigns to see where engagement is most coming from and even compare campaigns against one another.
  • We’re also building a Twitter toolset – though it’s not as robust as our Discord toolset at the moment.

Why are we releasing this product now?

  • Historically we haven’t been able to support small teams. Our team is made up of senior growth marketing and creative experts who typically go in and do all the work for a client. And it’s not cheap.
  • We’ve had to say “no” to some really awesome potential clients, like small indie studios, because it just didn’t make sense for them to use or pay for our standard services.
  • It’s been a big vision of ours to productize the tactics and tools we’ve found success with and make it available at a lower price-point so that teams of all sizes can use them.

Questions

  • Is the MASA Platform best suited for apps that monetize via in-app purchases? What about ad-monetization or subscription-based apps?
    • Ad monetization is factored into our models along with in-app purchases.
    • We have subscription-based apps in our portfolio already. Subscription models are actually easier to do because there are typically fewer purchase points.
    • The MASA Platform can be used for all apps – not just games. Some of our current clients are finding success for their non-gaming apps on the platform.
  • Does the MASA Platform work with non-mobile games?
    • Absolutely. All we need is your data. If we can get the data, you can use the platform effectively. We even offer cross-platform game tools.
  • Does the MASA Platform use SKAN conversion values?
    • At a high level, currently the platform doesn’t leverage it very much. We built our model very early on before MMPs and others had solutions. So we built a simple and clean solution of our own, which is now utilized effectively in our predictive buying model. The industry is still trying to figure out how to use conversion models, but our own model is working very well for our needs.
    • We also want our tools to be adaptable – so we lean on simplicity in design whenever we can so anyone can use them with any data stack, skillset, or team. So we intentionally designed our product so people wouldn’t have to build complex models or have a deep understanding of SKAN to use it.
  • What is the pricing for your platform or services?
    • If you’re interested in our platform or services, please reach out to us to discuss one-on-one. That said, we want to expand our pool of customers and we want everyone to be able to have access to this, so we believe the price-point for our self-serve platform is very compelling.
    • We also want to open this up so people can provide feedback and we can continue to iterate. It’s very different when you’re using these tools internally and with closed partners, than when you open it up for everyone to use. (Candidly, the price is probably too low at this point and will likely go up in time.)

Final Thoughts

 

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