There is no question that mobile is taking over social gaming. The data in Social Casino Intelligence’s Social Casino Tracker for Q2 2014 is opening the eyes of the industry: “Social casino revenues generated on mobile (iOS and Android) accounted for 51% of the total market this quarter vs. 38% in the prior year period.” For the first time ever, mobile revenues across the social gaming vertical surpass those from laptops and desktops.
There was also no growth on the Facebook/web front for social casino in this quarter. “Facebook/web revenues were flat q/q (Facebook’s total web game business reported as ‘payment & other fees’ declined -1% q/q),” according to the Social Casino Tracker (SCT) for Q2.At Income Access, we know mobile, having been in the space since 2008, when we started working with brands like mFortune Mobile Casino. As these mobile games were all browser based, the Income Access technology could track activity much as it did with desktop – using cookies to attribute the referring source (via site ID and banner ID). This allowed campaigns to be tracked across smartphones, Blackberrys and even primitive WAP devices.
The present mobile landscape looks much different than it did in 2008. Today, top-tier real-money gaming (RMG) and social casino brands rely on native apps on smartphones to grow their user base, as well as to increase engagement and retention rates.
The goal is to provide players with the opportunity to play and deposit on their phones while out at the pub watching the game with friends or on their daily commute. “BSkyB said the growth in revenue during the past 12 months was driven by a jump in mobile usage, with the number of customers using the operator’s mobile service increasing 29% on last year,” according to a recent article in iGaming Business.The market shows no signs of slowing down, with mobile usage rising steadily in each new report released: the SCT estimates that “the global social casino game market grew +9% q/q in Q2 2014…driven by +17% q/q growth in mobile revenue”. It’s no longer a question of whether mobile will overtake desktop usage – it’s a question of when.
With the majority of RMG and social products available on apps, our team wanted to make sure clients did not lose the ability to attribute referring sources (whether it be through the affiliate channel, media buys, PPC campaigns, email campaigns, etc.). Cookies cannot be read through native apps.
To accommodate growing demand for native app tracking, special SDKs have been developed, like ours, which have the ability to track mobile app installs & in-app player activity, including registrations, deposits and play on iOS and Android devices. Income Access clients are now implementing the SDK in tandem with our Ad Serving technology to fully track, monitor, analyse and optimise all acquisition campaigns through one convenient location, across mobile, web and offline as well.
If you’d like to learn how you can gain more transparency on the performance of your mobile app acquisition campaigns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
