Do any hypercasual gaming companies buy exclusively from Facebook and forego install attribution?

Question

If a studio only ran ads on Facebook, they'd know (via Ads Manager) how much they are paying for installs, and if they only ran MAI campaigns, they wouldn't need to unify ad revenue data with acquisition (cost) data at the user level.

Do any hypercasual gaming companies run exclusively on Facebook and forego install attribution through an MMP vendor?

Answer 1

It doesn't make a big sense to work only with Facebook as your main goal is to drive volume. Applovin and Ironsource could provide you with more installs than Facebook even in US.  

 

Comments

Interesting. What percentage of spend do you think FB represents for most HC publishers? For casual and especially core games, FB is generally 50-60% of spend.

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It could be only around 30% for hypercasual advertisers.
From one side Ironsource and Applovin have both their own mediation, their own game publishing departments, and hypercasual games were there main driver of growth in last 1-2 years. About 70% of hypercasual inventory was sold to other hypercasual advertisers in 2019 based on Ironsource data and I think that this number is only growing in 2020.
From another side TikTok and Snap are doing great job, as these platforms are great to show snackable and youtubable content like HC game.

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I actually know some hypercasual publishers that go without FB altogether because it's too expensive and targeting isn't as necessary.

Answer 2

There's definitely a lot more spend on networks outside of Facebook than in other genres primarily because the targeted audience is much broader and FB is relatively expensive.

The other primary issue is that you still need a way to associate the ad revenue that comes from a hypercasual game to the channel.

Answer 3

That's a really good question.

If a company ONLY uses Facebook, the additioinal costs for an attribution solution doesn't really make sense in my opinion. There is no deduplication amongst various vendors to be made, and most of the services and features offered by an MMP would likely not be useful for a company at a phase where only facebook is enough / meeting your scale needs.

Up to a certain scale, a company should be able to reach their target effective cost per install via Facebook. At some point, upon scaling, you may notice that you are unable to meet your scaling needs at the same CPIs.

That is usually a good time to setup an attribution solution and bring on Google as a 2nd provider.

The moment you have more than 1 provider, it is highly recommended that you will have a neutral attribution provider, if only to differentiate the overlap the platforms will have.

The attribution companies will sometimes have a 5-50% discrepancy between their count and the count of the self reporting platforms.

This not because they have a bad platform - the contrary. This is because the amount of overlappinig attribution the large platforms have over one another due to their reach is very high.