At Social.com, we are proud to have many diverse advertisers working with us to create industry-leading advertising campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and beyond. In this first post in a series, I interviewed Noga Halperin, Director of Marketing at Playtika, about her work and suggestions for advertisers and marketers who are newer to social ads. 

What is your company and role?

I work for Playtika, which is the largest social casino company in the world. We are based in Israel, and were acquired by Caesars about four years ago to be their social games unit. As a part of Caesars, we focus on developing games that are play-for-fun and not real-money play [which provide the ability for users to “cash out” like a traditional casino].

I am the Director of Marketing for Slotomania, which is our flagship product.

Slotomania is a social slots app that has been in the top charts across all apps consecutively for the past four years, and we continue to grow it every year. People have said that games are very trend-driven, but Slotomania shows that a great game has real staying power. 

Besides Slotomania we also have additional products such as Bingo Blitz (the number one social Bingo app), Caesar Casino, House of Fun, and W.S.O.P.

What roles do the other people on your team fill?

On my team, we have people who directly run specific channels, including campaigns on Salesforce Social.com. We also have a separate team for campaigns on third party ad networks.

How do you use social advertising at Playtika?

We buy a lot of social advertising; Facebook is a very important channel for us. We have a version of Slotomania on the iOS, Android, and Amazon app stores, and we advertise for all three stores on Facebook. Additionally, we have a Facebook Canvas App version of our game that we also advertise.

Facebook works for us because it shows great ROI and we can very effectively target specific audiences. We run three different types of campaigns. First, we do user acquisition campaigns. Second, we do user reengagement campaigns. Third, we have 15 million people following our fan page, and we boost fan posts to reach more of that huge audience.

How do you decide where to put your advertising resources?

For the user acquisition ads and reengagement ads, we focus entirely on the lifetime value of the users that come to the game. All of our advertising budget is determined by ROI. At the start of the month we allocated budget based on the last month’s ROI, and we measure.  If the ROI trends change, we reallocate budget.  Without being too specific, Facebook gets a “nice share” of the budget because it can deliver high volume and its ROI is usually good. 

When you say ROI, how do you show success, and what are the key metrics you care about?

We focus solely on the amount our users spend within the app (their lifetime value or LTV); we monetize by entirely through in-app purchases.

What advice would you like to give to someone who’s newer at social advertising than you are to improve?

There’s a whole list of things that each make a big difference. These include:

•        Make sure that you can measure every activity. 
•        Run lots of different tests, and be confident in how you attribute installs and post-install events to the correct sources. 
•        Carefully define your KPIs (key performance indicators), and optimize all of your activity by those KPIs.
•        Start slowly and ramp up your advertising spend as you test.
•        Don’t put your entire budget behind a single ad type or channel; both can be very seasonal, and can change a lot over the course of a quarter.
•        For Facebook ads, there are a lot of algorithm changes that cause large but short-term changes in your performance.
•        Make sure that your backend developers know how to evaluate the LTV of the user, and bid for ads based on that. We use a MMP (mobile measurement platform), but the really important deep calculations are being done on our side, by our great and very robust BI team.

That was a great list! What do you think are the key differences between the social casino space and casual gaming space?

Social casino games are a niche within the larger social gaming space. Social gaming overall has a lot more targeting options than we do, which is an advantage. However, social casino games monetize better, so we can bid more per user in our Facebook campaigns. 

Beyond Playtika, what is another brand’s advertising, or specific advertiser do you really admire?

I love the ads Supercell runs for Clash of Clans, especially the commercial they put on the Super Bowl. They manage to reflect the game in their ads in a perfect way, and with a great sense of humor. 

Outside of social gaming, there’s a new company, EatWith. EatWith allows a host to invite a group of 10-15 people who don’t know each other or the host to a dinner. The guests have the opportunity to mingle with each other and it’s a way for people to use food to connect and break the ice. In terms of advertising, they always upload really nice pictures from the meals and share great facts about the people who host at their house. 

What’s one thing we wouldn’t be able to learn about you from your LinkedIn profile? 

I’m a really passionate photographer. I love to travel and take pictures; I traveled in exotic countries such as Georgia, China, and all over Africa. I have two kids. 

That sounds great! Can I use one of your photos for this post?

Sure!

Social.com would like to thank Noga for participating in our inaugural post in a series highlighting our clients and their success.  You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter, or check out Slotomania on iOS and Android. 

For more information about Social.com and how we help mobile advertisers drive installs for casual gaming as well as social casino games, check out this creative optimization case study with SGN.