Google Tutorial: Guide to launching your game
Launch Your Game with Google
Maximize the impact of your launch with platforms that reach billions of players around the globe.
Overview
There are many factors across product and marketing that weave together to determine the success of a game. You need more than a distinct concept or stunning game design– a strong go-to-market strategy is vital. Most critically, you need the ability to find more of your most valuable players.
Google can help you to reach more valuable gamers globally, from capturing early results pre-launch to growing your user base and revenue quickly and effectively. This guide will showcase powerful tools and solutions to help you launch your game successfully and supercharge your game’s growth.
The Steps to Success
1. Establish technical readiness with Firebase SDK
The Google Analytics suite houses a multitude of useful features for game developers and marketers alike. Google Analytics for Firebase SDK provides all the first-party data that you need to understand, segment, and engage players in-app.
Powered by the GA4F SDK, Google Analytics conversions provide rich data for App campaigns’ machine learning algorithm to improve performance. Unlock features like Target ROAS bidding which lets you dynamically pay more for users likely to spend more and pay less for users likely to spend less.
On average, gaming advertisers see an 18.5% increase in installs, and a 27% uplift in post-install events!
2. Set a goal to match your business objective
Your goals set the foundation for your Google App Campaign strategy; whether your focus is on driving as many installs as possible or capturing the highest value users, app campaigns can be adapted to suit your business needs.
With over 1B users globally, App campaigns’ machine learning algorithm combines millions of user signal combinations with customer data to build a predictive learning model, and bid and target for users depending on advertiser goals.
3. Choose the right bidding strategy for your goals
One of the most common mistakes developers make during launch is the lack of bidding strategy alignment to business goals. Once your goals are established, it is time to choose a bidding strategy that will help you achieve those goals.
4. Make a winning bid and budget strategy
Your bid will be a deciding factor in determining your competitiveness, while your bid to budget ratio will determine the stability of your campaigns.
Google recommends a minimum of 10 unique user events per day, or 50 installs per day for install campaigns. This will help to ensure that our bidding models have the volume of data needed to optimize towards your campaign’s goal. Naturally, the more data Google captures, the more effective your campaign will be.
In soft launch, we’d recommend bidding approx ~20% lower than your expected bids (based on internal studies on performance). However moving towards global launch, ensure you are applying the most competitive bids to access all Google inventory and users.
5. Build Creatives for launch
The creatives you launch with can make or break your campaign. Among other considerations, it’s important to ensure comprehensive asset coverage while splitting ad-groups thematically.
Your assets are the core ingredients of your ad-groups, so it’s important to know the fundamental requirements of each.
Headlines
Add up to 5 headlines using 30 characters or less for each.
Descriptions
Add up to 5 descriptions using 90 characters or less for each.
Videos
Videos must be hosted on YouTube, orientations can be landscape, portrait, or square. Aim to maximize dimension coverage and the number of videos per ad group (20) for the best performance.
If you don’t have videos to add, Google Ads may make a video ad for you using assets from your app store listing
Images
Upload images as .jpg or .png with a maximum size of 5MB:
HTML5
Upload HTML5 as .zip with a maximum size of 1MB and no more than 40 files
To validate your HTML5 assets before uploading, run your .zip file through the HTML5 Validator tool.
HTML5 sizes currently accepted include:
480×320 (landscape interstitial, variable size)
320×480 (portrait interstitial, variable size)
Become an expert on creative strategy for App Campaigns here, and learn how to make better creative assets here.
Get in Touch
Google Ads experts are available to provide free help with creating your new account. Plus, we can assist with setting up your first campaign at no extra cost.
Get more info and help with setting up your account here.
