Espresso Publishing: “CTR as the main benchmark is losing relevance for developers of hyper-casual games”

Mini Theft Auto: Never fast enough!

• Espresso Publishing believes that a high CTR does not increase the chances of games being successful. Even reaching the level of 10% does not mean that the game will be a hit.
• In this regard, representatives of the publisher claim that CTR as the main benchmark is losing relevance for developers of hyper-casual games.
• "Now CTR is an additional metric and indicates the best features of the project, rather than its overall perception," Espresso Publishing says.
• Also, according to their assessment, a good CTR for the hypercausal genre (for tests on American Facebook) can be considered the one that is 4%.
• The publisher's representatives call the retention of the first day (R1) a key metric. It is worth testing for a better understanding of the prospects of the future project.
• At the same time, they themselves note that today two out of three test requests ask for a CPI assessment.
• But the situation with CPI is complicated. Due to the introduction of a new policy on iOS, the price for attracting a user has increased. This is especially noticeable in the cost of traffic on Google Play (for Android on Facebook, the average CPI for projects entering the Espresso Publishing platform reaches $2.5).
• The distribution of budgets between platforms has also changed. If in 2019, 64% of the advertising budgets of hyper-casual publishers were spent on iOS, now (the data is relevant for the 3rd quarter of 2021) this figure has decreased to 45%, Tenjin reports.

The situation with the distribution of advertising budgets for hyper-casual games

• Specifically, on Facebook, the CPI metric is constantly growing. Against this background, publishers are increasingly starting to use alternative sources to test products. One of them is TikTok.
• "Often the results on alternative channels look different and provide opportunities for product development or contribute to its rapid growth," Espresso Publishing says.
• As an example, they cite the case of the game Mini Theft Auto: Never fast enough!. On Facebook, the title's creatives showed a CPI of $0.89. They also demonstrated a CPI at $0.45 on TikTok. And this is not an isolated case.
• Espresso Publishing concludes from this: some projects may not pass hypercase benchmarks due to high CPM on Facebook (and, in fact, do not pass). At the same time, an additional test on alternative platforms may show that projects can pay off.
• "The business associated with publishing hyper-casual games is changing before our eyes. If earlier it was enough to do a couple of Facebook tests with well—chosen creatives to understand whether the game will fire or not, now the process is becoming more complicated at times," the representative of Tenjin sums up the whole situation.