SocialPeta: how Genshin Impact was promoted at the start of sales

Fiona Long — SocialPeta

In June 2019, the company miHoYo published a commercial for its new game Genshin Impact. Visually, the project turned out to be close to the blockbuster The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is not surprising that even then the game attracted attention.

The story continued this September, when the world release of the game took place. Genshin Impact not only climbed to the top of the charts, but also received wide coverage in the gaming press, which is rare for a product with free-duplex monetization.

IGN rated the game 9 points in its review, responding “an incredible open world and addictive exploration mechanics”

Of course, it didn’t stop there. More importantly, the game has performed well in terms of cash:

• in the first weeks since the release of Genshin Impact earned $60 million from the App Store and Google Play;
• the novelty took away the title of the most earning mobile game in the world from Arena of Valor (Tencent) in its very first month of sales;
• Genshin Impact is the first role—playing mobile game that earned $45 million in its first month on the American market.

Based on the experience of working on Honkai Impact 3, the miHoYo team managed to implement Genshin Impact at the highest level. But even an excellent game is not enough to rely on cool graphics and well-developed gameplay if it wants to succeed. Its launch and operation should be accompanied by high-quality advertising and a well-thought-out promotion strategy.

In this article, I will try to answer the question, thanks to which the game was able to achieve such success in a short time since its release. To do this, I will use the SocialPeta service, an advertising analytics tool. We will look at Genshin Impact marketing in three planes:

• the course of the advertising campaign (Media Buy Trends);
• promotion Channels (Advertising Channels);
• analysis of advertising creatives.

With the help of SocialPeta, we saw how traffic on iOS was bought for Genshin Impact. According to our assessment, the advertising creatives were targeted and clear to the audience (in other words, we were not talking about mislids).

1. The course of the advertising campaign: the popularity of Genshin Impact grew rapidly within the framework of a three-stage advertising campaign

The table below shows how the promotion of the game has unfolded in recent months, including in terms of the type of creatives used (for example, we see that on November 23, 48.96% of all posted creatives accounted for videos, and 37.15% for pictures).

It is easy to see significant changes in the magnitude of impressions. The bursts occurred on September 7, September 25 and November 3. All of them are somehow connected with key events in the life of the game.

• September 7 — Preparation for public beta on PC in China

The release of the Genshin Impact public beta on desktops was scheduled for September 15. This is the earliest launch among all versions. It was in connection with him that the first stage of the warming up (a week before the start) of the advertising campaign began. Most of the creatives during this week led to the mobile pre-registration page (the game is cross-platform, you can log in to the game even from consoles).

• September 28 — launch on all platforms worldwide — the number of ads has increased dramatically

Genshin Impact’s full launch on all platforms began on September 28. At the same time, the second stage of promotion started. SocialPeta recorded more than 400 types of creatives only for the iOS version of the game on this day.

• October 30 — launch of the new version — a little more advertising

The last major autumn push took place on October 30, when an update was released to Genshin Impact, expanding the main plot and adding new characters to the game. The campaign was not instantaneous. For two weeks since the release of the update, the publisher has been actively pouring traffic on the game. At the same time, the peak occurred on November 3.

Thanks to the appearance of new content, developers were able to prepare a lot of new video material aimed at promotion. So most of the creatives that fall during that period are commercials.

2. Promotion Channels: Genshin Impact went to global success relying on Google Ads and Bilibili

With the help of SocialPeta, you can segment traffic by advertising channels to see which of them had the largest number of advertising placements. And just thanks to this opportunity, you can see that the main advertising network that miHoYo used to promote Genshin Impact is Google Ads.

Facebook’s advertising tools were also actively used for placement in order to ensure a long-term and stable impact on the audience.

In China, Bilibili capabilities were used as the main channel for promoting Genshin Impact. More than 50% of creatives were placed on this video service.

This choice is explained simply. Bilibili is the largest hub in the Middle Kingdom dedicated to anime, comics and video games.

3. Analysis of advertising creatives — advertising was customized depending on the interests of the audience in different regions

One of the features of SocialPeta is also the analysis of creatives. It allows you to find any creative of interest by filtering the data. There are a lot of filters. Among them: application category, advertising network, advertising format, language, and so on.

One of the filters is also the region for which the creative was intended. We will use it just to understand how the progress was different from region to region. For example, just below you can see the advertising creatives of SocialPeta, which were intended for Japan.

It can be seen that creatives were made unique. Not only the language was taken into account, but also preferences. It is easy to conclude this by comparing the top videos between regions.

Remark: The output first shows those creatives that have collected the largest number of views.

The hottest creative in the West is the one where Amber is present, the second game character, in which it is easy to see a young, but still an adult woman.

Amber

Asian players prefer lolita. The most popular advertisement in China is featuring Kiwi, a very young zombie girl.

Kiwi

Separate creatives — giant bosses – were prepared especially for the hardcore audience.

Genshin Impact as a role-playing action movie (ARPG) just needs to have giant bosses in its bestiary. Huge tension and seemingly invincible rivals — that’s what gives such games a special charm.

Conclusion

The global success of Genshin Impact made it clear to publishers that role—playing fighters on mobile have huge potential. At the same time, its success is inseparable from how it was promoted.

To learn more about the marketing campaign of the game, you can use the SocialPeta service, which aggregates data from 73 top advertising networks in 46 countries. The total base of creatives of the tool covers 980 million items.