How to Promote a Game in VK Play

VK Play is a platform for gamers, developers and creators, which today is the only analogue of Steam in Russia. In the previous article, we gave information how to place your game in the VK Play catalogue.

After the game has passed successful moderation and got into the VK Play catalogue, it is important to take care of its promotion not only among users of the platform, but also among Russian-speaking players around the world. These can be both the tools of the platform itself and standard digital marketing channels. Let's consider each of them in more detail.

Collections of Direct Games and Web Platforms

Free user engagement methods are available through collections for all games in the catalogue. Some of the collections are compiled by VKontakte editors at the request of developers, and some are formed by algorithms.

Thematic collections

Collections dedicated to holidays or seasonal events are formed in catalogues on the Web Platform and on the Direct Games mobile platform. There catalogue editors collect games that have prepared major updates for these dates.

Source: VK instructions for developers.

Sale day

This is a sale in the catalogues of the Web Platform and Direct Games. VK Play announces the exact dates of the sale in advance in the community for game developers. During the sale, the games that take part in it, offer players discounts on in-game goods, and VKontakte gives wide coverage of the sale within the catalogue and gaming communities, as well as raffle votes between all users who will make purchases in games these days.

Genre categories

Categories combine games of the same genre.

Fee-based collections

You can place your game for a fee in the Recommended Games advertising collection and in the banner carousel. These ads have a limit of up to 100 impressions per user. You can launch ads and set up placing in the VKontakte advertising account or through the RMAA Game Marketing agency.

Source: VK instructions for developers.

In addition to those collections listed above, the catalogue contains other collections formed separately for mobile and PC games.

Game Mechanics

Through the use of game mechanics, you will give users the opportunity to invite each other to games, ask for help, please with gifts, share important experiences on the wall and fill the activity feed with achieved levels, earned points and completed missions.

Messages from the game

Sending personal messages is a great way to convey important personal information about gaming events to a user. The messages should contain relevant and valuable information with a game context. In this case, users will not be annoyed when they receive the message and probability of launching the game will be higher.

Messages are sent to users on behalf of the official community of the game.

Adding to the menu

Adding to the menu is an important element of long-term user retention, which directly affects the retention of players. The left menu on the website desktop version is the second largest source of launching games after the Games section.

Notifications

Attract your regular users to the game or return inactive ones using notifications. The user will receive a push notification and an alert in the "bell".

Friends' activity feed

Friends Activity feed allows you to learn about the player's success and progress in games. The feed is filled with levels, points and missions and does not require additional actions or confirmations from the player.

Invitations

Invitations are one of the most common methods of social interaction and direct communication with friends. Invitations allow you to involve friends in the game to cooperate or compete with each other.

The invitation to the game is displayed in the user's catalogue on vk.com or in a mobile application and is accompanied by a standard black notification window or push notification from the VKontakte mobile application, if the user has not banned notifications.

Paid Promotion

VK advertising cabinet provides various opportunities to place targeted for promotion of PC and mobile games. We have already talked in detail about the formats of game promotion on VK in our articles several times. Here we will take a closer look on targeting and target audience selection.

VKontakte has more than 20 types of targeting available: from the simplest ones like gender, age, geography and interests to fine-tuning. For example, the types of devices from which users access the network.

In our experience, the most optimal targets for promotion of games in VK are:

• Interests and behavior: Computer games. Thus, your ads will be seen by users who have recently been interested in VKontakte games, visited thematic communities and external sites.
• Subscribers of communities of games of a similar genre (your competitors). You will attract users to the game who are already passionate about similar gameplay.
• Key phrases. This is an audience with an already formed demand for a specific game. The main thing is to choose the appropriate queries.
• Retargeting audience. The advertisement will be shown to a list of users who are already familiar with your games: have visited your website, left their contacts and are in your CRM or have already seen your advertisement.

We recommend running separate ads for each target and monitoring the results. At the same time, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of advertising not only and not so much by CPI, but by further user activity in the game.

RMAA Game Marketing specialists will assist you to select targets, choose advertising formats, set up and launch paid promotion of your game on VK.

The article uses materials from the VK instructions for developers.

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