Promotion

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Promotion helps you attract more users to the game. This has a positive effect on the generated revenue, which is directly linked to the game's popularity and the number of online game sessions.

On the Yandex Games platform, games are promoted through featuring and ranking.

Catalog sections

When games are placed in certain sections of the Yandex Games catalog, this contributes to their promotion.

These sections do not rank the games in the order they were added, but based on a variety of metrics. As a result, the most popular games show up at the very top.

New

The section where new games are featured once, upon the first publication. They stay there for a week.

Note

  • To have your game featured in this section, create a new project and place it in draft with a new ID.

  • Republishing with the same ID is considered an update to the game. In this case, the game will not appear in the New section.

  • According to the rules of the Yandex Games platform, it is prohibited to:

    • Upload a completely different game as an update (section 1.24).
    • Duplicate a game, meaning placing it in another draft to have it appear again in the New section (section 3.6).

The New section helps our machine learning (ML) algorithms learn which audiences would enjoy the game the most. It is essentially a gateway to gaining a large volume of traffic and helps gauge how successful a newly published game will become.

The main purpose of the recommendation system is to bring the user to a game that they will enjoy and whose key metrics (play time, ARPU, retention rate, etc.) are above the average across the service. This ensures that the average quality of games selected by players will continue to grow.

How the recommendation system works

The recommendation system reviews every new game by displaying it multiple times to various users and then judging its performance across metrics.

All games on the chart are divided into three groups based on their quality and user metrics:

🔴 Red games quickly lose traffic after placement because they have low ARPU and average play time per user. These games usually suffer from optimization issues, offer little content, and don't have updates or gameplay mechanics for user retention.

🟡 Yellow games find their audience of players and generate much more traffic. Upon reaching a certain number of players, these games can retain it over a long period of time.

🟢 Green games are those with better-than-average metrics. They grow their audience and often become hits. Typically, these games have an active development team that regularly adds new content and works on user motivation and retention.

Based on these charts, we can draw the following conclusions:

  • Featuring in the New category generates less than 30% of the traffic.
  • Most of the traffic comes from the recommendation system.

The charts show that the recommendation system needs just a single week to evaluate the quality of a game and its target audience. If the game has good metrics, the system will increase traffic to it. But if the metrics are poor, the traffic will be decreased.

Games with low play metrics hurt user experience, because they stand in the way between players and truly thought-out products. To prevent this, games that do not meet the requirements are hidden from the catalog. Make quality games that users will enjoy, and the recommendation system will try to drive as many new players your way as possible.

Note

If your game stops generating traffic after being removed from the New section, you should probably think of ways to improve it.

A section for additional promotion of promising games. Games are included in it on a selective basis, with good metrics being the main criterion. To suggest your game for the Popular section, write to the support chat.

Note

This section has its own metrics in addition to the general ones.

The Popular section is the same for all users within the same environment but varies for:

  • Desktops
  • Mobile devices
  • Different countries

It updates once a day.

Promotion recommendations

  • Consider your target audience and what game mechanics would attract them.

  • On the Draft tab, fully complete all fields so that the scale at the top turns green for each language.

  • Prepare high-quality and eye-catching promo materials (images and videos) for your game draft.

  • Provide localization:

    • Fill out the game draft in Russian and English.
    • If possible, add a draft in Turkish.
    • On the Countries and regions tab, make sure that the game distribution is not restricted. The international audience accounts for about 15% of the traffic.

  • Adapt the game for different platforms — in particular, for Android OS mobile devices, since they generate the most traffic. In the draft, check the corresponding options under Supported platforms.

  • Enable sticky banners in the game draft, because this ad format brings the most revenue.

  • Make sure that all ad units in the game are called correctly and not too often.

  • Regularly update the mechanics that retain players and increase game session time. For example, create new and exciting levels, run promos and contests, or add new in-game paid features.

Additional promotion

If you want to earn extra revenue from attracting users to your game, sign up for the Yandex Games referral program.

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