UA Patterns

Acquire players who stay, at a sensible cost.

Methods for acquiring players for mobile games who stay and are worth what you paid. For user-acquisition managers, marketers and studio leads, the cards cover deciding who to target, making ads that work as a first impression, turning store visits into installs, choosing channels, measuring what each install is worth, and optimising spend while avoiding fraud.

48 cards · 6 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

Strategy8Is it clear who you are buying?
Creative8Are your ads showing the game at its best?
Store8Does your store page turn visits into installs?
Channels8Have you found where your players actually are?
Measure8Can you tell what each install is worth?
Optimise and Protect8Are you sure your spend is clean and working?

A few cards

Strategy

Target Player

Describe the player you want to buy by what they do and where they are, not just by age and gender.

Creative

Hook In Three Seconds

Earn attention in the first moments of an ad, before the thumb moves on.

Channels

Paid Social

Feed the algorithm good creative and clear signals, then mostly stay out of its way.

One card in full

Measure

Attribution Basics

Know how an install gets its label before you trust the label.

Every install in your dashboard carries a campaign name, but a rule chose it. Attribution hands out credit; it is not a camera recording what happened. Treat it like a referee: useful, consistent, occasionally wrong.

How to use it

Write down your rules: click and view lookback windows, which touch wins (usually the last eligible click), and how ties are broken.
Draw one typical player's journey: ad seen, ad clicked, store visit, install. Mark which touch gets credit and which vanish.
List the installs your setup cannot see: players who opted out of tracking, platforms that report only their own conversions, organic installs nudged by ads (see Organic vs Paid).
Compare totals weekly: installs claimed by all sources added together versus installs the stores report. A gap above zero means overlapping claims.
Agree which number decides, and label every report with its source.

Example

A hypothetical puzzle game sees two paid social platforms each claim 1,000 installs in a week, while your attribution provider credits them 600 and 550. Each platform counts its own touches; the provider de-duplicates. Neither is lying, they just use different rules, so you pick one for decisions and note the other.

Watch out

Last-click credit undervalues the ads that created the interest. Pair it with an Incrementality Test before cutting upper-funnel channels.
Rules shift as platforms change privacy mechanisms; read Privacy-Era Measurement and check current platform rules.

Recipes

Creative Sprint: A batch of honest ads built around different ideas, tested in a readable order, with a refresh rhythm behind them.
Is It Working?: A straight answer on whether your UA spend is buying valuable players who would not have come anyway, and when to stop what isn't.
Scale Up: A plan to grow spend from a working campaign without breaking it, with a ceiling, a pace and a monthly look back.
Soft Launch Plan: A soft launch with a named player, chosen markets, early signals and written gates for when to spend big.
Store Makeover: A store page that tells one story, with a tested icon, first screenshots that sell and versions for each key market.

Missions

Plan a UA test: from "we need installs" to a first campaign plan with target player, channel, creative concepts, budget, kill rules and the metrics that decide what's next.
Review a campaign: from a spreadsheet of campaign numbers to a clear verdict per campaign (scale, fix or kill), with the reasons and the next test.

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