Sergey Grytsuk

This Q&A was conducted when Sergey was a Lead UA Manager at Playrix. Currently, Sergey is a Chief Marketing Officer at Zephyr Mobile.

Sergey is a mobile marketing expert with six years of experience in the field. He started his career as a developer in a small outsourcing company in Ukraine. After several years as a developer, Sergey became the product owner at a German DSP and SSP. During this time he discovered his passion for ad tech, prompting his move to Lead User Acquisition Manager at Playrix.

In your own words, tell us about the app that you manage?

I mostly manage casual match 3 games with their own stories. Homescapes and Gardenscapes are almost identical on the backend but have different match 3 mechanics and designs.

How did you get started in mobile marketing?

I started as a product owner in a small German startup. After a period of time, the stakeholders started an internal media buying team, which I was given the responsibility to manage. With increased exposure, advertising technology became an important part of my life and changed my career to what it is today.

What do you like most about mobile marketing?

You can feel and calculate your impact. It’s really necessary to understand that what you are doing is beneficial for the team and company as a whole.

What does it take to succeed in mobile marketing?

A creative mind and knowledge (with access to a lot of data).

What does a quality mobile user look like to you?

I’m always looking at ROAS. If we are hitting our ROAS goals per campaign, it means that users are good. If not, it means that we are buying irrelevant audiences. Users can play a lot and be very loyal, but some will never pay, so we really like to focus on ROAS.

What strategies work best to convert installs into engaged users?

This is more of a question for development, but from my perspective, we are testing many different incentivization strategies: discounts, paywalls, etc.

In marketing, we are doing a little bit of retargeting and trying to test how these actions will influence our main campaigns and previous cohorts.

In the past year, what is one tip you can share which made the biggest performance difference with UA or re-engagement of your app?

We see a big impact from programmatic buying on our UA. It seems that this field is growing and several top publishers are moving in this direction.

How do you stay ahead of changes in technology?

When UA is your job, you will always need to stay ahead of changes in technology. It’s because we are testing many new things and doing so much data analysis. It helps us understand what will help our campaigns, what suits us best, and what will be the next big thing in the industry.

What do you see as the next big thing in mobile app marketing?

I think “header bidding” is the next big thing in mobile marketing. And from what I see, it looks like the market is ready for it.

What advice can you offer to help marketers combat mobile ad fraud?

It’s a very complex question. In Playrix we are very vigilant regarding ad fraud. We try to analyze the data ASAP, especially when we are testing a new channel and understanding whether all fraud metrics are ok or not. If you want to prevent ad fraud, look at the data as soon as possible.