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Pocket Gamer Connects, the leading international conference series for the global games industry is coming back to London on January 20th and 21st, 2025.
This must-attend event will unite more than 2,750 industry professionals for two days of learning, pitching and networking. Attendees will dive into 20 expertly curated conference tracks exploring the latest trends and opportunities in mobile, PC, console, web3, AI and beyond.
Joining the world-class line-up of speakers is Sarah Lafferty, business development manager with AppLovin. With over five years of experience in mobile marketing, Lafferty is now helping ensure optimal outcomes for AppLovin clients around the world.
Pocketgamer.biz: Tell us a little about yourself
Sarah Lafferty: I am a Manager on AppLovin’s business development team, based in Berlin, Germany. AppLovin makes technologies that help businesses of every size connect to their ideal customers. Having accumulated more than five years of experience in the mobile marketing industry, I’m now focusing my expertise on collaborating with app developers to optimise the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. I believe I’m quite adept at measuring campaign performance and implementing AppLovin’s solutions to deliver optimal outcomes for clients.
What are you speaking about at PocketGamer Connects London 2025?
How User Acquisition Is Evolving in 2025
User acquisition took a beating in the games industry, but now publishers are adapting to the new normal with emerging technologies and creative strategies. Our panel of experts explore how AI is impacting UA, the best-performing ad networks and platforms, and why it’s not all about performance marketing.
As it says on the tin, it aims to explore how UA is changing in 2025 and beyond with technologies like AI and new strategies.
Where are the next big opportunities in the mobile games market?
Hybrid monetisation – earning revenue through both IAPs and ads – remains a big opportunity available to the market. While this approach isn’t new, personalizing the entire funnel, from user acquisition to the in-app experience, is still an underutilised strategy for most advertisers With recent upgrades to user-optimised campaigns, advertisers can now customise every stage of the customer lifecycle. This includes choosing the campaign type to acquire users, selecting KPIs to measure ROI, and crafting the in-app experience. For example, an IAP-focused campaign might target high-CPI users with greater lifetime value and longer payback windows, offering them a lighter ad experience in-app. In contrast, an AdROAS campaign may aim for lower-CPI users who are expected to monetise more quickly and encounter in-app ads earlier. By tailoring the lifecycle from acquisition to engagement, advertisers can effectively monetise a broader range of users while delivering a more appropriate in-app experience, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.
What’s the most important key performance indicator (KPI) for you – and why?
It’s not easy to pick just one KPI to focus on, as several metrics feed into the overall bigger picture. But I would say one of the key metrics to take into account is ROAS. Not just absolute ROAS values but also the growth rates/maturation you see week-over-week/month-over-month on that ROAS. Campaigns that have longer maturation curves, for instance, require advertisers to adjust their prediction models and alter how they look at performance.
In the last few months, AppLovin has launched D28 ROAS campaigns, and part of that launch has involved an evolution of how we, together with our partners analyse data. The shift in focus from relying solely on early absolute retention and ROAS values to looking at the long-term growth curves per campaign type has been key to growth. Using this strategy partners have been able to drastically increase their scale while attaining users with stronger longer-term growth curves.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this and the only way to find what works best for your app is constant innovation, testing, and adapting to user feedback.”
Sarah Lafferty
What is the single biggest challenge facing the mobile games industry today?
Finding the balance between monetisation and user experience is arguably one of the biggest challenges at the moment. Over the last few years, we have seen a shift in focus from purely ad-driven hypercasual apps to hybrid monetisation models. We are also seeing more ad placements being added to what were once purely IAP-driven apps. One of the biggest challenges for gaming companies is finding that delicate balance of monetising their apps in an effective manner, while still providing an enjoyable user experience, that keeps their users engaged and retained. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this and the only way to find what works best for your app is constant innovation, testing, and adapting to user feedback.
What do you enjoy most about working in the mobile games industry?
The pace and agility at which it moves. There are very few industries where you get to see a business grow from an idea to a household name at the speed that mobile games can. In other industries minor decisions can take months, if not years, of discussion before they are implemented. In the mobile games Industry, companies tend to be much less siloed, with employees at all levels, being empowered to make data-driven decisions that can grow their businesses. This level of efficiency can provide them with an edge over competitors and allow them to react in a timely manner to major industry disruptions.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received that you can pass on to others
Focus on your app and your users and the metrics will follow. Working at an ad network, I often see advertisers trying to compare themselves with competitor’s KPIs. While having some benchmark to measure yourself against can be useful in early testing, in a user-level optimised world, these comparisons become less and less useful in the long run. What really becomes key are the users you’re acquiring for your app and the experience they are having in your app. If the right users are being acquired into an app where they can have a positive experience, then ROAS, retention, etc will follow.
Can people get in touch with you at the event? What sort of people would you like to connect with?
Of course, feel free to reach out to the AppLovin Team and me, either on LinkedIn in advance so we can set up a meeting or on the ground at Pocket Gamer Connects London. We would love to talk to anyone interested in scaling and growing their apps, be it through UA campaigns, CTV, monetisation, ad mediation, etc.
