Scalarr Q&A with Gulnaz Saitova – Head of UA at Azur Games

With several years of experience under her belt, Gulnaz Saitova is the Head of User Acquisition at Azur Games. In this Q&A for Scalarr, she shares with us her background in the gaming industry as well as the driving forces of her role in Azur Games. To top it off, Gulnaz speaks about her favorite marketing approaches, methods and instruments.

1.- Scalarr: Hello Gulnaz, thank you for joining us today! We’d love for our readers to know more about you and the great team at Azur Games. Can you please share with us some background on Azur Games and what it’s like to work in the hyper-casual games industry?

Gulnaz Saitova, Head of User Acquisition at Azur Games: Hi! Of course, it’s my pleasure! Azur Games is an international developer and publisher of mobile games. Our portfolio consists of nearly 70+ free-to-play games in different settings and genres. Today, Azur Games has a team of more than 300 employees who work on developing mid-core and hyper-casual games and several projects with other gaming studios. At Azur Games, we believe that one of the key goals is enabling the most comprehensive possibilities for our developers, helping them with Analytics, ASO, Localization, UA, and much more.

2.- Scalarr: It sounds like you have a well-oiled machine running there! When it comes to game genres, can you give us your views on what makes hyper-casual games different from mid-core from a marketing perspective?

Gulnaz: In User Acquisition, the most significant difference between hyper-casual and mid-core games is, of course, the target audience. We can say that hyper-casual games are designed for a broad audience of users who enjoy short gaming sessions. These types of games are simple, easy-to-play, and can be enjoyed in short playing sessions. One great example would be our app – Stack Ball – where users can get started in a matter of minutes. All marketers know how important it is to know your target audience, and in this case, it can be any person.

As for mid-core projects, our approach is significantly different. Let’s take an example of our top shooter game – World War Heroes. These projects are more long-term with longer gaming sessions and where monetization is mostly done through in-app purchases. The critical differences in UA strategies for these two genres consist of selecting advertising channels for each title, fine-tuning creatives, methodologies in set-up and optimization of marketing campaigns, and accurate tracking.

A broad portfolio of Azur Games titles makes our work exciting but challenging and allows us to find non-standard solutions for our daily tasks.