At Second Stage, we believe that understanding the full journey of a player, from first impression to conversion, is essential for building smarter, more effective game marketing campaigns. While lower-funnel metrics like installs, purchases, and ROAS are key performance indicators, they tell only part of the story. To help publishers and marketers gain a deeper understanding of upper-funnel performance, we’ve introduced the Awareness Tracker in TRACKS, along with a groundbreaking new metric: Cost Per Quality (CPQ).
In digital marketing, CPM (Cost Per Mille) has long been the standard for measuring the efficiency of awareness campaigns, representing the cost of delivering 1,000 impressions. But not all impressions are equal. With the rise of skippable ads, muted autoplay videos, and banner blindness, many impressions fail to generate any meaningful engagement. That’s where CPQ changes the game. Cost Per Quality measures the cost of reaching 1,000 users who meet a predefined quality threshold—users who actually engage with the creative, whether through actions like turning on video sound, watching longer durations, interacting with landing pages, or showing behaviors that indicate higher intent.
The closer the CPQ is to the CPM, the stronger the targeting and creative alignment. When your CPQ closely mirrors your CPM, it means your ads are not only being seen but are being seen by the right people, those who are most likely to become engaged players down the line. By contrast, a large gap between CPM and CPQ suggests wasted impressions on low-quality, disengaged audiences.
The Awareness Tracker within TRACKS brings this to life by providing a full suite of insights into the early stages of the user journey. It highlights not just how many people saw an ad, but how they interacted with it, whether they took meaningful action on the landing page, and how those actions correlate with eventual mid- and lower-funnel outcomes such as wishlist adds, installs, and purchases. This kind of upper-funnel visibility has traditionally been difficult to quantify in the gaming industry, where much of the focus has been on end conversions without fully accounting for the importance of pre-conversion engagement.
One of the most common requests we hear from publishers and marketers is for better visibility into post-view conversions, those instances where a user may not immediately click but is still influenced by an ad. While TRACKS is built on the accuracy of post-click attribution, the addition of Awareness Tracker and CPQ gives marketing teams the tools to better understand and value the early touch points that shape the player’s decision-making journey. This means you no longer need to rely on questionable post-view models to measure awareness impact. Instead, you can use CPQ and engagement signals to optimize prospecting campaigns and identify audiences who are more likely to convert over time.
With these new capabilities, TRACKS allows publishers to seamlessly connect upper- and lower-funnel performance, offering a more complete view of campaign effectiveness. Whether the goal is building hype during a game announcement, driving wishlist adds ahead of launch, or fuelling direct sales, TRACKS ensures that both awareness and conversion are measured with precision and transparency.
As the industry continues to shift away from legacy attribution models and towards data-driven accountability, Awareness Tracker and CPQ represent a forward-thinking solution for modern game marketing. By helping teams focus on quality over quantity, these features empower publishers to make smarter investment decisions that not only drive awareness but also lay the groundwork for meaningful player acquisition and retention.
To learn how TRACKS can help your studio or agency get in touch with our team or request a live de