Comprendi’s social-marketing tech makes player acquisition cheaper for Zynga and Kabam (update)

Getting people to install your free-to-play game is expensive, but another new tool is hitting the market to help drive down those costs.

Comprendi, a tech firm that specializes in social media marketing, is launching an open beta program for acquiring players using “hyper-targeted” ads on sites like Twitter. The company uses a variety of algorithms and language-comprehension tricks to find audiences that will respond to a certain kind of app. This can reduce acquisition costs because game developers can specify their marketing outreach on a smaller group of people that are more valuable in terms of in-app spending and other engagement metrics. That’s opposed to blasting out a less-targeted ad that is going to bounce off of most people. With player-acquisition costs hitting an average of $4.23 per user, an all-time high, in December, developers are looking for any advantage they can get to save some cash while still competing for an audience in the $34.8 billion mobile gaming market.