In this series, Liftoff Mobile highlights inspirational women from across the mobile app ecosystem to share their stories, achievements, and insights on the future of the industry.
This month we chatted with Büşra Amanlar, Senior User Acquisition Manager at Snowprint Studios.
Can you walk us through your early career and how you found your way to Snowprint Studios?
I didn’t originally study marketing. My bachelor’s degree is actually in Translation and Interpretation, and I started my professional career as a Project Assistant. After two years in that role, I realized I wanted to transition into marketing, so I began taking online courses and interviewing with tech companies in Turkey. That led me to my first marketing role as a User Acquisition Specialist at Masomo, a mobile gaming company. Initially, my focus was largely on influencer marketing, but over time, my responsibilities expanded into performance marketing and paid user acquisition.
In 2020, I relocated to Germany and joined Stillfront as a UA Manager. There, I managed multiple game titles and gained hands-on experience across different platforms and markets, which significantly deepened my UA expertise.
Then in 2022, I was ready to take the next step in my career and crossed paths with Snowprint Studios, where I’ve been working for the past two and a half years as a Senior User Acquisition Manager. Our team focuses on operational UA execution, partner management, and driving the overall user acquisition strategy for our game, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus.
What were some of the early “wow” moments or surprises about how UA works there?
From the very beginning, and still to this day, I’ve been really impressed by how lean and efficient Snowprint Studios is. Despite the company’s strong growth and success over the past three years, we’ve remained a team of fewer than 70 people.
That lean structure directly shapes how UA works here. There’s a strong sense of ownership and self-leadership, fast decision-making, and close collaboration across teams. It was a real “wow” moment to see how much impact a small, focused team can have when processes are clear, and everyone is empowered to move quickly.
How do you divide your time between strategic work, analytics, creative testing, and new channel exploration?
At Snowprint, UA is very hands-on, so my time is spread fairly evenly across several areas. A significant portion goes into strategic work such as defining channel strategy, setting and adjusting budgets, and aligning closely with the wider team on priorities and goals.
Data and analytics are a constant across everything we do. We’re continuously monitoring performance, digging into results, and using those insights to guide decisions across channels and markets. Creative testing is another core focus, as we strongly believe that creative is one of the biggest growth drivers in UA. That means close collaboration with our marketing creative team and external partners.
Finally, we always dedicate time to explore new channels. Even if they don’t scale immediately, testing and learning are important for staying ahead in a competitive mobile landscape. Overall, the mix is dynamic, but that flexibility is what makes UA at Snowprint both challenging and exciting.
How do you prioritize which platforms or formats to focus on for the different games you publish?
We currently run UA for a single title, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, which allows us to be very focused and intentional with our platform and format choices. That said, my approach is strongly shaped by my previous experience working across multiple games.
Prioritization always starts with a deep understanding of the product itself. Different platforms and formats perform better depending on a game’s genre, audience, monetization model (e.g. in-app purchases or in-app ads-heavy), and lifetime value.
I’m a strong believer that successful user acquisition can’t exist in isolation. UA and product need to work closely together. The alignment between UA and Product is one of the most important drivers of sustainable growth and long-term success.
What are the core metrics you and your team track? Are there any metrics you feel are undervalued by UA teams?
Like most UA teams, we closely track upper-funnel metrics. They give us early signals on creative and channel performance. We also pay close attention to cost per install (CPI) and early return on ad spend (ROAS), which help us evaluate UA efficiency and short-term performance.
Revenue per install (RPI), also known as average revenue per user (ARPU), is another essential metric we monitor closely, as it provides valuable insight into user quality across different channels and platforms. Looking beyond basic metrics and understanding how users actually engage with our game allows us to make more informed decisions and optimize for long-term value rather than short-term efficiency.
How do recent privacy changes and increasing ad costs impact your UA strategy at Snowprint?
It definitely changed a lot. From a user perspective, these privacy changes are absolutely a positive development—but from a marketing standpoint, they forced a fundamental shift in how we evaluate performance.
With the introduction of iOS privacy changes and despite SKAdNetwork reporting, campaign-level data became much more limited, making it harder to draw clear, data-driven conclusions purely from attribution. At Snowprint, we’re fortunate to take a more holistic approach to marketing, looking beyond attribution alone and combining multiple data sources to guide decisions.
How do you ensure UA efforts are tightly linked to LTV and ROAS, especially in mid-core games where monetization mechanics are more complex?
We rely heavily on cohort analysis, early monetization and engagement signals, and ROAS trends over time to understand which channels, creatives, and audiences bring in high-quality players. Creative testing also plays an important role here.
Strong alignment between UA and the product is essential. At Snowprint, we’re fortunate to work with experts across disciplines who truly understand this connection. We make a conscious effort to ensure that UA activity is closely aligned with the product roadmap and live ops.
Mid-core audiences can be surprisingly emotionally invested. What’s been the most unexpected layer behaviour, community trend, or sentiment that influenced your UA thinking?
We have a highly engaged Discord community, and our community team stays in close contact with players, collecting feedback, understanding sentiment, and relaying those insights directly to the product team.
That player feedback plays an important role in how we think about both product and UA decisions, especially when it comes to creative production. Because we work with a Warhammer IP, we see how emotionally connected players are to specific factions and characters, and that passion has a real impact on how we develop new UA creatives.
Ultimately, we’re here to make great games. That’s literally one of our company’s ethos! Maintaining an open dialogue with our community helps ensure we stay aligned with player expectations and continue building experiences that players truly care about.
Snowprint was acquired by Modern Times Group in 2023. Did that acquisition bring any significant changes in the way you work?
Yes, absolutely. One of the biggest benefits of the MTG acquisition has been increased access to industry knowledge and resources. In UA, gaining broader insights and learning from how others approach similar challenges is incredibly valuable.
What non-traditional UA levers or hybrid tactics are you currently exploring or scaling?
Since Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus is a strong IP game, the community plays a particularly important role in our strategy.
We actively support community initiatives and content creators who are passionate about the game, and we see this as a powerful complement to our activities. Working closely with creators helps us reach highly engaged, high-intent audiences, while also reinforcing authenticity and long-term player trust.
What barriers have you faced in your career, and how have you addressed them?
Coming from a degree in Translation and Interpretation, I initially had to work harder to build credibility and close knowledge gaps. I addressed this by investing heavily in self-learning, including taking online courses, asking questions, and learning from hands-on experience.
As a woman in a technical space like UA, there were also moments where I had to be more intentional about making my voice heard. Over time, I learned to trust my expertise, speak up with confidence, and let results speak for themselves. Having supportive teams and mentors along the way made a huge difference, and those experiences ultimately helped me become a more confident UA professional.
For other women looking to build a career in UA or mobile growth, what one piece of advice would you give?
Don’t wait until you feel “ready” to take the next step. UA and mobile growth are fields where you learn by doing, and confidence often follows action, not the other way around. Be curious, ask questions, and invest time in understanding both the data and the product.
Most importantly, don’t be afraid to take up space. Your perspective matters, and the industry truly benefits from having more women in these roles.
Looking ahead to 2026, what do you believe is one of the biggest opportunities and biggest risks for UA in mobile mid-core games?
I think the biggest opportunity is in stronger alignment between creative, product, and community. Teams that can clearly communicate deep gameplay and long-term value through their creatives will be better positioned to attract high-quality and highly engaged players.
The biggest risk is over-optimizing for short-term signals in an increasingly complex data environment. For mid-core games with longer retention, losing sight of LTV in favor of surface-level metrics can hurt sustainable growth.
Beyond metrics and growth levers, what part of this job energizes you the most?
The team, without a doubt! Working with smart, passionate people who genuinely care about the game and the players is what energises me the most. The collaboration, self-leadership, and trust within the team make even the toughest challenges exciting to tackle.
If you imagine a future Senior UA Manager ten years from now, what’s one skill you think they’ll need to master?
They’ll need to be very comfortable making decisions without having perfect data. As tracking becomes more limited, strong judgment, product understanding, and an instinct for what players actually care about will matter more than ever.
Storytelling will also be a key skill. Standing out won’t just be about optimization; it will be about clearly communicating why a game is meaningful and fun to the right audience. Finally, collaboration will be essential. Working closely with product, creative, and community teams to build long-term player relationships rather than focusing only on short-term growth.
