Understanding Player Behaviour - Games

A good game gives you decent downloads & revenue, but as a developer, it is of utmost importance to understand player behaviour which includes how they are performing in the game. This will enable you to tune your game for optimum revenue generation.

In this post, I am going to cover the following points.

• Game KPIs and how these will help us to understand players.
• Custom game events and the most important ones.
• Funnels & their importance.
• Player feedback & support.

Game KPIs & their uses:

Game KPIs give us more information to understand the player behaviour. As a developer, our ultimate goal is to improve KPIs. Below are the most identified key performance indicators and their analysis.

- Player Retention, Sessions & Session length

 These KPIs plays a very important role and every other KPI will more or less depend on these.

Based on retention numbers we can analyse how much players engaging with the game and also we needs to analyse which game mechanics are making players come back every day. Usually, the developer will consider Day - 1, 3, 7, 15, 30 & 90 numbers to analyse game performance. Depending on the game genre, retention numbers will vary.

- DAU & MAU

  Based on daily or monthly active users, we can analyse how players are hooked to the game. We should calculate DAU/MAU to know the player's engagement. It will be <1.

- ARPDAU, ARPU & ARPPU

  Based on the high average revenue per user or per paid user, we can analyse which mechanics are making players purchase items.

- LTV

 Based on the player lifetime value, we can identify whales, dolphins, minnows & non-paying players. With that understand we should analyse how we can convert non-payers to minnows.

Game Custom Events and most important ones:

To know the in-depth behaviour of players, we should have game custom events. There are a lot of analytics tools out there in the market which gives basic KPIs like retention, DAU, MAU & session length etc.. by default, but to track custom events, developer needs to add a piece of code based on the event.

Commonly identified custom events:

- Quit after Intro Video/Game Intro.

- Tutorial complete steps as events.

- Energy or lives usage.

- Events related to gameplay mechanics.

- Level progress events.

- Events related to monetisation mechanics.

- Game premium currency spendings.

- Game soft currency spendings.

- In App Purchases.

- Premium to soft currency conversions.

Funnels & their importance:

Funnels will give us data on how many players are actually going through a sequence of steps to complete a particular task or action. To understand the in-depth behaviour of the players using custom events, we should create funnels.

We should analyse funnels before finalising events list.

Some key funnels:

Initial Launch Funnel:

Using this funnel, we can analyse how many players actually launched our game after installation.

If there is a huge difference in numbers, we can suspect a possible launch or game performance issue which is interrupting game launch.

Tutorial funnel:

The Tutorial is very important in most games, and with this funnel, we should know how many players actually completed all tutorial steps and entered the game.

If the completion percentage is more than 85%, then most players liked the on boarding experience and are going to continue gameplay.

Gameplay funnel:

If you observe a good percentage of users who are completing those actions then we can conclude that players actually liked your game concept and can possibly go on to be paying players.

We should include all the game mechanics which are in the game to know more information.

Based on this funnel, we can identify which game mechanics are liked by the most of the players.

IAP funnel:

Based on this funnel, we will be able to know which gameplay mechanic is leading to IAP so that we can polish it more and make decisions accordingly.

All the above funnels will give us enough information about the players and we can come up with the actions items accordingly. We can also create any number of funnels to analyse more about the player behaviour.

Player Feedback & Support:

Surveys are powerful tools which gives us direct feedback from players. We should select our most active players and invite them to participate in surveys.

Also, player support is vitally important. With in the games or apps, we should provide options to contact the developer which would enable players to get in touch with developers directly.

Direct feedback from players will always help to improve your game. In that way, we can analyse the player behaviour and take right decisions at right time to improve ROI. All the best!

Thank you for reading this blog and subscribe for more interesting topics.

Player Re-engagement Strategies - Games

Player Re-engagement Strategies - Games

My game went live in all major app stores and it got huge number of organic downloads and things were looking good. However, after a few days, it was observed that a number of valuable players are churning out. what to do now?

Should I go and spend a lot of money on user acquisition (UA)? Sounds reasonable because my game is doing well. In my opinion, instead of spending 100% money on UA let's spend some % on Re-engagement and rest we can spend on UA. As per the current market, we need to spend minimum $2 to get new user. But with the same cost, we can convert 3-4 valuable inactive players to active users if we apply the correct re-engagement strategy.

Follow me to know more about re-engagement strategies.

In my post I am going to cover below elements:

-- What is meant by re-engagement & its importance?

-- Why should I go for re-engagement campaigns?

-- Analyse before spending on re-engagement campaigns.

-- Inactive player segments.

-- Re-engagement strategies.

-- Sources/Networks to conduct re-engagement.

-- Challenges in re-engagement.

What is mean by re-engagement & its use:

It's a process of getting back our churned/dropped out most valuable
players back to the game and re-engage them to play.

Below are the uses of re-engagement:

-- Can convert paid inactive users to active users.

-- Make players to re-install our game again.

-- Can improve rolling Retention.

-- Can improve DAU and MAU.

-- Can improve revenue.

-- Improves LTV, ARPU etc.

-- More chance to improve free to paid player conversion.

Why Should I go for re-engagement campaign:

Let’s say my game has 1 million downloads and once players deleted
my game then how can I approach them? Also, how to get them back
to my game? It’s a very big challenge and here, re-engagement campaigns
come into the picture.

Analyse before spending on re-engagement campaigns:

We should do below things before we start re-engagement campaigns.

-- First and foremost thing is we should understand the game mechanics
completely to apply correct strategy.

-- Better understanding of user behaviour. (In my coming posts will give
in-depth analysis)

-- Identifying right segment of inactive players.

-- Should understand game KPIs.

-- Should understand where users are dropping out.

-- Needs in-depth analysis on game revenue and future scope.

Inactive player segments:

We need to identify the inactive player segments, based on which, we should
apply re-engagement strategy and start campaign on selected segment of users.
Below are the most identified player segments to select for re-engagement
campaigns.

-- Segment of players who are not playing from past 3-4 days.

-- Players who have not reached a particular level in game and inactive.

-- Players who have not completed particular content and inactive.

-- Whales & dolphins who are inactive based on game version.

-- Players who have not paid and are inactive. (free users)

-- Players who made at least one IAP and inactive. (Paid users)

-- Players who completed entire game content and waiting for new content.

-- Players who are waiting for new mechanics.

Re-engagement strategies:

When we apply right strategy on right segment of players then with less cost
we can re-engage most of our churned out players.

Below are the most identified strategies.

-- Showcase newly added content.

-- Newly added discounts and offers.

-- Limited time offers.

-- New game update.

-- New game mechanics introduced.

-- If any premium content prices decreased.

-- New game controls introduced.

-- Players feedback fixes.

-- Progression block fixes, if any.

-- Overall price changes.

-- Give free in-game currency.

-- Give some free content.

-- Live events.

Priority segment:

Mobile Re-engagement platforms:

 -- Facebook
 -- Twitter
-- Google Adwords
-- DBM
-- Third party networks

Re-engagement cycle:

Deep Linking:

Deep linking plays a major role in re-engagement. Here is the reason.

When player clicks on re-engagement ad then it should redirect to game,
if game is in the device, or it will redirect to store. This will happen when
deep linking is present.

Challenges in re-engagement campaigns approach:

Below are the  challenges we have in re-engagement campaigns.

-- Reach percentage:

We need to identify and choose the network/platform which have more database

to reach most of the segmented or targeted players.

-- Conversions:

To increase the player conversions (inactive → Active → IAPs) should apply

correct re-engagement strategy on segment.

-- Right message or impression to the right person 

Tips:

-- Understand the game and your player's behaviour.

 -- Identify right segment of users based on their paths/actions in the game.

 -- Apply right strategy to right segment.

 -- Impressions should be based on re-engagement strategy.

 -- Should try different impressions in campaigns to identify the impressions which are giving most conversions.

 -- Identify the right platform/network to run campaigns.

 -- Closely monitor the campaigns and spendings.

 -- Closely monitor the conversions.

Thanks for reading and stay tune for new posts related to Mobile game engagement and monetisations.