Tag: Building A Great Game
ENGAGE YOUR USERS WITH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

ENGAGE YOUR USERS WITH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

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Push notifications are a very powerful tool because they allow communication with your app’s users when they are not actively engaging with your app or game. However, they have to be executed carefully! Otherwise, there is a risk that they will be ineffective, or even hurt your game’s retention and increase churn. Indeed, their perceived overuse has sparked extreme reactions – as the recent Wired article “Turn off your push notifications. All of them” illustrates. Although the author’s frustration is understandable, it is also undeniable that push notifications, when used wisely, can be very useful to users as well as being an effective channel to keep them engaged in your game.

Indeed, here at Thumbspire, we typically experience an increase of game launches around 12-15% on our weekly push campaigns days. The graph below illustrates Day 7 retention for one of our games where the weekly re-engagement push campaigns effect is very evident.

So, how do you effectively configure push notifications in your game?

First of all, it is important to understand the rules for opt-in on both Android and iOS. In iOS, the game needs to get permission from the user by displaying a system pop-up where the user can either grant or deny it, and… it can only be asked one time! For this reason, we recommend to explaining the benefits of the notifications for your game, and gauge the user’s intention before triggering the pop up with a flow similar to this:

Source: Localytics

On Android, permission is granted at install, so historically there has been a higher percentage of opt-in than on iOS (60% vs. 40%). It is important to notice some recent (and upcoming) changes on Android: Android N introduced a 2-click flow to disable notifications for an app, which makes it even more critical only to send timely and relevant information to users, so as to avoid your channel from being “shut down” by them. The upcoming Android O introduces the interesting concept of Push Notification channels, where notifications can be bundled by type, thus allowing better control from the perspective of the user and the publisher. For example, engagement, marketing promotion, and transactional notifications could be separated into different channels, thus offering the user more granularity in controlling what to opt-out from if desired.

Depending on your game you might want to set up transactional notifications for meaningful events, for example when a waiting time is over, when energy refills, or when a user action is required in a turn-based game. While these notifications are typically very useful to bring users back to the game, they need to be designed carefully so that they do not overwhelm the user, increasing the risk of being ignored or pushing the user to opt-out altogether. Keep your notifications “fresh” by mixing in new copy (including emojis), so the messages look more appealing and catch the user’s attention.

Another type of push notifications are the engagement notifications that are typically triggered from your marketing automation or analytics platform (e.g. Appboy, DeltaDNA, Swrve, etc.). You can define cohorts of users based on their characteristics (progress in the game, frequency of playing, time from last session, etc.) and target them with engagement campaigns to bring them back to the game. You should define a broad weekly re-engagement campaign with new copy every week and then smaller campaigns for specific cohorts of users (inactive players, players stuck on a level, etc.). Most tools also allow you to also cap policies to make sure users who fall in many different cohorts don’t get hit by too many messages.

To set your expectations, the typical open rate for push notification campaigns range between 2% and 3% with Android having a slightly higher open rate than iOS.

Here are some tips that you should keep in mind in order to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns:

  • Work on the copy of your message so that it is both compelling and intriguing: curiosity can inspire users to open the notification to find out more.
  • Personalize the message as much as possible. Use specific characteristic of the cohorts you are addressing to connect with the users on a very specific need or situation (e.g. Stuck on a level? Low on cash? Etc.).
  • Nail the timing: you should always set the campaigns to be delivered in the user’s timezone at the times when most users engage with your app. A 2016 Tapjoy study(based on 4.4 million push notifications) found that open rates are highest on Mondays and right after lunch.
  • Make the message actionable: prompt the user to take an action, (with clear results) and, if possible, offer a reward for that action! We guide our developers to integrate mechanisms in the games so that a push notification can trigger a reward: a virtual currency gift, a free power-up, or a special sale promotion. These kind of targeted campaigns with clear rewards have shown much higher open rates and can be very effective to re-engage your users.

In summary, push notifications are a very important part of your game’s live operations (‘live ops’) after commercial launch. Do not hesitate to comment or get in touch if you need any guidance!
BUILDING A GREAT GAME: AD MONETIZATION BEST PRACTICES

BUILDING A GREAT GAME: AD MONETIZATION BEST PRACTICES

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In the first article of our Building a Great Game series we focused our attention on engagement and in-app monetization metrics: now it’s the time to look at the equally important component, ad monetization. In fact, as we already mentioned, the average overall conversion rate for IAP (In-App Purchases) is ~2% of the base over a 30 day period, so it is crucial to find ways to get some value from the other 98% of your players.

Many game developers are wary of integrating ads into their game. They fear that ads would annoy their players and negatively impact retention and engagement, but if done in the right way, ads can raise the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) by 10% to 80%, even for games that are successfully monetizing with IAPs. To get started, let’s first take a look at the main ad formats, their characteristics, and the pros and cons of each type.

AD FORMATS

The oldest format is the Banner Ad, inherited directly from the web. Static banners are typically displayed on the top or the bottom of your game, either in menu pages or in the gameplay view itself. As you can imagine, this format can be pretty invasive, and it can also lower the perception of your game’s quality. It is not used much nowadays, but can still be an important component of your ad monetization strategy for very casual games.

Interstitial Ads are full screen (or almost full screen) images or videos that pop up at a certain point in your game. They are typically placed at “intermission points” like after seeing the “Game Over” screen or at a “Level Up” moment in the game. This format constitutes the bulk of ad revenue in most casual games, but as we will discuss below, it must be integrated carefully in order not to impact user experience.

Rewarded Videos require the user to opt-in to watch a full (15-30 sec) video ad in exchange for a reward in the game. They are becoming very popular in mobile games because they provide high CPM (Revenue per thousand impressions) and they fit well with the Free-to-Play model: giving non-spenders a way to progress faster in the game in exchange for some value they provide by voluntarily engaging with the ads.

Another format that has been getting some traction in recent times is rich media or “Playable Ads” which require users to interact with the ad, typically in a short game demo, which showcases the core gameplay inside the ad. This format can be displayed either as an interstitial or as a rewarded ad. They have the potential to achieve high CPMs but need to be utilized carefully because depending on the quality of the creative, the experience can be confusing and negatively impact your user retention.

From Left to Right: Banner Ad, Interstitial Ad, and Rewarded Video Ad

From Left to Right: Banner Ad, Interstitial Ad, and Rewarded Video Ad

BEST PRACTICES

An easy yet valuable piece of advice is to integrate ads into your game, or you will be leaving money on the table! However, it is important to implement ads in the right way, and at Thumbspire we guide our developer partners to follow the best practices for games found in the same genre.

The most important rule is to prepare your game in a way that allows you to measure and dynamically control the ads in your game. Considering that for each format you will most likely integrate a few ad networks, it is important to control the order in which these networks will be invoked at every ad impression to maximize the average CPM of your traffic. This is the role of the mediation system – an intermediate layer that your game will invoke at every ad placement, deferring to it the choice of which ad network to forward the request to. There are a number of mediation systems on the market, and all of them have some automatic algorithm aimed at maximizing the CPM for every impression based on various parameters like device, location, etc. With mediation, you can also manually override the algorithm and force a pre-defined priority of ad-networks for a specific format in a specific geographic location (known as a “waterfall”).  This can be useful if you want to take advantage of special guaranteed CPMs you might be offered by the ad networks in exchange for a guaranteed call order in the waterfall. From our experience, introducing mediation to optimize the return for your inventory can lead to an increase of 80-110% compared to your average CPM from a single network.

In addition to mediation, it is also important to put a system in place that allows you to measure and dynamically control the ads being served in your game. For example, if you decided to have banner ads in your game you might want to have a server flag that enables or disables them for specific cohorts of users, such as disabling them for any user who makes an IAP.  You might also want to be able to control the frequency of your interstitial ads (for example, every 5 “Game Over” screens) and dynamically tweak it depending on the average game session length or even apply different frequencies to different cohorts of users. For rewarded videos, you might want to make the amount of the reward configurable dynamically so that you can tweak the economy of your game once you have a sense of the CPMs you can obtain. Hopefully, you get the idea: the level of control depends on how granular you want to be in your actions, but it is important to have the possibility to control and modify the ad implementation without the need of a new release for every change you want to test.

Finally, it is important to measure and track every ad impression at a user level in your analytics, so that by applying an average CPM per geographic area you can estimate the advertising contribution to the LTV (Lifetime Value) with the same granularity that you have for IAPs.

Stay tuned, as we’ll dive into more details on what to measure as well as target benchmarks for ad KPIs in our next blog post in this series. In the meanwhile, feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments!
BUILDING A GREAT GAME: 5 METRICS EVERY GAME DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

BUILDING A GREAT GAME: 5 METRICS EVERY GAME DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

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In this series of posts, we’ll be examining the best practices from successful FTP (free-to-play) games so that they can be applied to your titles, from design to soft launch and beyond. To begin, let’s go over some basic metrics, their definitions, and typical benchmark targets for successful games.

ENGAGEMENT

The first thing to measure during soft launch is the level of engagement of your users. This is typically measured by focusing on retention, session length, and frequency.

Most analytics and marketing attribution tools will provide you with a measure of the retention by taking cohorts of users who installed and launched your app on a given day, and looking at the percentage of those users that launch your app again after a given amount of time, commonly in days (Dx). You will typically look at D1, D7 and D30 retention rates, which respectively measure the percentage of users who came back to your game 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days after installing it.

These data points can be used to model or estimate the lifetime of your users: the average number of days that your game will be played by each of them. Typical target benchmark values for retention are the well-known 40%/20%/10% for D1/D7/D30, but those should be taken with a grain of salt because the genre of your game will obviously impact your targets. More casual games will target much higher D1 retention (as high as 65%-70%, such as Crossy Road) but will most likely have a lower D30 number. Mid-core games can thrive with slightly lower D1 as once the users get onboard and like the game, they will likely stick around for longer.  Still, the higher the better!

Session length and frequency are self-explanatory, and their targets will also vary a lot depending on the genre of the game. For successful casual games, it is typical to see short but more frequent sessions, in the order of 2 – 4 sessions per day per DAU (Daily Active User).

During soft launch, it is important to measure these engagement metrics and improve them iteration after iteration, by focusing first and foremost on first user experience (tutorial completion rate, etc.) and identifying any bottleneck in your funnels (level progression, churn points). At Thumbspire we work very closely with our partner studios by providing the analytic data and suggesting improvements for product iterations during soft launch and beyond.

MONETIZATION

Once the engagement metrics are aligned with your game genre targets, it is time to look into themonetization metrics. Most successful F2P games today monetize with a mix of IAP (In App Purchases) and Advertising. In this initial post, we will focus mostly on the IAP part, but it is important also to measure the ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User) contributed by the ads placed in your game. To reach an LTV (Lifetime Value) that can sustain User Acquisition, you should target a healthy mix of IAP and ad revenue (60/40 or 50/50 share). We will dive more into ad revenue in future posts.

For IAPs it is important to measure the conversion rate (CR%) both on a daily basis and over a longer time period. The daily CR% is the number of purchasers divided by DAU, while the overall CR% over a 90 day period will give an idea of the share of your user base that will ultimately make a purchase in the game. It is well known that for F2P games the overall conversion rate is ~2% of the base over a 30 day period while your target for daily CR% should be between 0.8% and 2%. Again, these are just average benchmarks, as the effectiveness of your game’s monetization will also depend on the ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User) that varies wildly depending on the game’s genre. When we work with our partner studios, we compare their monetization metrics to similar games in the same category, and we suggest improvements that can help the conversion rate. Special attention should be put into the first payment since more than half of the users who make an initial purchase will end up purchasing multiple times after that. Starter packs and well-timed Calls to Action in your game can help on the first payment conversion rate and bring up the CR%.

Ultimately the bottom line metric that you can easily measure during your game’s soft launch (and that is a function of all of the above) is the ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User). The ARPDAU  may range between $0.02 for quick casual games (monetizing exclusively through ads) to over $0.50 for mid-casual/mid-core games. Here is a breakdown by game genre from SurveyMonkey, but please note that this is not definitive – different reports may show different results!

All the metrics described so far contribute to the calculation of the LTV (Lifetime Value) of your game which is the average revenue generated by every install over their lifetime. If you are able to measure or estimate Lifetime and ARPDAU, the LTV can be simply calculated as

ARPDAU X LIFETIME (IN DAYS)

More often you will have to estimate the LTV with available retention data points using different approaches and calculators, like the ones mentioned here.

The LTV (or its estimate during soft launch) is what will determine if your game can sustain the cost of user acquisition. It is important to notice that even if the overall LTV is not greater than the average CPI (cost per install), there is still hope for your game. We can often identify specific segments or niches where the combined action of user acquisition and the subsequent organic downloads uplift can have a positive margin and sustain the growth of your game.

There’s more to come on this subject in future blog posts, but in the meantime, do not hesitate to comment or reach out!