Research on mobile games and monetization
In this section I discuss some behavior patterns common to most mobiles, and elaborate on some KPIs I’ve found useful to observe and analyze game performance. All graphs and numbers displayed here are for illustration purposes only, and are not actual numbers of any specific title.
100% of your installs play the first session. Maximizing the user’s first contact with your game is crucial. In this week’s post I argue you should design your tutorial and first session with 2 main goals in mind: get users to come back to play a second session and get users to convert.
Users converting soon after install are your best customers. And those users are your biggest fans. You don’t cause them to convert in your game, and you can’t use difficulty or friction to get them to make their first purchase. The best way to get your conversion numbers up is to be proactive very early after install and showcase aspirational offers. It’s not about utility or a functional understanding of value.
Looking at how many days a user logged in in the previous week is a strong indicator of future churn. By using this approach to identify at-risk users, you can act preemptively to reduce churn in your game.
Looking at engagement from a Live Ops perspective requires a specific set of tools. This post covers a few different thigs to keep in mind when assessing the engagement rate of your active users.
This post considers ways to further evaluate the engagement of your userbase, and suggests ways to leverage that to optimize your game.
Some of your payers will churn after spending for the first time in your game. And payers converting on install day are those who churn the most.
This post tries to make sense of this, and further suggests how you can leverage this to understand conversion and monetization better, and design your monetization strategy accordingly.
Alexandre Macmillan 