What’s Important to Social Gaming Developers?
One of the main goals of running the social gaming analytics workshop was to get a good understanding of what developers are always thinking about and what types of problems they are encountering. By gaining an understanding of these problems, we can then design actionable metrics and tools to help solve these problems. So at the beginning of the workshop, we solicited questions from all the developers to get a sense of what people were interested in. Here is a sampling of the key questions from various developers grouping to category headings:
User Acquisition (both paid for and viral)
- What are the key drivers of conversion from invite to install and how do you use intelligent filtering to drive increased conversion rates?
- What are 3 stats I should look at most closely for identifying spenders within a few days of using my app for the first time?
- When users play games on social networks, they develop social relationships over time. What are the metrics that capture the conversion rate from strangers to friends for specific apps?
Engagement
- What’s the most commonly accepted metric for long-term user engagement (ie, over the user’s lifetime, not time per visit)?
- What’s a good way to measure the impact of feature changes on long-term engagement?
- What are the most important engagement and monetization metrics to optimize (i.e. return visitors/all visitors, time on site, churn, ARPU, paying/active users, etc.)?
Monetization
- How do you accurately isolate and measure the correlation between an improvement in engagement and an increase or decrease in monetization?
- How do you optimize the balance between enabling free game play and extending engagement and forcing users to pay to advance?
- How to best determine pricing in virtual economies? Macro or micro approach? Tips, tricks, or war stories on the subject?
Discussion Groups
After sifting through all the questions, the 3 topics that emerged as the one that developers were most interested in were:
- User acquisition
- Engagement
- Virtual economies
We broke up the workshop into 3 groups, each of which discussed one of the topics. While we were able to address all the questions in the short time we had, we had some very good discussion about the topics. In the next 3 blog posts, we’ll summarize the discussions and results that took place.
[...] is Part 3 of our 4 part series of the Kontagent Social Gaming Workshop Summary, here is: Part 1, Part [...]
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