Gaia Online CEO on Important Mobile App Metrics to Track

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego discusses the lessons he learned in social app development that Gaia is applying to mobile.

Happy New Year!

Here at Kontagent, we’ve helped hundreds of social customers win by helping them gain better insights into their users’ behaviors. And, we have even more exciting product features planned this year. (Sign up for our newsletter for the latest Kontagent news and updates.)

We’re always improving our already-powerful, best-in-class analytics platform. We’ve been leveraging our knowledge and experience to help many of our social customers make a successful transition into the mobile space, too.

Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a mobile application, or you’ve already launched it and have a substantial user base, looking to social app developers for a history lesson on how to do it right can give you a huge head-start, and greater chance at success.

Kontagent Konnect Interview:
Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego

Gaia Online has been able to do this with Monster Galaxy–a hit on both Facebook and iOS. In the first installment of our Kontagent Konnect Executive Interview Series, we spoke with CEO Mike Sego on how the company is applying many of the lessons it learned in social to mobile, including:

  • The metrics that are most important to succeeding on mobile
  • How to monetize on the F2P model
  • How to successfully split-test on iOS (yes, it is possible!)
  • Other tactics used to keep players engaged and coming back for more Continue Reading…

How Does Zynga Really Make Money from Free Games?

Author icon Dan Kimball|Comments icon 0

Source: The New York Times

Recently, I was talking to a colleague about how there is now technology that enables non-verbal brainwave communication between two people. Essentially, you put a device on your head that translates chemical synapses in your brain into patterns that are recognized as words, phrases or entire ideas. A person on the receiving end of this communication can then absorb these patterns in their own brain device, which will then interact with his chemical synapses. And, a conversation occurs.

It is absolutely mind-numbing to think about how much data needs to be processed in order to create patterns out of chemical synapses that an individual experiences at any given time. In fact, the adult human brain is estimated to contain from 100 to 500 trillion synapses! How could there possibly be a technology powerful enough (or scientists insightful enough) to process and interpret that volume of data, and then find a way to translate that into meaningful communication?

Well, on a much (much) (much) smaller scale, Zynga (public as of this morning) and other social game companies have achieved a similar feat. (Side note: VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi penned a great piece on the history of Zynga.)

In our view, the Internet has been through three defining phases of its short life in the modern era: Continue Reading…

Kontagent kScope Social & Mobile News Weekly Roundup

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Source: GDS Infographics

 

Big week in mobile app downloads
According to Mobilewalla, as of this week there are more than a million apps in the market. And, Apple’s developers are adding about 1,000 new apps a day while Android developers are uploading about 1,400 a day.

Even though ComputerWeekly.com says games is the “most popular” form of mobile apps when it comes to high engagement, games isn’t #1 in overall categories for top downloads. Find out which kinds of apps are the most downloaded. (Side note: games may not be #1, but they do sometimes inspire fashion.)

It was a big week for Google, too. The company announced that the Android Market had passed its 10 billionth app download. Apple may have hit that milestone first (and faster), but Business Insider says that Google is hot on Apple’s heels. Should Apple be concerned? Continue Reading…

Diving Deeper with Mobile Analytics

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Mobile app developers want visibility and actionable insights.

The mobile ecosystem is like the wild, west West. This space is still in its infancy. There are so many opportunities for us, but also a ton of growing pains we need to get through.

We recently attended the AppNation conference here in San Francisco, and I was surprised to meet so many mobile developers who are struggling to make money when IDC predicts that global app downloads will reach 76.9 billion in 2014 and will be worth US$35 billion.

It does make sense though; the competition is fierce. Mobilewalla, a search engine for mobile, announced that the number of available mobile apps in the marketplace is approaching the million milestone. Faced with the issue of “app fatigue,” what can developers do to make sure that users are:

1) Finding and installing their apps;
2) Returning to the apps–and eventually spending money
through in-app purchases.

Most of them are using ad networks to drive user acquisition. But, there’s a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks. Developers aren’t really getting great insight into which specific ad network users are coming from. They need clear marketing attributions. And, once the user has entered the app, what are they doing within the app? Those are the missing links between installation and monetization. Continue Reading…

Kontagent kScope Social & Mobile News Weekly Roundup

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Data Science and the Art of Winning (and Wedding?) in Las Vegas

Data is big—and getting bigger. Thanks to modern technology, we’re facing “data deluge.” And, this access to big data is opening doors for a new (crucial) role in the new economy: the data scientist.

Forbes’ Dan Woods has a great series on data scientists. A couple recent spotlights are Monica Rogati and Daniel Tunkelang, data scientists at LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s data scientists “turn big data into big value, delivering products that delight users and insight that forms business decisions.” It’s this type of “big value” that leads to innovative products like the professional networking company’s “People You May Know” feature.

From medical researchers to social and mobile app developers, we’re all trying to interpret data as fast as we can, to make better business decisions as fast as we can. That’s why people like Rogati and Tunkelang are imperative to bringing much-needed order to the information chaos.

Data scientists give you more focus on the massive amounts of data now available—what slice(s) of data you should be honing in on, what the data is telling you, how to predict what’s going to happen next based on historical data. Data is useless without science.

Continue Reading…

The New Ecommerce Metrics: What Etailers Can Learn from Gaming Companies

Author icon Brian Smith|Comments icon 1

My background is in ecommerce and Internet marketing. Over the years, I’ve used lots of online marketing channels (SEO, PPC, shopping engines, affiliate programs, email, display/re-targeting, social, etc.) to drive sales. I call myself a metrics-oriented or data-driven marketer because I base a lot of my decisions on the data I collect. As many people have said over the years, if you don’t track results, you’ll never know if you’re succeeding or failing.

Leveraging powerful analytics solutions like Google Analytics, Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture over the last 15 years, I’ve attempted to track everything possible and made decisions based on a number of metrics.

In the ecommerce and Internet marketing world, there are general metrics which are interesting like page views, unique users, average order value (AOV) and marketing channel-specific metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.  Then there are meaty metrics like conversion rate, which combined with other metrics, lead to the bottom line: cost per acquisition (CPA), lifetime value (LTV), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), etc. More recently, I ran a SaaS business called SingleFeed and started looking at retention waterfalls and cohort analysis as well as everything that our CRM and marketing automation systems had to offer.

In other words, there are lots of metrics running around in my mind.

And then I started working with Kontagent, and I was introduced to how gamers think about their world. It took me a while to grok the new world order of Farmville, The Godfather, and The Sims Social, but once I did, I realized that there’s a huge opportunity for ecommerce companies to take advantage of the metrics which drive social gaming upstarts. Continue Reading…

Big Data in Social and Mobile Analytics

Author icon Dan Kimball|Comments icon 0

You have massive amounts of data from your social and/or mobile apps. But, are you focusing on the right data to optimize your customer economics?

The rise of social and mobile applications has given way to big data in those spaces. We recently hosted a tech talk on the topic. Kontagent executives, CEO Jeff Tseng, CSO Josh Williams, along with Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Battery Ventures, Todd Papaioannou spoke on these points: Continue Reading…

Building a Killer Mobile App: Appeal to the 7 Deadly Sins (and Other Things We’re Learning)

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 3

Many of us are trying to crack the code on building a killer mobile app business.

“If it doesn’t feed one of the seven deadly sins, it will not be addictive,” Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang told an audience of mobile developers and marketers at Open Mobile Summit.

Chang was leading a panel discussion on the exploding app market, and all the opportunities yet to come. In the past four years mobile apps and advertising has gone from a $700 million market to an estimated $12 billion market this year. We all want a slice of that pie. While Chang’s advice is good, as you develop your app, here are some other things to consider:

Continue Reading…

Big Data is Useless Without Science

Author icon Chris Bates|Comments icon 9

Many years ago I researched explosives by shining a light on them. It was every bit as exciting as it sounds. We would shine a light, take a picture, then study the explosive to see if it changed. I would painstakingly scour thousands of data points, looking for small fluctuations in intensity, signs of discoloration, or any statistically significant feature. We collected immense amounts of data from sensors, but the explosive always looked the same when we took snapshots. Then eventually we found out that if we looked not just at the snapshots, but also at the differences between the snapshots using a mathematical formula, we could see dramatic changes. We found out that every explosive was different, and we could effectively detect an explosive from a distance by just shining a light. Today, that research is being used to scan people before they enter airports for bombs.

Today, companies have more customer data than they can handle. Like a digital version of the show Hoarders, companies try to keep every bit of detail for as long as possible with the hope that one day these useless bits can be turned into massive new revenue opportunities. Over the past five years, bright engineers have devised open-sourced solutions to store and process the data deluge. We now even have a “big data stack” — that is, a framework for commoditizing data. Continue Reading…

Gamers Saving Real Lives? How Gamification is Solving Medical Mysteries

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is a collaboration between the University of Washington's departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Biochemistry.

Much to the satisfaction of teenage boys gamers everywhere, playing online games can pay off in the real world.

Gamers have used Foldit, an online video game created by the University of Washington in which players compete to design the most accurately folded proteins, to help advance research in the cure for AIDS. Foldit players were challenged to figure the structure of a protein that causes the virus in monkeys. Playing the game, they were able to do in 10 days what had stumped scientists for more than a decade.

How did this happen?
Continue Reading…