Many of the metrics we measure in social apply to mobile users, too.
If you’re developing or have launched a mobile app, are you tracking it properly to ensure that it’s profitable? Do you know what metrics are important, and how to track them?
The remarkable thing about mobile apps is we’re not starting from square one, like we did several years ago in social. Because we now have years of experience developing successful social games, we can hit the ground running in mobile–because many of the same metrics from social games apply to mobile apps.
This is especially true when it comes to the what we call the ARM funnel of Acquisition, Retention and Monetization. It’s the analytics framework by which our social customers have used to develop and iterate their games–and has helped to make them successful. When it comes to mobile devs, here are some metrics in social they can use to improve their apps in mobile: Continue Reading…
The social/mobile gaming space is relatively new, yet the evolution of the space has been rapid. Despite ever-changing tech and design trends, using analytics as a tool to drive success in this space remains critical.
Newcomers to social/mobile gaming must become overnight experts or risk becoming overnight failures. The first wave of successful social gaming companies, such as Zynga, Playdom and other innovators invested heavily in their analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools from day one. Over time they have built large analytics/BI teams, scalable infrastructure and robust A/B testing tools; all of which give them the ability to quickly optimize core game metrics. These companies, now behemoths in the industry, made massive investments in analytics from the start because no commercial solution specific to “social” existed at the time. These sophisticated tools, built from the ground up, gave them incredible insight, and a massive advantage over second- and third-wave gaming companies.
With new platforms being developed every day, and previously untapped “gamers” entering the space through free-to-play channels, the opportunity to build successful games is bigger than ever. So, how do up-and-coming companies get a comparable level of analytics into their games? Do they build it themselves or buy something commercially available?
I have worked in social gaming in a first-wave company (where we built our own analytics) and in the second-wave where we decided to buy an off-the-shelf solution. The goal of this post is to outline some of the factors to consider while making a Buy vs. Build decision at this point in the industry’s life cycle. Continue Reading…
Mobilewalla found that mobile apps released on Sundays statistically performed the best.
Launch your mobile app on Sunday
According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app; however, Wednesday appears to be the most popular day among developers. Find out the worst day to release your app. (Hint: It’s different for Android and iOS.)
A tiny gaming company has Zynga in its crosshairs
Rumble Games wants you to “swing your sword or fire your gun, not decorate your castle and spam your friends with invitations.” It was a big enough idea to prompt investors from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures to drop $15 million into the company in its first round of funding after it was founded less than a year ago.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
On the surface, probably not much. But, when it comes to analytics, Beane changed the game for baseball. Colaco could be doing the same for business.
Moneyball is based on Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Faced with a relatively meager budget, Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) uses a groundbreaking, sabermetric approach—the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence that measures in-game activity—to recruit a competitive baseball team. (Read more on how sabermetrics works.)
Beane goes against convention, taking advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to build a team that could successfully compete in Major League Baseball. He analyzes stats that are not generally considered top priority in the traditional scouting process. While most managers pored over stats like running speed, stolen bases and batting averages, the sabermetric approach, developed by baseball statistician Bill James, predicts other factors are better indicators of a player’s offensive success, e.g., on-base and slugging percentages.
Beane basically stared the “old guard” of baseball recruiting in the face and said, “Suck it.” And it worked.
Using sabermetrics, the Oakland A’s were able to put together a competitive team on a $41 million salary; by comparison, the New York Yankees spent more than $125 million in payroll in the same 2002 season. It paid off: the Athletics led a 20-game winning streak, and Beane shifted the paradigm of baseball scouting forever.
When it comes to Web business analytics, it’s not a bad idea to take a page out of the Moneyball book. Sometimes you have to look at data through a different lens in order to better make predictions and optimize opportunities. In baseball, Beane approached player stats differently and got different results. In business, data scientists like Colaco say there’s a similar shift happening in the world of Web 3.0.
Your users may be engaged, but are they being monetized?
Another great article about moving beyond traditional Web analytics.
Fast Company blogger Shawn Graham takes a look at the changing landscape of user analytics; we are now inundated with customer data, but we need to sift through it to figure out what’s meaningful–and that can be daunting.
In Are User Behavior Analytics the Real Predictors of Customer Engagement?, Graham credits social gaming start-ups with pioneering the process. It’s no longer about the page views; game developers have learned to “rapidly interpret and develop meaningful insights from billions of data events each day. They [use] customer data to drive engagement, fuel product development, improve the user experience and ultimately increase ROI.”
Other industries can take advantage of this, too. “Businesses now have an unprecedented opportunity to deeply understand and optimize their customer economics,” says Kontagent President and Chief Science Officer Josh Williams.
Williams says businesses need to find the levers that “drive effective user acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization…by acting on real-time insights that affect their bottom line.” It will be the only way to survive in this new Web 3.0 world.
Does customer engagement really lead to increased revenue?
We’d like to take the old-school vs. new-school analytics topic a step further. Continue Reading…
You need the right lens to look at big data effectively.
Imagine you are two inches tall, and you are inside a giant kaleidoscope. You’re nose to nose with thousands of little bits of color. Lots of different shapes and sizes of all different materials and compositions. You sift through the pieces and try to form patterns. After trying your hardest to move the pieces around, you realized you’re too deep in the pile to identify any discernible patterns. You simply don’t have the ability to step away to gain perspective, while at the same time arrange the pieces in a way that makes visual sense.
What you need is the right lens. You need a simple way to peer into the pile and analyze its structure and composition. You also need to be in a position where you can creatively manipulate its appearance, pivoting your view in any way, and forming new patterns each time. Continue Reading…
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