In a world filled with gaming applications, competing for users' attention is not easy. New games constantly appear and disappear on the market, so developers are constantly looking for the secret to success. However, the answer lies in just one word: “users”. To excel in this competitive landscape, developers must dig deep into user behavioral data in game applications and leverage these insights to improve.
Many game developers and publishers choose an important checkpoint in the game's journey – the test launch – to ensure the game's performance before official release. During this critical phase, you can measure and reveal how players move through a predefined sequence of events or steps, from download to behavior generation in the intended user flow your. This strategic process is called “conversion funnel analysis.”
Understanding how to leverage conversion funnel analysis to develop game apps and interact with players is the key to unlocking success in the mobile gaming industry.
What is conversion funnel analysis?
Conversion funnel analysis is a valuable tool for understanding user behavior in your gaming app. It provides a structured approach to visualize and quantify player growth through a series of predefined events or steps. This process involves in-depth tracking of user actions, from a specific stage, such as downloading an app, to a desired outcome, such as purchasing an item. This detailed tracking feature allows you to measure and optimize conversion rates at every step of the user journey.
Why conversion funnel analysis is a must for mobile game applications
Conversion funnel analysis can provide essential insights to help enhance your marketing strategy, enhance user experience and increase revenue. Let's find out why conversion funnel analysis is important for mobile game success:
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Improve marketing effectiveness in a privacy-first era
In the past, targeting audiences based on their behavioral data was relatively simple. However, with the evolving landscape of privacy regulations and growing concerns about user data, accessing data is becoming increasingly difficult. This change has driven a shift in marketing strategy, moving from targeting specific audiences to analyzing user data after acquisition to determine the most effective marketing channels and campaigns.
Conversion funnel analysis plays a vital role in this privacy-centric era. It helps you track user actions across each marketing channel and campaign, evaluate their conversion rates, and optimize your marketing strategy. By allocating your budget to the most effective channels and campaigns, you can maximize your reach to your target audience. With privacy concerns, conversion funnel analysis has become important in building user acquisition (UA) marketing strategies and improving overall marketing effectiveness.
2. Understand behavior and enhance user experience
Conversion funnel analysis provides a systematic approach to understanding user behavior in gaming apps. It provides a detailed view of how users interact with your game and progress through it. You can identify which stages are challenging, take more time, or have a higher churn rate. Furthermore, it sheds light on whether users are progressing in the game as intended.
These insights are especially valuable during the beta stages before official release. For example, if you notice a significant churn rate during the onboarding phase, you can refine the instructions or provide more precise instructions to reduce user churn. It's important to remember that improving first-time user experience (FTUE) can impact user retention and return on ad spend (ROAS). In short, conversion funnel analysis allows you to make data-driven improvements that enhance the user experience in your game, encouraging players to stay engaged over the long term.
Set up a step-by-step conversion funnel analysis
To begin analyzing your conversion funnel, you must define your purpose and goals. Start by asking yourself what specific areas you want to improve or understand. Your analytics goals can range from increasing purchase conversion rates to increasing subscription conversion rates. These goals will shape your funnel structure for analysis. Once your analytics goals have been set, the next step is to identify key performance indicators (KPIs), data, and events for each funnel stage to label them.
For example, let's say your goal is to check the conversion rate of users who acquired paid ads within the last seven days and then made a purchase. To optimize your performance across different marketing channels, you can organize your funnel analysis stages on Airbridge as follows:
Things to consider when determining funnel stages
When creating the stages in your funnel, there are several important factors to keep in mind:
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One-way progression
It is essential to ensure that user behavior transitions through the stages of the funnel and does not return to a previous step. This one-way progression is important to ensure accurate analysis. Using the previous example, users can only purchase items after successfully registering due to the game's settings. This prevents the accumulation of duplicate data from the same user in a single step.
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Consistent and easy-to-read names for each step
The names assigned to each stage in your funnel should be consistent and clear, ensuring every team member can interpret results in the same context. This practice simplifies reading and understanding reports, making the data immediately clear and logical at first glance.
Once you have carefully defined the stages of your funnel analysis, collect the data according to your definition and get to work on the analysis process.
Analyze data with Airbridge Funnel Reports
When it comes to conversion funnel analysis, you have a few options at your disposal. While product analytics tools are certainly possible, a mobile measurement partner (MMP) offers unique advantages. Unlike other MMPs, Airbridge is a notable exception as it is the only MMP with conversion funnel analysis.
As an MMP, Airbridge presents conversion funnel reports that provide detailed analysis across the entire user journey, from ad impressions or clicks to in-app events, uses proprietary data that media channels only share with their partners. In particular, you can quickly create specific groups based on Luft's internal OLAP database, Airbridge. With the conversion funnel report, you can understand when users tend to leave your app and how the user journey varies by country or operating system.
Benefits of channel analysis with MMP
The distinct advantage of using MMP for conversion funnel analysis lies in the ability to access a comprehensive view of advertising data, including data from the Self-Attribution Network (SAN). Only MMP can use data from SANs, exclusively through partnerships, combined with their data to provide a complete picture of the user journey. In practical terms, even when MMP and product analytics tools are integrated, product analytics tools still lack the ability to analyze the customer journey, including attribution data from the SAN. Airbridge can close this gap by providing comprehensive conversion funnel reporting in the form of MMP.
For mobile game marketers, this means the opportunity to create more effective marketing strategies by leveraging user segmentation analysis performed through MMP.
