The data, the opinion, all the news that's fit to put on your screen. Welcome to the Swrve blog
For those who missed it, Swrve CTO Steve Collins' presentation from Casual Connect Hamburg. Loads of awesome advice for those engaged in A/B testing, delivered with the usual style and panache!
We enjoyed this great article on the merits of F2P by Lee Perry over at Gamasutra. The freemium world comes in for a fair amount of criticism, but this puts a lot of that in context. Is it really so wrong to identify what players don't like a game and act on it? Is it a crime to care about issues like retention and UI design. Surely not!
Of course we would say that, wouldn't we. It all chimes in nicely with the Swrve view of the world after all. But it also makes complete sense. The alternative to carefully analyzing and acting upon user feedback…Neatly following on from our latest post on the limits of analytics, here's Alistair Croll via the awesome Avinash Kaushik reminding us of the limits of the basic analytics approach.
Obviously we agree with pretty much every word of this. In particular, the clear focus on changing things and moving the needle (rather than simply looking at the needle every now and again) is a concept that needs to be deeply embedded in our approach to mobile app and game development. Our take on this is that the action itself is what really matters, and the analytics put in place should simply be what is…By popular demand - another chance to enjoy our (short!) webinar on the subject of conversion. Why it matters, and what you can do to increase the number of your players who are contributing to your revenues:
Turning Players Into Payers - Maximizing Conversion With Swrve from swrve on Vimeo.Reading this informative engagement study from Playnomics got us thinking. Or specifically, the quoted result that 85 of social game players do not return after their first day did.
Although that figure might not feel like much of a surprise to anyone, there's still something of a shock when it's written down in black and white and we take a moment to consider its implications. We're being told that of all those customers we work so hard to acquire - and increasingly, pay good money to acquire - barely 10% ever get past day 1 playing our game.We're delighted to announce that from today we'll be enabling our customers to measure and improve the effectiveness of mobile advertising with Facebook’s mobile app install ads - which appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed.
Unfortunately ever-increasing acquisition costs are a fact of life for game and app publishers, and we're hoping this integration will enable clear reporting of ROI on those users acquired via Facebook’s mobile app install ads. That in turn will help our customers deliver smarter, more targeted marketing campaigns that give them more bang for their buck than ever before.It isn't impossible of course - in fact our customers are doing it every day - but still good to read this summary from Eric Seufert over on PocketGamer.
Particularly strong on the importance of not necessarily changing an individual's behavior (hard to do) but rather giving each type the experience they need (a little easier!) This is our favorite bit. Anyone who plugs the importance of data-driven optimization is alright with us:We were delighted to announce today that yet another forward thinking, all round awesome studio is putting Swrve to good use. That's right: HitGrab, makers of Magic Pets, Mouse Hunt and more, have selected Swrve to maximize retention, engagement and conversion within their games.
HitGrab are just our kind of company. Smart, data-focused and all about delivering great experiences to their players. That's why their using Swrve to provide KPI data on player activity, support complex segmentation of the user base, and enable A/B testing of game elements in order to optimize that experience.We're not above a little shameless self-promotion here at Swrve. And we're so proud of this new feature (rolled out as part of Release 46) that we figured a little update on our blog wouldn't be out of the question. In a nutshell, we now enable 'install day' cohort analysis for a range of metrics such as playtime, sessions and revenue - in addition to the more standard retention measures.
Cohort analysis is essential to good analytics practice. It turns what can sometimes resemble mounds of somewhat meaningless data into clear points of comparison. It gives a clear answer to the obvious question, "are things getting better or worse?" by quickly enabling the performance…
