When it comes to game and mobile app analytics, there are hundreds of metrics numbers to track. There are metrics like downloads, sessions, or DAUs on one end of the spectrum. These numbers are relatively straightforward and measure concrete actions. More complicated metrics include user churn or Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU). These are less intuitive to interpret and might raise more questions than answers.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all policy for game analytics, some useful metrics can help shed light on how you can improve your mobile game. To better understand how these metrics relate to each other and provide comprehensive insights into your game’s performance, we divide them into three main categories: engagement metrics, monetization metrics, and advertising metrics. Each category focuses on different aspects of player behavior, revenue generation, and marketing effectiveness, allowing you to optimize various avenues of your games.

Let’s dive into the first category.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics refer to key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure how actively and deeply players interact with your game. These metrics provide insights into player behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels, helping developers assess the efficiency of their game infrastructures, evaluate player engagement levels, and optimize their games to enhance players’ experiences to maximize their retention.

• DAU and MAU: The daily- and monthly active users ratio measures the percentage of monthly active users who engage with the game on a daily basis, providing insights into the game’s stickiness and popularity over time. A high DAU/MAU ratio indicates strong user retention and frequent engagement, while a low ratio may signal potential churn or disinterest among users.
• Retention: Retention tracks the number of players who continue to engage with the game over time, typically measured at various intervals such as day 1, day 7, and day 30. High retention rates mean players find your game compelling and will likely return. On the other hand, low retention rates suggest issues with gameplay, onboarding, or overall user experience.

Read more: Decoding players’ patterns with engagement tracing

• Playtime: Playtime refers to the total time players spend actively engaging with the game across all sessions. It provides insights into player engagement levels and the overall appeal of the game’s content and mechanics. Monitoring playtime can help developers identify popular game features, optimize gameplay experiences, and tailor content to meet player preferences.
• Session length: Session length measures the average duration of a single gaming session, indicating how long players typically play the game in one sitting. Longer session lengths suggest high player engagement and enjoyment, while shorter session lengths may indicate issues with pacing, content depth, or player frustration. Analyzing session length trends can help you fine-tune gameplay mechanics, level design, and progression systems to maximize player satisfaction and retention.
• Session count: Session count tracks the number of gaming sessions initiated by players within a defined timeframe, providing insights into player engagement frequency and habits. Higher session counts indicate strong player engagement and interest in the game, while lower session counts may signal waning interest or competing priorities. Understanding session count trends can help developers identify opportunities to enhance return visits, introduce new content, or enhance social features to keep players returning for more.
• Churn rate: Churn rate is when players stop engaging with the game over a specific period, indicating the number of players who churn or disengage. A high churn rate suggests issues with player retention and overall game satisfaction, while a low churn rate indicates strong player loyalty and satisfaction.

Read more: Retention Rate Secrets to Reduce User Churn

• Player count: Player count refers to the total number of players engaging with the game within a specified timeframe, providing insights into overall player interest and adoption.
• New users: New users represent players who have recently installed or started playing the game for the first time within a defined timeframe. Monitoring new user acquisition rates gives you insights into the game’s appeal to new audiences, the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and overall user acquisition trends.
• Installs ratio: The installs ratio compares the number of game installs to other relevant metrics, such as ad impressions or clicks, providing insights into user acquisition campaigns’ effectiveness and marketing channels’ effectiveness. A high install ratio indicates efficient user acquisition and conversion rates, while a low ratio may suggest inefficiencies or issues with campaign targeting, messaging, or creatives.

These metrics are crucial to developers who want to understand how the players engage with their games. But knowing how your games compare to the market is equally important. With data and insights from over 140,000 game studios and developers, GameAnalytics’ Benchmarks are a powerful ally for game developers. Further, our Store Intelligence provides insights into store rankings, including historical data. Both these tools are carefully packaged in a tool we call GameIntel, and their unlimited potential is a part of the Pro subscription.

The next category of metrics relates to a product or service’s financial performance, particularly in revenue generation.

Monetization metrics

Monetization metrics KPIs focus on assessing the effectiveness of in-game monetization strategies and measuring the revenue generated from player interactions. Some common monetization metrics that we offer in our analytics solutions include:

• Conversion rate: Conversion rate measures the percentage of players who take a desired action, such as making in-game purchases, subscribing to a premium service, or completing a specific level or task. A high conversion rate indicates effective monetization strategies and a players’ willingness to engage in these revenue-generating activities.
• ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): ARPU calculates the average revenue generated per user, providing insights into the overall monetization effectiveness of a game. By dividing total revenue by the total number of active users within a specified period, you can calculate the average value of each player and identify opportunities to increase revenue through targeted monetization efforts.
• ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User): ARPPU determines the average revenue generated per purchase user, excluding non-paying players from the calculation. It offers insights into the spending behavior and value of paying players, helping developers optimize pricing strategies, in-game offers, and monetization mechanics to maximize revenue from paying users.
• LTV (Lifetime Value): LTV estimates the total revenue generated by a player over their entire engagement with the game, including initial and recurring purchases. By forecasting the long-term value of players, you can prioritize user acquisition efforts, optimize retention strategies, and calculate the return on investment for marketing campaigns and user acquisition initiatives.
• IAP revenue (In-App Purchase Revenue): IAP revenue represents the total revenue generated from in-game purchases, including consumable items, virtual currency, expansion packs, and other digital goods.
• ILRD (IAP Lifetime Revenue per Download): ILRD measures the lifetime revenue generated per download from in-app purchases, indicating the revenue potential of each acquired user. These metrics allows you to understand the average revenue generated per user acquisition and evaluate the effectiveness of monetization strategies in converting downloads into revenue.

Advertising metrics

Advertising metrics evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising campaigns. In the context of game analytics, advertising metrics focus on assessing the performance of advertisements used to promote games and drive user acquisition. Some common advertising metrics include:

• CPC (Cost Per Click): CPC represents the average cost of each ad click, indicating the efficiency and effectiveness of ad campaigns in driving user engagement. Lower CPC values suggest more cost-effective advertising strategies and higher engagement rates among target audiences.
• CPI (Cost Per Install): CPI measures the average cost associated with acquiring a new user through an advertisement, providing insights into the efficiency and return on investment of user acquisition campaigns.
• CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions): CPM calculates the cost per one thousand ad impressions, representing the cost advertisers pay for every thousand times their ad is displayed to users. It is a common pricing model used in online advertising, with higher CPM values indicating greater demand for ad inventory and potentially higher advertising revenue for publishers.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): CTR measures the percentage of users who click on an advertisement after viewing it, indicating the effectiveness of ad creatives, messaging, and placement in driving user engagement.
• Fraud Share: Fraud share represents the portion of ad clicks or impressions that are deemed fraudulent or invalid, often resulting from click bots, fraudulent traffic sources, or ad stacking techniques. Monitoring fraud share helps advertisers identify and mitigate fraudulent activities, protect advertising budgets, and ensure the accuracy and integrity of campaign performance data.

Both monetization and advertising data is available in our Benchmarks.

While there is no magic recipe for game analytics, the above metrics are standards that can help you get started in the world of analytics. The most important part of mobile game analytics is to get started and establish benchmarks for your own games. Once you understand how your users behave, you can measure things like the impact of a game update or changes to your user acquisition strategy.

If you like challenging yourself, we encourage you to explore advanced analytics concepts like segmentation, funnels, or custom events. GameAnalytics makes accessing this data easy and provides you with a set of actionable insights to help you optimize your games – no data scientist needed.

There’s a common misconception that cybercriminals only target big business. But small businesses are actually three times more likely to be a target than larger companies. From the hacker’s perspective, it’s easy pickings. Small businesses have less security and fewer safeguards in place to protect themselves.

But protecting yourself isn’t necessarily hard. Not if you’re aware of the techniques hackers use. So, with data breaches becoming increasingly common in the news, we thought we’d give a little advice about how to protect yourself.

How do hackers attack game developers?

It’s not just your game that hackers might target. They could target your business and infrastructure, too. That’s why it’s important to think about how your game, backend systems, and internal tools link all together – especially if you’re making a multiplayer game.

For example, if you’re a small developer, you might decide to host your multiplayer matches on your own servers. But if those are the same servers where you store your player database, filled with usernames and passwords, you’re making it easy to find that data.

Social engineering is the biggest threat

Research from CS Hub found that social engineering is the number one business threat. This is just a fancy way of saying that the easiest way to hack someone is to trick the people themselves – your players or your employees. In other words, if you want to break into a vault, it’s far easier to get the manager to open the door for you than to drill your way in.

Hackers will go to extreme lengths to trick you. It might be as simple as an email that looks like it’s from one of your tools. Or it might be complicated. For example, they might look at your CEO’s Facebook page, hack their daughter’s account, and send a message from her asking for information that could help them guess a password.

Eventually, they could end up being able to send emails directly from the CEO’s personal account. Would you question an email from your boss telling you to send you an access code? Probably not. But you should.

Exploiting your game

Hackers can either look at your game code directly, try to inject code, or just generate random inputs until they strike lucky. This is usually fine in a single-player game, where spawning in an item doesn’t matter. But in a multiplayer game, where there might be real-world value to those items – it can be a serious problem.

Admin commands are particularly juicy for hackers. If you’re running an MMO, those admins might have tools to block players, reset passwords, or see people’s real names. Having those commands could help them trick a player or even blackmail them.

Targeting your infrastructure

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is where a hacker will send thousands – if not millions – of commands at your servers in a hope to overload them and make them crash.

At the very least, it can be irritating. Your game falls down and you lose revenue. But hackers might also use it to blackmail you by holding your game hostage.

They could target your file storage, your databases, your employee’s laptops, your emails – everything around your game.

Protecting your game from hackers

Most security experts tout one rule: Zero trust. Approach everything with scepticism. Do that, and you’re far less likely to succumb to trickery.

Teach staff and players about social engineering

Education is key. If people know the techniques hackers might use, they often think twice before giving away valuable information. They question whether that email is legitimate or whether they should really be giving that code they were texted to the person on the other end of the phone.

Obviously, it’s far easier to teach your staff. But you want to educate players, too. If you have an in-game chat function, remind players that you’ll never ask them for their password. Or to never tell anybody the two-factor authentication code you just sent.

Source: The Sun / Epic Games

Check through another medium

Now that your people are familiar with the types of attack, they will hopefully avoid giving out sensitive information. But what if your CEO really does need that access code?

Simple. Check using another communication tool. Give them a ring or set up a video call. That way, you’ve got proof it’s actually them asking for the information.

Make sure every layer of encryption is strong

It’s all well and good to have super strong encryption on your player database. But it’s all for nothing if someone’s email is just “password123”. There’s a reason “the weakest link” is a common phrase.

Keep everything up to date

As tempting as it is to hit “remind me later” whenever you get a popup for an update, just update it. Whether it’s your operating system, your game engine, or some third-party plug-in you’re using. Make sure everything is up to date.

Test your game for exploits

Try breaking your own game. Think like a hacker and see if you can summon items, use admin commands or launch services. Generate random inputs and try to inject code into every text box you have.

You can even offer rewards to players if they find bugs. Sure, most of those might not have any serious ramifications. But some might.

Hide sensitive code from the client-side image

Put blockers in place to stop hackers from directly seeing the code that’s requesting information. And make sure the data itself is encrypted. For example, if you need to call on a player database to get their name, don’t call it directly from the player’s image. Otherwise, the hacker could find out what service you’re calling and even get the IP address of the database.

Instead, call the server-side image and get it to do the heavy lifting. It can then encrypt the specific data and send it back to the player. Even if they break the encryption, they don’t get access to the database itself.

Keep your data safe with DataSuite

If you’re collecting and storing analytics data from lots of different sources, you probably want a data warehouse. With DataSuite, we host and keep all that data secure on our servers. And we never share it with any third-parties, so you have total control over it. Read more about DataSuite and see if it’ll work for you.

Data is the key to success in the ever-evolving landscape of game development. Explore this guide to transform your data into insights using our turn-key data solutions.

What’s inside?

Our comprehensive guide explores cost-saving strategies and real-world applications for advanced use cases. Learn how to seamlessly integrate data sources, unlock detailed player insights with Player Warehouse, access real-time data with Raw Export, and ensure data privacy compliance.

Discord is rapidly becoming the gamer social media channel. It’s the go-to platform for developers wanting to build a community. And it’s no surprise – players already use it to chat with their friends while playing games. Discord is the perfect space to add more content and engage with people.

But what exactly should your Discord server look like? How do you build that community? How do you keep it vibrant and active? It all comes down to five steps.

Step 1: Get familiar with the types of channel

Okay, you’re raring to go. You’ve signed up, given your server a name, and maybe even uploaded an image to ensure it stands out. Now what?

Well, first of all, you can make two types of servers: a private server or a community server. You’re going to want the latter. This gives you some extra options regarding channel types (and a few other features we’ll explore later).

The five types of channels are:

1. Text. This is the default. It’s what you expect.
2. Voice. A virtual conference room. You can also stream video and use your camera. Good times.
3. Forum. Like a regular forum, people can post topics and keep it all together. These are particularly useful for FAQs and feature requests.
4. Announcement. These are where you can post updates, but people can also follow them to post on their own servers.
5. Stage. These are a special kind of voice channel for significant events, where you want a few speakers and a big audience. They’re best for those AMAs, fireside chats, or webinars.

The best Discord servers are the ones that use a good mix of these types.

Step 2: Organize your server

Now that you know the difference between the channel types, you must decide what channels you need. And how to organize them. There’s not only one right way to group them, but generally, you’ll want sections like support, internal, general chat, beta testing, announcements, and in-game advice.

Whatever your structure, there are a few specific channels you should include:

1. Welcome. A holding channel where newbies can say hello and get to know the community.
2. Rules and guidelines. Your second channel should typically have your community rules to ensure everyone is on the same page. Make sure you fill this out before you go live. If you need a starting point, we recommend checking out Discord’s rules. (You’ll need to follow these anyway.)
3. General chat. This is typically an off-topic channel for general chit-chat.
4. Play together. If your game is multiplayer, having a channel where people can find a squad and team up is useful. It is particularly useful for games with specific roles, like Overwatch or World of Warcraft – where you might be looking for a healer.
5. Announcements. You’ll want at least one channel where you can post updates about your game.
6. Support. You want a place where people can ask for help. You might want to split this into bug reports and general help or have separate channels for different aspects of your game – like game modes.
7. FAQ. This makes a good forum channel. You can have each FAQ as a separate post. The fact that the forum channels have in-build search and tags makes this much easier to use than a regular text channel. As part of your FAQ, consider whether you should include in-game tips and tricks or tutorials.
8. Feedback and feature requests. This is another channel which is best as a forum. You can let people post ideas and even tag them. Just make sure you keep an eye on the channel and incorporate the most popular changes (or explain why you’re not going to).
9. Beta testing. Getting your community involved in your beta testing is a great way to engage with your players. But you’ll want to have a private channel for those players so they can discuss their feedback with you.
10. A community update channel. This is where you’ll get Discord updates relevant to your admins and moderators. (You’ll need this once you’ve turned your server into a community server.)

Those are the main channels that you should definitely include. But it’s worth getting your team together and brainstorming other channels specific to your game. For example, do you have players in lots of regions? Maybe you need to separate those out?

Step 3: Set up your roles

Once you’ve decided on your channels and overall structure, it’s time to think about the roles you’ll have. This should be pretty simple – your typical admin, mods, and general – but you also have an opportunity to create a bit of friendly rivalry or prestige.

For example, if your game has factions – like the Horde and Alliance in World of Warcraft or the houses in Harry Potter – you might consider letting players pick a side. Maybe you even lock certain channels to certain factions so they can plot and scheme against their rivals.

Or maybe you want to uplift particular players. People who are part of your Patron or are content creators might get a special role with a few extra benefits. Maybe they get a special flair they can use or you add them to a monthly prize draw.

Step 4: Convert to a community server

With your basic server set up, it’s time to turn it into a community server. A community server gives you extra functionality (like being able to make those forum channels or getting data insights once you hit 500 members). And – when you’re big enough (10,000 members) – you can even get listed in the public discovery section in Discord.

You can turn your server into a community server by going into the server settings, heading down to community, and clicking on “Enable Community.”

As you go through the process, there are a few channels that Discord makes sure you have. You can either create new channels for these or pick from ones you’ve already created. It’ll also ask you to set default channels that people will see. For now, make sure you don’t hide your channels away.

Create a welcome screen

With your community server set up, it’s time to add a bit of onboarding. If you have a lot of channels and users, it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. So Discord offers a welcome screen – you pick a few key channels based on common activities and send people straight to those.

This helps get people past that ‘choice paralysis’ that can happen if you just open a new server with a hundred different channels. Just write in your description, pick the top four activities that people might want to do and then link to the relevant channels.

Let people customize their experience

Discord also offers customization options for community servers. Most servers miss this nifty feature, but it’s a really useful way of making sure that people only see the channels they care about. (And join the right roles.)

It’s a simple questionnaire where the results decide which channels you see and the roles you join. It can be a great way to make sure that players in – say – Europe, get added to the Europe channel, rather than the USA channel. In fact, PUBG Mobile uses it really well.

In this example, it’s a pick-as-many-as-you-like situation. Players can choose everything if they want. But if they don’t click, they won’t see those channels. They’ll only be added to the ones they actually care about.

We also particularly like how inclusive PUBG made their server, going so far as to include pronoun preferences as a role.

This is a single-select option. Here, they’ve used it to decide which of these three roles a player wants assigned to them. But you could easily do the same with your game’s factions.

Don’t hide your channels

One mistake that people can make when setting up their server is having too many hidden channels. If you don’t make a channel default, people are unlikely to find it. That’s because most people won’t click the “channels” button at the top of the list and browse all the hidden ones to turn them on. They’ll just accept the status quo.

This is where the questionnaire can be really helpful. If you do find you have loads of channels, either make sure you set them as a default channel or that you’ve at least got a question in your onboarding steps about that channel.

Step 5: Keep engaged

Now you’ve got everything set up, it’s time to actually start building your community. The key here is to make sure you’ve regularly got an excuse to engage with your community. There are a few ways you can do that.

1. Run Q&As. Set up a Stage channel and host a fireside chat or something every week. Let players chat with your lead developer and answer questions.
2. Host in-game events. Set up a channel and set up a tournament. Do prize draws. Set a daily challenge. Depending on your game, there are plenty of ways to get people playing your game slightly differently.
3. Promote content creators and fan artwork. If you start getting YouTubers or Twitch streamers regularly creating content around your game, make sure you set up an announcement channel so people can follow their content. You could even give them special roles. Likewise, if you’re getting a lot of fan art, set up a separate channel to showcase it all.
4. Add bots for more fun. We won’t get into all the different bots that you can add to Discord. But there are loads to choose from, including games like Truth or Dare or dice-rolling tools. Maybe you could even set up a role-playing channel?
5. Hire a community manager. At this point, with all these activities. You’re going to need someone to be keeping an eye on everything. They’ll need to host these events, gather the feedback to send to the rest of your team, and generally field questions.

Stay in the loop

With that, hopefully, you’ll have a great bedrock on which your community can grow. If you’d like to keep up to date with our own news, sign up for our newsletter and make sure you never miss a blog.

This event design guide is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to make the most out of their data within GameAnalytics.

Data tracking is complex, requiring meticulous effort to ensure that downstream data is valuable. This guide introduces you to the concept of a ‘Tracking Plan’, a strategic document that helps bridge the gap between data collection and analysis.

What’s Inside?

1. Brainstorm Your Burning Questions: Identify key game-related questions to guide your data tracking.
2. Create Your Events: Learn to design trackable events for thorough data collection.
3. Define Your Dimensions and Attributes: Understand the role of dimensions and attributes in enriching your data.
4. Plug in Your Game: Integrate your game with the tracking plan to gather meaningful data.
5. Keep Updating Your Plan: Emphasizes the necessity of adapting your plan to remain valuable.

By following this guide, you will develop a comprehensive, adaptable data tracking plan that ensures robust, valuable data for precise analysis and better insights within GameAnalytics.

Learn how successful publishers evaluate hundreds of games per month, to find the next hit game.

What’s inside?

One of the questions we get most often at GameAnalytics is: “How does [super successful publisher] evaluate hundreds of games and find hit after hit? We want to do the same thing!”.

The short answer: in-house data tools, which is exactly what we go over in this report. What the best setup is, key techniques you can use, and how to get started.

Over our last couple of blogs around data warehouses, we’ve explained how they let you analyze data from across your portfolio and look at what insights you can gather from them.

Now, we’ll dive into how to build a data warehouse. What steps do you need to take and what resources will you need? To figure this out, we’ve rounded up the costs, steps, and tools we think you’ll need to get started. Please note, that we haven’t included the cost of running an engineering department (which you’ll need), which can end up being a lot of $$$.

What do I need to get started?

Before you start, you’ll need to ensure you have the right people. You’ll likely need a software or data engineer, and perhaps an architect or DevOps engineer. You’ll also need to budget for tools like data storage, servers, and database licenses. You might decide to host these on-premise or in the cloud. It’s up to you.

Alternatively, you can use our Player Warehouse and let us take the load off your shoulders.

Six steps to your own data warehouse

If you’re looking to create your own data warehouse, there are six steps you’ll need to follow. Make sure you give yourself ample time to finish each step – it’s hard to predict exactly how long each step will take. Some might take three weeks, others three months. Chat with your developer to check.

When pricing up this entire process, it’s a bit difficult to give accurate estimates. As you can imagine, many moving parts are at play. We’ve put some rough costs in this article, but don’t take it for the gospel. You can consider it a rough number that a studio of a semi-large game could expect to pay.

Step one: Add your tracking code

Average cost: $0.
Average time: Anywhere between a week and 6 months.
Typical tools: GameAnalytics core tool.

In this stage, you’re adding the logic to track events in your game that you’ll eventually send to the servers. There’s a lot you’ll want to capture. What are players doing? How long do they stay logged in? When do they make a purchase? What level were they on when they signed out?

Thankfully, you don’t need to plan all that logic yourself. Every analytics platform has its own API you can plug into. Or you can just use our core tool. We’ve already defined all these events and set up the tracking, so you just need to use our API and SDK to grab the information.

Using our core tool will likely take you a week to set up and learn how to grab the relevant information. But if you’re looking to create your own analytics, this could take a long time. (It’s taken us years to get our core tool to where it is now.)

Step two: Collect the data

Average cost: $2,000 per month.
Average time: One month.
Typical tools: AWS S3, REST API, AWS Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS API Gateway.

Once you’ve got the code in place to collect your games’ data, you need somewhere to send it all and store it. Remember, you’ll need to encrypt the data you send, so any service you use needs to work with TLS – the standard security protocol when sending data over the internet.

You’ll need two services

Sometimes these come bundled together, and you’ll have to get them separately. The first is an HTTP service at the front, like AWS API gateway. This handles how a device connects to your storage.

The second is your storage, like AWS S3. This is what holds the actual data.

Combining AWS API gateway with S3 is a good mix, as it’ll mean you can use TLS and easily scale it up if you get more traffic than expected.

Consider the cost of the data, storage, and processing power

Whatever service you choose, you need to account for the data transfer costs – specifically your ‘egress costs’. You’ll also need the computer power necessary to handle that much-encrypted traffic, the connections themselves, and parsing the events. Calculating this cost can be a bit tricky. It depends on the volume of your data. You can calculate it here if you’re using AWS Stack (we also wrote a blog on how we reduced the cost of HTTP(S) APIs on AWS. Check it out here).

What other options are there?

Many cloud providers offer managed services, taking the load off your hands. For example, AWS Kinesis Date Firehose or API Gateway. These take a lot of the strain off you, but are quite expensive. They’re also not designed specifically for games, so it can be tricky to set them up properly.

Step three: Transform the data

Average cost: $1,000 per month.
Average time: Depends on data size and sources.
Typical tools: AWS Glue, Hadoop (EMR), Kafka, Kinesis.

Now that you’ve collected all that data, you need to convert it all into a standardized format. The idea here is to process the data so that you can add it to the warehouse. This stage is crucial if you want to bring together multiple data sets from different sources, otherwise, you won’t be able to search through the data properly or find links between those data sets.

Depending on how you’ve set up your original databases and how many different sources you’re gathering from, this could be relatively simple or quite complex. Many sources with different rules and data sets will be difficult to standardize.

Usually, you’ll be processing in batches, using AWS Glue or Spark on Hadoop (EMR). But in some cases, you might want real-time data. In those cases, you’ll want a streaming service like Kafka or Kinesis.

A word on pricing

These steps are usually quite pricey. It really depends on the scale of your solution. Post-processing data alone (adding the cost of the transform) could get up to $12K, and then if you add the cost of the player ETL, this can be around $5K per month.

Depending on how much data you’re dealing with (so say billions of events), it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars each month.

Step four: Load data to the warehouse

Average cost: Anywhere between $100 and $2,000 a month.
Average time: Ongoing. Usually once a day.
Typical tools: BigQuery Data Transfer, AWS Glue, Apache Druid, or Click house.

Once you’ve prepared all your data in a standard format, it’s time to send it to the warehouse.

Rather than sending it all at once, it’s best to send a batch once a day. You’ll also want to manage how much you send based on your typical queries and the data lifecycle. This also means you can handle the costs and not spend too much at once.

The most popular warehouses are Snowflake, BigQuery or AWS Redshift. And if you need real-time data, you’ll want to look into Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, or Clickhouse.

Step five: Monitor and troubleshoot

Average cost: Free (or not too pricey).
Average time: Around a week.
Typical tools: AWS, Cloudwatch, Datadog, Grafana, Pingdom, or Pagerduty.

Once everything is set up, and the devices send data, it’s time to ensure it stays online. Any downtime is going to lose you data, which could be crucial.

You’ll need someone on call to deal with problems, day and night. Usually, a small team of two or three should be able to handle this, along with their other responsibilities. But bear in mind that they’ll need to check the status regularly and have the skills to fix any problems on their own.

Step six: Analyze and visualize

Average cost: Free (although can be thousands, depending on what you need).
Average time: At least a couple of weeks.
Typical tools: Tableau, Superset, Holistics, Looker, Google Studio, or AWS QuickSight.

Finally, you need to make that data useful. If you’ve got someone who knows SQL, they can run queries. But this often needs specialist knowledge. Usually, studios go for a visualization tool or framework, like Tableau, Superset, Holistics, Looker, or AWS QuickSight.

Our Player Warehouse is ready to go

Instead of all that faff, you could just use our Player Warehouse. We’ve designed it specifically for game developers. And you can get started in minutes, not months. Let us handle keeping it up and running. And save yourself all the hosting and processing costs.

That way you can focus on the last step: analyzing the data. So get started and make the most of your games.

The goal of marketing your mobile game? Drive awareness and increase installs. It sounds simple when you narrow it down to that. But there’s a world of tools and techniques you’ll need to research to get it done right.

The mobile games industry is a vast one, filled with thousands of games. And making yours stand out is just half the battle. So to give you a fighting chance, we’re rounded up the best articles and resources for you to get started.

Let’s dig in.

First off, understand your audience

Before you even consider sorting your marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re selling to. Sure, you made the game – so you should have an idea of who your audience is. But you’ll need to understand exactly what your players’ motivations are and why they’ll want to play your game.

Here’s what we recommend reading:

1. Research the eight most common player motivations

This article is an in-depth breakdown of the eight most common player motivations for mobile games. From competitive play to relaxation, Will Freeman explains what motivates players and how to adapt your game to entice different players.

Photo by Pandhuya Niking on Unsplash 

2. Read up on the Bartle Player Taxonomy

The Bartle Player Taxonomy looks at the psychology of players, and classifies them based on what actions they take while they play. It’s based on a paper written by Richard Bartle back in 1996. And it’s a great place to start when learning more about the motivations of your players.

Market your game during your soft launch

Soft launching your game not only helps you perfect your levels and squash bugs, it also helps build a loyal following and gets people chatting about your game before you even launch. Here’s what you can do:

1. Learn from the best

We analysed three real-life examples where developers successfully built a community before launching their game. It’s filled to the brim with useful insights and tips from some of the most popular developers, and should give you some inspiration for your own game.

2. Create a press kit for journalists

Contacting the press and asking journalists to review your game is always a good shout. They can raise awareness and get players searching for your game, which will boost your organic installs. But you don’t want to just send them a game key to play. You need to convince them to try it out first. So here’s how create the perfect press kit.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

3. Perfect your email marketing strategy

This is something you can do early on. Once you have a following, a great way to keep your loyal players keen is by sending regular updates on your progress. Ask their opinions, get them to vote for new features, or just send news as and when you have it. Here’s a breakdown of how to do it well.

4. Start shouting on social

Build relationships with your audience through social media. Answer their questions, share their art, keep them updated, and interact with them – regularly. Depending on your game, you can even create a fanbase.

Our friends at Adjust wrote a guide for social media marketing. And the experts at Megacool have some advice around gif sharing, too.

5. Get social media influencers to create some hype

Influencers are always looking for early access to new games. Their viewers love this type of content, and regular watch streams and reviews to find the next best game to try out. You can reach out and give influencers game keys and special discount promotions for their subscribers. The developers of Stumble Guys did this brilliantly. You could even argue that this played a big part in their success.

A lot of developers do this. The crew at Matchmade put together a couple of guides to help you stand out and find the right influencers to work with. Here’s part one of their series. And when you’re done, make sure to head on to part two.

Tidy up your game’s store page

Your App Store listing is like the front of your shop. And the last thing you want is someone walking past your window. So it needs to grab people’s attention. A bad icon, boring copy, or dull pictures can drive potential players away. Here’s how to avoid that:

1. Find your niche

The big publishers will always have an advantage over you. They have an ecosystem of players, years of experience, and an abundance of budget. So how do you compete? You can find a niche.

That’s what Platonic Games did. They found a gap in the market by researching keywords on the App Stores. And they built a unique community and following, which they actively engage with. Here’s how they did it.

2. Get advice from the best

We’ve spoken to a few different experts and publishers on how they perfect their app store listing. They all have valuable advice on how to do this right.

Games’ journalist, Jupiter Hadley, chatted to a few industry pros and rounded up her findings. And TapNation also shared their experience and top tips to reaching the top charts.

3. Sell your game with your words

The devil’s in the details. You’re competing with every other game listed on the stores. So you want to make sure you excite any new players with your words. Boring language can be such a turn off.

We asked professional copywriter and editor, Emma Wilkin, for her best tips on writing copy that sells. And she rounded up all of her advice for you. It’s definitely worth a read.

4. Perfect your creatives

The words are only half the work. Your images and trailers will show your players what your game is all about. You should never judge a book by its cover, but players will always judge your game by how it looks.

The first resource we have to help get your creatives in order is from Homa Games. They wrote a report on optimizing app store images. This is mainly for hyper-casual games, but a lot of the rules apply to other genres, too.

Another article to read is Nathan Lovato’s guide to game trailers. He covers the dos and don’ts to crafting brilliant game trailers, which you can use on your store page.

Nail your user acquisition

Lastly, you need to think about your user acquisition strategy. Which networks to work with, how to get the best ad creatives, and how to lower your cost-per-install (CPI). Here are the top articles we’ve done:

1. Read up on how in-game advertising works

Sounds silly. But perfecting your ad and user acquisition strategy is a beast of its own. Ideally, you’ll have a couple of experts in your team – reviewing campaigns, lowering your CPI, and increasing your player’s LTV.

To get you started, you’ll first want to get familiar with the industry terminology. We’ve also got a beginner’s guide to header bidding and ad mediation, which should cover the basics.

2. Get creative with your ad creatives

We’ve got a breakdown of the top ad creative strategies to help you get new players in your game. It breaks down all of the different ad types, when to use them, and shows real life examples from leading studios. We have a specific guide to perfecting playable ads, too.

3. Research the best ad networks

There are plenty of ad networks to choose from. Tenjin actually released a report on the top ad networks in 2022. They focus on hyper-casual, but it should give you an idea what to look for when picking your own.

Think we missed something?

Get in touch, and we’ll add it to the list. And if you enjoyed this article, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter (form below). We’ll keep you updated with the last industry news and guides.

We’ve been getting our research on, and looking into the metrics behind successful hyper-casual games. You can read our full findings here. But just in case you’re too busy for that, we’ve put together this post to give you the need-to-knows.

What’s the research about?

Using data from our network of games, we’ve broken down the top KPIs (key performance indicators – basically measurements of performance) that developers of hyper-casual games should be aiming for, by sub-genre. You can use these to benchmark your own games against some of the best games, and learn just whereabouts you sit within the industry.

But before we do, here’s an idea of how much data we’re handling in GameIntel.

Our network stats for Benchmarks+

• All-time integrated games: 140k+
• Games tagged with sub-genres: 150K+
• Cross-title monthly players: 2b+
• Average monthly sessions: 20b+

Network stats for Game Explorer

• Data from top ranked games featured: 321k+
• Game-specific contextual tags: 500+

In short, we have a mixture of aggregated data from our portfolio games that we collect from GameAnalytics, and data we scrape from the App Stores. For the latter, we’ve layered and combined this with our own aggregated data and tagged over 200k games with contextual points. There’s a lot more info around this here.

What are the hyper-casual sub-genres we’re looking at?

• Timing: These games are all about precision like timing jumps or hitting a ball. So it’s titles like Fun Race 3D, Crossy Road, Splashy!, and Color Switch.
• Traversal: This genre of games relies on players’ reflexes and getting them to swipe left or right, for example, dodge objects or run through a jungle. It includes games like Color Road!, Pixel Rush, and High Heels!.
• Physics: These usually involve an object (like a ball) either rising or falling through obstacles. Examples include Helix Jump, Stack Ball 3D, and Stack Fall.
• Shooting: Logic is your player’s best friend for these games. They often involve moving objects around the screen or aiming at a moving item. Think Stealth Master, Pocket Sniper!, and Knock’em All.

The results in numbers

Here’s a snapshot of the figures from the top 5% of best-performing games. You can find the exact numbers in the report.

Health metrics

• Day 1 retention looks at how many players come back after one day of playing a game. The winner in this category was timing at 44%. And the rest were around the 40% mark.
• Day 7 retention looks at how many come back after seven days. Here shooting had the edge at 17%. The rest were just below 15%.
• Playtime is the total time a user spends playing a game each day (combining all sessions). The shooting came out on top here as well at 45 minutes.

Monetization metrics

Timing was the winner when it came to monetization with an ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) of $42, ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) of $0.15, and conversion rate (the percentage of users who made a purchase that day) of 0.94%. The other sub-genres results varied, but you can get the full rundown in the report.

Winning countries

The best day one retention came from France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, who tied on 49%.

Best day 7 retention had Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan at the top with 19%. And the best playtime was in Japan at 63 minutes. We also looked at some other countries inside, specifically the USA and China (although they didn’t quite make it to the top for the casual genre…).

Superstar 2020 games

We’ve gone into a lot more detail in the report. But for now, the top games in each genre in 2020 were:

• timing – Slap Kings from Lion Studios with a performance score of 43,420
• traversal – High Heels! by Zynga Inc. which scored 48,383 (you can read more about High Heels! in the full report)
• physics – Demolish! from Voodoo with 36,449
• shooting – Stealth Master by SayGames LLC with 39,732.

FYI – performance score is basically a score we give to each game based on many things, like their ranking, ratings, how long they were in the top charts, and how many countries they rank in to.

How to make a successful hyper-casual game

We’ve crunched those numbers and used them to develop three bits of advice to help you build a super-popular hyper-casual game.

1. Keep it short, simple, and satisfying

Short, so someone can play your game while standing in a queue. Simple, so anyone can start playing without any instructions. And satisfying, so you give them a reason to come back.

2. Make sure the gameplay is forgiving

Don’t make your game too tricky. Think about offering multiple lives or rewards – some games even make it impossible for players to lose. Remember that your players are looking for a quick, easy, and fun game to fill their time. Make it too harsh, and they might move on to something else.

3. Know when to cut your losses

Any hyper-casual game with a day 1 retention rate lower than 40% probably isn’t doing well. Depending on where you are in your development process, you can either run quick sprints to roll out more iterations, improve your stats, or go back to the drawing board. You’ll want to start with high-impact, low-effort tweaks for each sprint – otherwise, you might spend weeks working on a game that people just don’t want to play.

Want to know more?

If you want even more data, you can read the full report or try GameIntel – ranking data, market insights, and accurate performance estimations powered by GameAnalytics (it’s free to sign up). And if you fancy learning more about the industry, have a read through our Tower Defense report.

Making a game is one thing. An impressive, creative and wonderful thing. But a game really comes to life when it is released to players. Being played is a game’s reason to be – and the vital step in starting to generate revenues that let your studio grow, or allow you to begin work on your next title.

As such, getting the release of a game right is about as important as it gets. And in today’s connected era where titles so commonly exist as live, maintained entities, releasing is now about a lot more than making it available for sale.

With all that in mind, we’ve built up a checklist of all the things you need to consider before releasing your games. It’s a list that considers quality, performance, marketing, monetisation and more. Bear in mind that many of these elements take time and planning, so start to think about your release strategy long before wrapping up development happens.

1. Test Everything

Certainly, testing should be about ensuring they meet a certain quality bar – and you are very likely already carefully considering how to test your game’s fundamental performance and user experience. But testing doesn’t stop with squashing bugs. Consider that you can test how players feel the art style works as a compliment to the genre. It can be extremely helpful to test how the theme lands with players, or how subtly different themes connect with and engage your target audience.

It can be extremely helpful to ‘test’ your game against other success stories in the same genre of category by deconstructing those titles and seeing how they compare – so analyse their mechanical design, theming, monetization and release. You can even test your testing; feedback testing will let you understand why players have offered the insight they have. Testing is ultimately a mindset that can be applied to almost any element of your game.

2. Know Your Metrics – and Competitors

If you are to gauge the performance and impact of your game on release, you need a standard to compare it to. Before your release, analyse key performance indicators from a range of games that share the same genre, theme or even monetization model – these will let you understand what ‘success’ looks like. You should certainly check out our guide to hyper-casual metrics if you are working in that space – and it provides insight into the broad process as applied to any genre. Also consider your capacity and budget for promoting and servicing the game as part of that process.

Your studio and EA might have both made a football game, for example, but if they have scale and resources you don’t, a comparison of revenues and marketing strategy might not be meaningful. If you can find similar games by studios of a comparable size, they will offer far more relevant metrics. If those studios appear to be competitors, research how they have released and promoted a game. Our recently launched mobile intelligence platform GameIntel offers a remarkably impactful means to understand your metrics, rivals, the market around you, and much more besides.

3. Pick the Right Monetization Model

The golden rule of successfully matching monetization and gameplay is to build your chosen monetisation model into your game design from the start – perhaps at the earliest prototypes or documentation. Your monetization model’s depth of integration may be key to your success.

It may be wise to resist grand changes, but constantly consider how complementary the match is as you continue to develop your game, and keep an eye on evolutions and developments in monetization. If you’ve opted for an ad-based free-to-play model, for example, and later realise you want to integrate ads contextually into the game world rather than have video ads run, have that thoroughly implemented and tested before release day dawns.

4. Get Your Marketing in Place

You’ll want press or influencer coverage around the release date of your games (because both those groups tend to prefer covering recent and new releases) – meaning you’ll need to get marketing materials ready in advance. Screenshots, gameplay videos, dev blogs, gifs, video and banner ads, store page details and studio profile copy all works here. For a reliable example of what assets and content you need to offer press, influencers and others, we’ve penned a thorough guide to getting your ‘press kit’ right.

You can also build a schedule in advance for social media campaigns. Simply put, different audiences are attracted to different content, so get a broad range out there – video content, written content, social media and so on.

5. Backend Matters

If you have any kind of multiplayer, leaderboards or other online elements, you need a robust backend. You also want to have everything in place for complaints and bug reporting, and be sure that when the time for updates and additional content comes, your backend will be up to the job. The brave can try building their own, but it will likely be better to consider how to pick the right option from backends provided as services

Other Considerations

• If you are releasing in multiple countries, make sure you understand the legal requirements and app store processes for each nation.
• Create a plan for testing the game regularly when live. Monitor how the price of in-app purchase items are impacting sales, and how content updates succeed or fail.
• Test your tutorial with players that are not familiar with your game, and make sure it not only makes sense, but gets players to a point where they stay with your game after the handholding ends. With so many games for players to choose from, smooth onboarding can be make-or-break in terms of your success.
• Make your game as accessible as possible to as many players as possible. Supporting those with visual impairment or hearing limitations can bring in a sizable new audience. And games should be for everyone!
• Have in place a clear roadmap (a plan) for the months and years following release. When will you deliver updates, add content or even release the sequel?
• Make sure all the written copy in your game has been thoroughly edited and proofread for errors. Do that twice if you can. Try to avoid proofing and editing your own copy – a ‘second pair of eyes’ will almost always pick up stuff you won’t.
• Check your calendar. You may want to avoid releasing your game on the same day as any major title – even far from your own genre or platform – so as to not be overshadowed in terms of what gets attention. The same can be true of releasing amidst the news storm of E3 or GDC.

That covers the fundamentals, and you can find plenty more specific insight across our blog. If your release is far away, keep this list in mind so you can refer to it when needed.

And we’ll give GameIntel one more nod here. It can help with a range of the strategies listed above, and particularly with building metrics, understanding rival games, analysing mobile gaming trends and changing user preferences. It even offers tremendous power as an ideation tool. GameIntel is available via a range of generous payment plans, keeping it accessible and powerful for developers of every kind.

This article was originally written by OneSignal. You can it out on their blog here. 

Before OneSignal, our company was a mobile game studio called Hiptic Games. Our experiences at Hiptic helped us see the need for a simpler, more reliable, and more powerful messaging platform to improve user engagement.

In many ways, we built OneSignal with game developers in mind. The top 25% of mobile games have an average Day 28 retention of just 4% and the cost of acquiring a user that eventually makes a purchase is over $40 USD. Yet, the vast majority of mobile games still don’t implement basic best practices for improving user engagement and retention through messaging.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the four main user-engagement channels that every mobile game studio may want to leverage — Push Notifications, In-App Messaging, Email, and SMS — and the best practices for each. We’ll refer to the OneSignal platform for examples of how game developers can implement these techniques, but the lessons and best practices apply regardless of the implementation path you choose.

Ask For Push Notification Permission

The way you ask for Push Notification permission in your game is an important area to start with because so many game developers get it wrong.

iOS and Android both have entirely different ways of managing user permissions for notifications. But we see some of the greatest mistakes made by games on the iOS platform.

How about… No! When was the last time you clicked “Allow” to notifications without a clear understanding of what you were signing up to receiver? Yet, it seems nearly half of the top mobile games on iOS ask for push notification permission when the app is first downloaded without any added context.

Game developers tend to provide one of two explanations for this less-than-ideal prompt:

1. They haven’t gotten around to asking in a better way: This is one of the sadder reasons we’ve heard. Push notifications are often the only way to re-engage inactive users, yet many game developers don’t value them as a channel. Asking users for permission with the basic native iOS permission dialog is a bad user experience. Attention to detail here is just as important as it is in the rest of a game’s design.
2. Their opt-in rate is higher than doing it a different way: We’re always skeptical of this claim. What other ways have they tried that could be worse? It’s also important to consider the quality of opt-ins. Gamers who are more sophisticated, more experienced, and more likely to spend money are likely more inclined to click “Don’t Allow” without more context.

Apple recommends that developers always provide context when asking for notification permission:

“Make the request in a context that helps the user to understand why your app needs authorization. In a task-tracking app that sends reminder notifications, you could make the request after the user schedules a first task. Sending the request in context provides a better user experience than automatically requesting authorization on first launch, because the user can more easily see what purpose the notifications serve.”

You always want to give the user a clear incentive and understanding of why they should grant notification permission. In a game, some common reasons might be:

1. To get a notification when their friend sends them a virtual gift.
2. To be notified when an in-game event begins.
3. To be notified when their energy meter is full so they can make more progress in the game.

One of the better implementations is Halfbrick’s new Fruit Ninja 2, which provides an excellent two-step permission prompt that users trigger during early gameplay.

The Push Notification Pre-Prompt in Fruit Ninja 2

Remember that once users click “Don’t Allow” on the iOS native permission dialog, you don’t get another chance to show it, so you need to make that chance count. We recommend making sure that users are genuinely interested in opting into notifications when you show it. But be careful not to wait too long. If you wait to ask after 15 minutes of gameplay, you’ll miss the opportunity to send re-engagement notifications to users who don’t make it that far.

Provisional Notifications are an option

Apple provides a powerful but rarely-used feature to send notifications to users on a trial basis, without the user needing to click “Allow” on a permissions dialog. Players can then evaluate the notifications and decide whether to authorize them.

These “Provisional Notifications” have several limitations, including not showing up on the lock screen, but they are an excellent way to message users who have not yet provided direct notification permission.

Tools like OneSignal can help simplify the process

OneSignal’s In-App Messaging feature can be used to simplify the process of asking for push notification permission without extra required code. Developers can also customize the permission prompt on the OneSignal dashboard without requiring new versions of the app to be released.

What about Android?

Android apps don’t need to request system-level permission to send notifications. However, many games choose to give users additional control and context on the notifications they receive.

Topwar Studios does this well for the Android version of their game “Top War: Battle Game”

OneSignal has several features to make this easier to implement, including the OneSignal.setSubscription() method. This method can be used to turn on or off notifications for the current device. OneSignal also has a feature called Tags, which are key/value pairs that can be used to store the user’s notification preferences for the device.

Starting in Android Oreo (8.0+), Google introduced the concept of Notification Categories (Sometimes called “Notification Channels”). All Android apps must define at least one notification category and then send notifications linked to this category.

Android applications can set various default properties of each category, such as the importance level or notification sound. Users can also override these settings for each application in their device settings.

Despite the powerful features of Categories, many games don’t use them correctly. For example, “Top War: Battle Game” only has two notification categories. The second one listed, “AdMob Offline Notifications,” is related to a bug in Google’s AdMob SDK.

If they chose to do so, Top War could link their in-game notifications to these category settings, so users have a more consistent user experience.

For OneSignal clients, the OneSignal dashboard and SDK provide several features to make it easier to create and manage Android Notification Categories without adding extra code or releasing app updates when modifications are made.

OneSignal’s Android Category Management UI

How about asking for email?

One surprising finding is that the vast majority of mobile games do not prompt players for their email. But when we talk to growth leaders at top game companies, they resoundingly recommend email as a crucial channel for re-engagement and increased revenue.

There are three primary reasons to collect user email:

1. Email is an excellent channel to use alongside notifications for user engagement. Especially since not all users opt-in to notifications – Since emails are very affordable to send (OneSignal’s pricing scales affordably for both small and large companies), emails act as a second channel to keep users engaged.
2. Email works exceptionally well for adult gamers, who are also more likely to make in-game purchases – One product manager from a big game company reported a 20% lift in revenue from top spenders after targeting them with email campaigns.
3. With the deprecation of IDFA, email is a crucial identifier for retargeting users – A common strategy for user re-engagement is to show ads to players on platforms like Facebook. With Apple’s decision to deprecate the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) in early 2021, email becomes the best possible user identifier to use for targeted advertising.

Getting users to provide their email addresses can sometimes be difficult, so it’s crucial to provide users with content and incentive. Supporting sign-in with Facebook or other providers can help streamline the process and skip the need to validate email addresses.

One crucial detail is that Apple’s recent policy updates require applications that provide login through third-party services to provide “Sign in with Apple” as an equivalent log in option.

Bubblegum Games’ “Project Makeover” chooses to provide both “Sign in with Apple” and “Sign in with Facebook” as options as ways to get users’ emails and create profiles for users to see their progress. Each option has a clear in-game incentive to maximize conversion rates.

Project Makeover by Bubblegum Games uses “Sign”

Project Makeover chooses not to ask users for an email in other ways, which may reduce their opt-in rate, but this also removes users’ need to confirm their email before receiving messages.

When sending emails, it’s critical to provide value to the reader at every touchpoint. High open rates and engagement rates will help improve your email’s visibility to users (and reduce the chance that your emails end up in the spam folder).

Source: https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/be-one-of-the-first-to-play-mighty-quest-on-mobile

Is SMS worthwhile?

SMS is one of the least commonly used messaging channels for games, and for a good reason: SMS messages with an image can cost 2 cents to send or more, depending on the country, which can get expensive quickly.

However, when used in games with a high player LTV (Lifetime Value), SMS is a compelling channel to stay connected to users. SMS has the highest open rate of all channels, and SMS links get clicked by about 19% of recipients, in contrast to just 2% or 3% for email.

Games or apps that choose to require user accounts may be the best able to utilize SMS. For example, the game video app Donut offers “continue with phone number” as login and identity verification mechanism.

This comes in handy to apps when they want to stay connected to their users, even those that may have uninstalled the app. In this case, to collect user feedback:

It may also work well for segments of particularly valuable customers, like those who have previously made an in-game purchase.

OneSignal supports all three channels — Push, Email, and SMS, and unifies the features in a single platform and SDK to make it easy to implement messaging and personalization across these channels.

Content and Frequency of messages to send

Hellosaurus does an excellent job of setting up a notification drip campaign to drive user conversion to their subscription service while sprinkling in various updates about their app.

In general, messages sent by games fall under one of the four categories:

1. In-game events that occur
2. Game news
3. Promotions

In each case, it’s crucial to think of the message as a core part of the user experience with your app. If your messages’ quality does not match the quality of your in-game experience, users are much more likely to block your messages or uninstall your game entirely.

Just as games require creativity to make a fun in-game experience, games can bring this creativity to the messaging experience outside of the game as well.

Keep in mind that people sometimes have hundreds of apps on their device, with gamers being the most prolific in installing new apps. Given this, every message you send, whether over push, email, or SMS must:

1. Stand out from the crowd.
2. Be relevant to its recipient.

Generic messages such as “You haven’t played in a while. Come back today.” are unlikely to have much of an impact on user retention. However, personalized messages or those that provide an incentive perform far better: “George, your hero is nearly at level 10. Get double XP for every level you complete today.”

The frequency of messages you send may vary greatly and depend on the messaging channels you’re using.

Some of the best apps have found that there’s practically no limit to how many push notifications you can send, as long as each one is part of an overall excellent user experience. An important technique is to make notifications that are not time-sensitive be delivered silently. If done well, notifications can act as a core experience of your game, providing a valuable experience to the user when they look at their device and drawing them in at the right time.

For games that are concerned about user churn if they send too many messages, a good rule of thumb is to send the same number of daily notifications (or emails) as to how frequently players open the game. For example, if new users play a game roughly three times in the first week after installing it, then three messages per week is a reasonable limit.

Leverage modern messaging capabilities to make your messages stand out

Every messaging channel comes with a unique set of capabilities to make the messages more visible, engaging, or powerful. Yet, many of these capabilities are often overlooked by game developers.

iOS Notifications

In new versions of iOS, notifications can have a wide range of interactive customization options, including images, gifs, videos, and more.

Services like OneSignal help to simplify the process of creating these interactive notifications with built-in support for rich media, along with example code and documentation.

iOS notifications can also be customized with custom sounds, grouped into threads, or made to replace a previous notification.

Android Notifications

Similar to iOS, Android notifications support a wide range of customizations, including various image sizes, notification sounds, notification privacy settings (via Notification Categories), background images, interactivity options, and more.

Source: https://material.io/design/platform-guidance/android-notifications.html#templates

Some of the more advanced customization on the Android platform can get complicated due to the need to support a wide range of Android devices and operating system versions. In general, we recommend using all of the basic Android notification features, including images and custom categories, and then gradually expanding the usage of more advanced features as you grow your app.

In-App Messages

There’s no “one best way” to create in-app messages, but just like every other part of your game, applying creativity, design, and a user-experience focused mindset is vital.

Tools like OneSignal can simplify this process by providing a simple but powerful WYSIWYG editor for in-app message creation and targeting. OneSignal also allows in-app messages to be created and customized without needing to update your app.

Email

Contrary to what many believe, email continues to be an evolving channel. It’s never been more critical to make sure the emails you send are well designed and leverage modern email features.

When it comes to design, Really Good Emails is an excellent resource for design ideas and inspiration. Keep in mind that players can read emails on many devices, and optimizing for the mobile email experience is often best.

New email features like Google’s “Dynamic Email” can be handy for products where email is a core part of the experience.

Source: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/take-action-and-stay-up-to-date-with-dynamic-email-in-gmail/

Advanced features may not make sense for some mobile games, but when used correctly, they can make a huge positive impact on user engagement and experience.

SMS

Finally, SMS has had fewer changes over the years and generally has limited support for visual customizations. For this reason, the text content of your SMS message is more important than anything else.

SMS messages should be heavily personalized, relevant, and timely for the user. Given that they can be disruptive to users and expensive to send, they should be used sparingly and only when it makes sense.

Future versions of Android will begin to categorize messages into “personal, transactions, OTP (one-time passwords), offers, and more.” There’s also been gradual progress on a new SMS update called RCS, that will bring more interactivity and customization to messages, but this has yet to be widely supported or adopted.

Analyzing the performance of your messages

“What’s a typical open rate for a message?” is one of the most common questions we hear from users. There’s no one right answer since the values will vary greatly depending on the message’s purpose, the channel it is sent on (push, email, or SMS), and the user base.

However, it’s critical to track the ongoing performance of the messages you send to compare and refine your messaging strategies.

Opens or clicks are often not a useful metric. In the case of push notifications, many users who receive a message may open the app from its icon rather than tapping the notification itself. Furthermore, message clicks may not be closely correlated with long term user engagement or monetization.
For this reason, we recommend instrumenting tracking of multiple message metrics, including:

• Receive Rate (Did the user receive the message?)
• Open Rate (For email opens)
• Click Rate
• App Influenced Opens (How many users opened the app within a short time after receiving a message)
• Custom Outcome Events (Could be engagement rate, purchases, or other desired actions)

Tools like OneSignal can provide insight into some of these metrics for each channel. These metrics can also be integrated with and sent to existing analytics systems that you may use to track in-game user activity. This analytics connection is an important component of analyzing the short and long term impact of your messages.

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