Free Player Retention Guide Get Now
IMVU (by TogetherLabs) is the world’s largest avatar based social networking app. Sonamine has been partnering with Together Lab since 2019.
In an interview with Senior CRM Manager, Donnie Kajikawa, she discussed how a complete retention program solved key challenges by combining different capabilities with data science. It is summarized here.
Like most free-to-play games and apps, IMVU had a very large churn rate. These are non spenders who installed, registered but abandoned the app pretty quickly. Morever the required capabilities to run retention campaigns were distributed over separate departments.
As game marketers, we spend a lot of time and energy on optimizing user acquisition. But we tend to ignore the tail end of the funnel, that is, churn. In fact if you can decrease churn by 10%, it's like improving your UA by 10%
I’ve been running programs for a long time, and one of the hardest things is to coordinate among different departments and tools. Many ML projects fail because it’s hard to get the ML output to the different places that it can be used.
Sonamine's backend was used to identify likely churners who were active, and could be engaged with a retention reward.
Sonamine set up several different AB tests in the CRM tool, Leanplum. These AB tests were used to identify the level of retention rewards most likely to appeal to different user segments, such as different platforms.
Specialized reporting not available in the CRM tools allowed analysis on several KPIs over a 90+ day horizon. This was critical to identifying the payback period and addressing concerns with unexpected impacts.
Based on the AB tests results, Sonamine helped to design an automated reward system to enable one-to-one personalized rewards, without needing precious game development resources. This reward system is now used in live ops events and streaks.
We decided to leverage Sonamine services, as an extension of the internal team, but also to get to market faster. If you are just starting out, we recommend working with a partner first. You can always bring it in house later.
Within 4 weeks we had our first test in-app campaign running! It’s a testament to the team effort. And we have been sprinting ever since. We are now even running conversion campaigns using the same automation paradigm.
Currently in the aggregate of all our campaigns, the rewards group has a 23% higher ARPU compared to the control group!
We find that their DAU level is 10% higher than a control group that does not get them. And interestingly, this elevated DAU level is sustained even 60 days after the initial reward!
High School Story, Hollywood University and Choices are successful narrative mobile games built over the last decade. Sonamine has been partnering with Pixelberry since 2014 to improve their game performances.
Like other successful free-to-play games, Choices had great retention and relatively low payer conversion rates. There were precious few resources to devote to increasing the payer conversion rate.
A breakout content oriented game such as Choices required a constant stream of new content to satisfy players. There was no bandwidth to integrate new SDKs for live ops or CRM tools.
Growth stage games focus their management attention and resources to driving new players. The payback logic is straightforward, more UA leads to more players and revenue. However, increasing the payer conversion rate by 10% is similar to increasing ROAS by 10%.
To preserve internal resources for game improvements, Sonamine provided an end to end package to drive first time conversions.
Sonamine backend connected to the analytics tool used and retrieved the required data for analysis. There was NO data engineering resources or work required on the part of Pixelberry.
Customized data science was used to target users likely to respond to a nudge message.
Custom integration was set up with the Leanplum system so that users could be flagged and instantly eligible for the nudge messages and alerts. User flags were also removed once they were no longer picked up by the machine learning model. This was critical to ensure that users were not spammed with irrelevant messages.
New content genres, business models such as subscription were introduced over the years. These new game features were integrated into the First Time Spender Nudge package, thus enabling new data to be used for predictions, and new nudge options.
Sonamine services team created and set up the AB tests and messaging within the CRM tool, Leanplum. Such end-to-end service allowed Pixelberry product and live-ops teams to focus on other features and events.
By creating a long term holdout control group to compare performance over several years, the incremental revenue of the first time spender nudge was calculated. It was an extremely high ROI number.
Sonamine moves the needle with actionable user predictions.
- Oliver Miao, CEO Pixelberry
Instead of spending time and money on new development within the game client, the New Spender Nudge used the existing Leanplum implementation combined with offline data science. The first AB tests were running within weeks of game launch.
The First Time Spender Nudge maintained its higher performance compared with a holdout user group over several years. There was no indication of "revenue acceleration", the phenomenon of hastening purchases but not increasing the overall LTV. This is a direct result of proactive tweaks and automated machine learning.
HyperBeard is the largest mobile game developer and publisher in Mexico. It’s known for its portfolio of cute casual games, such as Pocket Love, Adorable Home, and Campfire Cat Cafe.
Players have downloaded HyperBeard's games over 220 million times since the company got its start in 2017. HyperBeard CEO Alex Kozachenko discusses how the company worked with Sonamine to solve the challenge of maximizing the company's use of data in the interview summarized here.
Like many small to mid-sized gaming companies, HyperBeard had a successful portfolio of games but struggled to leverage the massive amounts of data generated by those games. The HyperBeard team could see the potential to use data to drive higher revenue and return on advertising spend, but they weren't sure how to get there.
It's more that you don't necessarily know what the right questions are to ask because you haven't asked them before. Sonamine can, with their breadth of experience, kind of take a look at the data and then ask the right questions and give us some answers and solutions that we can then implement to drive higher LTV across the portfolio.
All of our games are cute and casual. They all appeal to the same demographic, women 16 to 35. For us, the opportunity is much larger. We just need to know how to capture it.
Goal was to provide HyperBeard with the tools to generate its own reports and run its own analysis based on data that was clean, organized, and reliable.
Documented different data sources and lineage for transparency. Identified and fixed inconsistent data definitions.
Standardized tables and definitions were implemented. The required ETL processes were scheduled and handed over to the Hyperbeard team for ongoing maintenance.
Specialized reporting not available in the UA tools allowed portfolio level analysis on several KPIs over a 90+ day horizon. This was critical to identifying the payback period not just in main game, but throughout the portfolio.
Used new database to analyze user journeys through the portfolio of games. Recommendations were provided to generate high impact improvements to the cross-promotion and UA efforts.
HyperBeard’s partnership with Sonamine has supercharged the company’s user acquisition efforts and stretched their UA dollars to maximum effect.
Higher ROAS translates to higher revenues and profits, which can be further funneled back into the UA machine.
“We looked at a campaign running Unity ads. Spent about $15,000 and actually plateaued at around 60% ROAS in the game that we were running it on. However, when we looked at the portfolio view, we actually found that we had broken even by 75 and around 15% profit by day 90. That just wasn't visible before Sonamine was able to jump in and help us to merge that data.”
One of the things that they're able to help us with is just really to just dive in and take a look at the data and see where the growth opportunities are. They put together an analysis that showed us kind of the most ideal flow from one game to another, whether that's the initial game or the second game, or the third game, and how we should be acquiring users and how we should be pushing users to other titles.
We predict that in 2024 we'll be able to grow our UA budgets by approximately 100%-200%. And most of that is attributable to the portfolio level, especially as the CPI environment gets harder to compete in. It's going to become incumbent on casual game developers to kind of look for these opportunities.
IMVU (by TogetherLabs) is the world’s largest avatar based social networking app.
Like most free-to-play games and apps, IMVU had a very large churn rate. These are non spenders who installed, registerer but abandoned the app pretty quickly. Morever the required capabilities to run retention campaigns were distributed over separate departments.
As game marketers, we spend a lot of time and energy on optimizing user acquisition. But we tend to ignore the tail end of the funnel, that is, churn. In fact if you can decrease churn by 10%, it's like improving your UA by 10%
I’ve been running programs for a long time, and one of the hardest things is to coordinate among different departments and tools. Many ML projects fail because it’s hard to get the ML output to the different places that it can be used.
We decided to leverage Sonamine services, as an extension of the internal team, but also to get to market faster. If you are just starting out, we recommend working with a partner first. You can always bring it in house later.
Within 4 weeks we had our first test in-app campaign running! It’s a testament to the team effort. And we have been sprinting ever since. We are now even running conversion campaigns using the same automation paradigm.
We find that their DAU level is 10% higher than a control group that does not get them. And interestingly, this elevated DAU level is sustained even 60 days after the initial reward!
Currently in the aggregate of all our campaigns, the rewards group has a 23% higher ARPU compared to the control group!
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