Game Analytics - The Social Connection

Analyzing and tracking the impact of social connections in the context of games is an important part of managing a game and game properties. When most people think of social games they think in terms of Facebook and the social mechanics of the Facebook environment. Facebook is an environment we will cover. However, Facebook is not the only social environment to consider when analyzing the impact of the social graph or social engagement of a game. This is especially true for games that are inherently social like poker, bingo, MMO's some RPG's. In fact, when designing a game thought should be given to how a game will stimulate social interaction because this form of engagement usually improves  a game's  popularity, decreases the cost of acquiring players and improves player retention.

So what data points should a game platform track to determine how social a game is performing and how a game's social popularity impacts the profitability of the game? I mention profitability because in some cases a social game or a game with built in social mechanics can attract large numbers of players. You may say that this is a good problem to have. However, for a game company that is working hard to balance the budget and grow a company, an extreme spike of sustained traffic has implications for the infrastructure costs of supporting that traffic. The last thing you want is for a game to become popular and not be able to handle the traffic.

1.) Social Trail - Every player that participates in a  socially connection environment should be tracked in a way to determine all of the connections they have spawned. This seems simple enough. However, if a game is not hosted in Facebook and is on the web, in a mobile environment or in a game environment that does not support this tracking the game developer will have to add the tracking.

2.) Social Monetization - It all comes down to showing how a game generates revenue. Just because a game is social and has the capability to grow large communities does not mean it is a successful game. We all view Angry Birds as a big success because of its social distribution. However, was the game an economic success? I suspect that merchandising and licencing of the Angry Bird brand was more profitable then the game itself. Build monetization into the social structure of the game. Each of the  monetization opportunities should be tracked by game and by player. Each player's connections should be rolled up to determine the monetization power of a single player.

3.) Game  Cycle - I mentioned in a previous blog the notion of a game state machine. Games do differ from standard applications because they are usually not fall through applications. Instead they engage a player in a cycle of some kind that can keep players in a game for prolonged periods of time. This does have implications for social connections because there are more opportunities in a game to interact socially or to invite others to join in on a game. From a game development perspective hooks and features should be added to a game to encourage social interaction during a game cycle. Each of these events or opportunities should be tracked to determine how many connections have been made, determine if they are existing or new connections and if the social interaction

4.) Influential Players - It usually comes down to a small percentage of players that either generate most of the connections  and or revenue for a game. Analytics that provide an understanding of the semantic social web created by players helps to determine the true power of an individual. Quite often a player that generates the most players does so because they have people in their network that are also influential. The same goes for revenue generation. A "whale" most likely attracts other whales to a game. Game companies can get lost in the number of social connections without focusing on the important protagonists a social game. Analytics will help to identify who the important players are. 

5.) Facebook - The Facebook environment and any other legitimate social network facilitate social connections outside of the context of a game or application.   Social connections exist for a variety of reasons and Facebook does a good job of exploiting that. Facebook no longer supports application virality for this very reason. There was a time when application developers could exploit the Facebook platform to produce a truly viral effect. Facebook has removed these features for obvious reasons (covered in one of my previous blogs). This does not mean that social connections do not occur in Facebook and Facebook games they do, However, a game environment has to work harder in Facebook to acquire and retain players in a social game environment. This means higher cost of acquisition and more focus on the "influencers" previously mentioned. Thus the reason for developing special Facebook social game analytics to maximize revenue and acquisition in Facebook.

Tracking this process is important with a number of off the shelf analytics packages advertising that they can do this. The challenge is to combine the analytics provided by these packages with the special social analytics developed for your own game. This intersection is required to give  the management team a full view of the impact of the social factor of a game.  

6.) Cross Game Social Fertilization - There is a growing trend to cultivate the social connect factor across games and potentially across environments(mobile, Facebook, web, etc). Essentially, if you acquire a gamer and their social semantic web one game why not exploit this is another game. The key is to determine how successful this is. What percentage of the players network transfers and or how is their network and the game community enhanced.

7.) Big Data - There is no doubt that games have largely contributed to the concept of Big Data, NoSQL DB's , emerging data storage, retrieval and reporting on non-relational DB data stores. This space is still evolving quickly and does have an impact on social game network analytics.  When building a social game analytics platform consideration has to be given to the trade off of game performance and the capture of data for analytics purposes. Storing data in NoSQL depositories still creates a big challenge for game business interested in farming this data for business intelligence purposes.

In summary creating analytics to capture  game data for the purpose of understanding the game connect factor and the influence of key players in the context of a community and social network is critical to the success of a game, game platform and the success of a game company. Standard funnel analysis will not suffice requiring a different set of analytics to address social game data sources. Games are growing in popularity as powerful ways to acquire, engage and monetize applications. However, this trend also challenges the conventional wisdom on how best to create a business intelligence system for these games.

 Game Analytics Series
Game Analytics Overview

Game Analytics - The Classic Funnel And The State Machine

Game Analytics - The Social Connection

Game Analytics - Big Data And Business Intelligence(BI)

Kevin Flood is the CEO of Gameinlane, Inc. Kevin writes extensively about online games and their impact and integration into iGaming and E-commerce environments. Kevin is a frequent speaker at online game events and conferences in Asia, Europe and the US. Kevin and his Gameinlane team are currently working with online gambling, social gaming and e-commerce companies integrating social gaming with online gaming operations and integrate game mechanics into e-commerce applications.  

Game Analytics - The Classic Funnel And The Game State Machine

The funnel has been with us since the beginning of time if you consider the WWW to be when time began. Funnel analysis is primarily focused on determining the amount of web traffic coming to a property in a certain time slice and how that traffic trickles through a web site to the ultimate goal of making money from the traffic. Game properties that are web hosted also use the funnel. However, games have unique characteristics exhibited by their "state machine" behavior that challenge funnel analysis as an exclusive source of traffic/revenue analysis. Social networks and mobile platform environments also challenge the effectiveness of the funnel as a comprehensive way to evaluate game traffic. Despite these caveats funnel analysis is useful for game BI and should be a part of an analytics package if a game is hosted in a web environment.

The goal of the funnel is to line-up the cost of acquiring  traffic with the revenue that the traffic generates. The funnel is geared to e-commerce sites where there is a definitive end goal of a transaction. Fall off can happen from the time the traffic arrives at a site and the actual transaction.  Analysts peal through the funnel data to determine where the drop off occurred with the hope of adjusting the site to improve the "conversion" rate. Each site or game  will have its own characteristics and conversion rate.

The funnel is not generally used to evaluate social media environments because of the impact of the social or viral impact on conversion.  True mobile applications(excluding web apps run on a mobile device) because driving traffic and analyzing games in a mobile context requires  a different approach. We will cover analytics for these environments in future blogs.

 Web traffic will come from various sources such as paid search, natural search, e-mail campaigns, affiliate sites and referring sites. Each of these sources will have a cost. When all is said and done the cost of acquiring this traffic is compared to the revenue generated by a game. The hope is that the revenue exceeds the cost of acquisition.   Traditional web marketeers   live by  funnel reports to help them adjust marketing programs and to assure that marking funds are well spent. A good funnel analytics package will provide results instantaneously to allow an organization to react quickly to positive and negative trends.  

Evaluating the relationship of traffic to revenue in the funnel can be challenging because traffic does not necessarily translate to revenue in a fixed period of time.  So when do you draw the relationship between traffic and revenue? A very crude and often used method is to run reports for different period's of time; 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc. and see what the ratios are. However, a much more precise way is to take a traffic/marketing campaign  source and follow the life cycle of revenue from its inception to the eventual end of its lifetime value. There is usually an initial peak of traffic at the start of a campaign and then a tailing stream of acquisition and revenue  commonly called the "tail".  Funnel analysis can become very sophisticated if each marketing program thread  is tracked in this way giving rise to overlapping threads and traffic tails.  

Games themselves poise an interesting challenge for funnel analysis because unlike a standard e-commerce application games are "state machines". Games  are not single threaded experiences. Instead they engage an acquired player in a number of ways and in some cases loop a player through a series of steps over and over again keeping the player in a game session for a prolonged period of time.  In essence, even a simple game such as a single player slot machine potentially engages a players in a number of states. Some times the cycle a game puts a player through is predictable in some cases it is not. This is especially true with multi-player games like RPG's and MMO's.  Some game state machine experiences can cycle over and over again for long periods of time creating many revenue opportunities to monetize a player and many places for a player to fall out of a game. This is what makes games such a great way to generate revenue from a player giving rise to the "gamification" of standard e-commerce applications and a challenge to determine how best to keep a player in the cycle and also monetize within the  game cycle.

For this reason games are unique and very different from  standard E-commerce applications.  Once a player engages in a game the funnel analysis becomes less valuable and a new set of analytics strategies must kick in addressing game dynamics. This is the primary reason why game analytics stand apart and in their own space. Essentially, Google Analytics style reporting has a limit in its ability to provide adequate intelligence on the full scope of  game acquisition, retention, fall-out and revenue. 

A truly game oriented analytics package will include a state machine analysis in addition to funnel analysis helping business owners, developers and marketing staff to obtain a full understanding of a game and its impact on the bottom line.  

In summary,  funnel analysis  has a place in the pantheon of  game analytics and reports. However, the "state machine" characteristics of games, combined with  social network and mobile platform deployments,  requires game developers and publishers to go beyond the funnel report to obtain a full understanding of game cost of acquisition, revenue per player, fall off in a game and player retention.

Game Analytics Series

Game Analytics Overview

Game Analytics - The Classic Funnel And The State Machine

Game Analytics - The Social Connection

Game Analytics - Big Data And Business Intelligence(BI)

Kevin Flood is the CEO of Gameinlane, Inc. Kevin writes extensively about online games and their impact and integration into iGaming and E-commerce environments. Kevin is a frequent speaker at online game events and conferences in Asia, Europe and the US. Kevin and his Gameinlane team are currently working with online gambling, social gaming and e-commerce companies integrating social gaming with online gaming operations and integrate game mechanics into e-commerce applications.  

Game Analytics

I write one of my first blogs back in 08 about the commonality between the acquisition cost and revenue characteristics of two game sites I worked on. One in the UK and one in the US.  Despite their geographic differences they had striking similarities in player behavior, cost of acquisition, revenue per player and lifetime value of a player. I was able to make these comparisons because both operations created  fairly sophisticated reports and analytic tools to evaluate player behavior, cost of marketing, revenue trends, etc.  The US based  site  launched one of the first game sites in Facebook and was able to chart what is currently called the K-Factor or "virality" from the very beginning understanding the power of acquiring players for free through the "viral effect". We were able to determine K-factor because we build a data capture and an accompanying social media analytics tool kit to help us react to the 'just in time' nature of the social web.

Fast forward to today's world of online gaming, ARPU, ARPPU, NOSQL/Big Data(BD), etc.  and expensive BI platforms and you realize that almost all game sites, publishers and developers are highly dependent on analytics and reports to make their businesses run. Ironically, the information they are looking for and evaluating is remarkably the same across game types. Game properties in particular require very detailed and "just in time" analytics and reports because the success or failure of a game can be determined in a very short time. If a game is not succeeding  a business needs to know why and quickly so it can make the necessary changes as fast as possible to avoid the dreaded "dead on arrival" syndrome that impacts games more then other apps. Game related businesses also need to understand the "death spiral" of a game as it reaches its player saturation level in terms of interest and market penetration. For a variety of reasons if a game is launched and does not have immediate rapid rise in popularity the game quickly dies. Conversely, if a game is successful the business wants to feed that growth and attempt to capture as much market share as possible it has to have a very good picture of what makes that game work for players.

Although almost all  game publishers/developers are creating some level of game analytics to support their games, the level of sophistication and timeliness of the analytics can vary even though everyone is looking for the same data(ARPU, ARPPU, Funnel Report, etc.). I have marveled over this fact and have wondered why most organizations are building their own analytics and reports and not leveraging a centralized cloud  analytics solution s(a topic for another blog)?

To address this interesting phenomena and to help newly emerging game publishers and developers understand what they need to make their businesses run efficiently, I plan to write a series of blogs over the coming weeks addressing specific areas of the game reporting and analysis world that needs to be part of a game business analysts tool box. The subject requires a series of blogs because each major subset of reporting and analytics needs to be fully understood on its own merits. In addition, some businesses may decide that a subset of all reporting is adequate for their needs. The dissection of each of the core components will also illustrate how involved a comprehensive reporting and analytics solution really is. Currently, we see vendors offering pieces of the solution. However, these solutions are far from what game companies really need to effectively run their businesses. The following general topics will be addressed.

1.) The Classic Funnel - The "funnel" is the top down process of taking in leads or potential players from various sources and their conversion rate into active and revenue generating players. These are sources other then social platforms like Facebook. Funnel analysis is also used in non-gaming web apps and their are many similarities between what game businesses are looking for and what the average web application business is seeking.

2.) The Social Connect - In some ways social mediums such as Facebook, RenRen, QQ etc. are  lateral funnels generating leads on the horizontal plane.  In some cases there is a direct relationship to social media and marketing spend to the final goal of acquiring players in a socially engineered environment.  However, there are scenarios where the marketing influence within social networks is not entirely responsible for starting lead generation from social networks. Exploring the full extent of the impact of a social effect and a truly social game is paramount to managing a successful game business. The social web can sink a game as easily as it can make a game successful. Also, games can be social or viral outside of an artificially constructed social world such as Facebook. Angry Birds is a classic example of a viral game not associated with a "Social Network".

3.) Big Data - The interactions that can occur in a single game can generate large amounts of data in a very short time. This phenomena has helped to fuel the NO/SQL movement with the goal of at least capturing the data. However, currently game businesses are struggling with ways to figure out how to use this information in concert with its SQL captured data. We will explore and ponder the value of these data sources to determine value add for game business management.

5.) Power of Groups(Cohorts) - In some cases groups of players demonstrate common behaviors that a company would like to encourage or discourage. They can be a specifically targeted group or they could be groups that form dynamically within a game or within a social context outside of the game.  How do you figure out what is a useful cohort to look at and how do you determine if they are worth cultivating?

6.) Trending - It is difficult to determine the impact of players if you do not have a context for where they are taking the game or where the game is taking the players. A number without the context of time really has little value. So what trend analysis should you invest in? What is meaningful and what is noise?

7.) Reacting to Analytics - In many of my game development and operations positions the reaction to analysis resulted in a very rapid change to  a game. In other cases a longer history was required to determine what if anything should be done to change a marketing program or the game itself. In some cases a quick change to the game resulted in disaster that the game never covered from. So how do you decide what if anything should be done based on analytic and reporting data?

8.) Multi-Platform Games - Developers and publishers are beginning to put the same game on the web, Facebook, Google+, international social networks and a number of mobile devices. How do you make sense out of what could be conflicting or complementary reports and analytics from these different environment? How important is cross platform analysis?

9.) Show Me The Money! - Well, it all comes down to how a game is making money for a business and what revenue sources are working, where they are working and when they are working.  Is it virtual currency, in game advertising, on game advertising, gambling, sponsorships, lead generation, etc. How does this combination add up to success or a noisy distraction for  players?

10.) Ad Hoc Reporting - For all of the virtues of canned reports a good business analyst is going to want to slice and dice the data in  ways that are not represented in the canned reports.. They are also going to want to quickly dive into the data if something is going really good or not so good. How do you setup an Ad Hoc reporting environment that complements the canned reports that already exist and not flatten the DB with an errant query?

In the coming weeks we will engage on these categories within the game analytics and reporting universe. If you have any additional categories you would like to cover please let me know.

Game Analytics Series
Game Analytics Overview

Game Analytics - The Classic Funnel And The State Machine

Game Analytics - The Social Connection

Game Analytics - Big Data And Business Intelligence(BI)

.Kevin Flood is the CEO of Gameinlane, Inc. Kevin writes extensively about online games and their impact and integration into iGaming and E-commerce environments. Kevin is a frequent speaker at online game events and conferences in Asia, Europe and the US. Kevin and his Gameinlane team are currently working with online gambling, social gaming and e-commerce companies integrating social gaming with online gaming operations and integrate game mechanics into e-commerce applications.