Four Ways to Measure and Analyze Revenue Impact for Improved Game KPI’s

As technology makes campaign and engagement data more accessible than ever, the benefits of testing, measuring, and iterating for optimal results can’t be emphasized enough.  

With the proper insights, you can optimize and deploy the most effective campaigns to drive increased player revenue.  However, the quality of the results is only as good as the tools you use to measure them.  With that, you want to ensure you’re using the right techniques for assessment.   

Here, we examine four techniques to measure the impact of engagement on revenue to understand the value your efforts are bringing in and ways to refine them to yield more returns. 

Measuring long-term impact with universal holdbacks

With Universal Holdbacks (or UHBs), you use a subset of all your player profiles as a control group to exclude from receiving your campaigns.  

This allows you to accurately measure the cumulative impact and revenue lift you’re getting from your campaign activities over a specific timeframe.

To create a universal holdback in Leanplum, you can use our bucketing feature to set up your player control group.

Since you’re leaving a subset of players out of your communication, this may be perceived as a costly process and one that requires additional discussion and approval.  As a result, many companies don’t implement this method.  In fact, through analyzing over 1,800 campaigns and 670 million messages for our Games Data Science Report, we found that less than 5 percent use UHBs to measure impact. 

However, you can’t know if there was lost revenue without implementing a UHB, and there are strategies you can implement to make up for potential lost revenue from the UHB. Using data from UHBs, you can determine which campaigns produce higher lifts and focus on similar campaigns in the future to compensate for any losses from conducting the UHB. Another option to recoup any lost revenue is to target the UHB with the same campaign(s) after you’ve completed the experiment(s).      

Without knowing what’s working through testing and data, improving your campaigns can be challenging, if not impossible.  By running tests with UHBs in regular intervals, such as every month or quarter, you get to see the compound effects across your various programs over time.

Comparing campaign-level performance with holdbacks

Unlike universal holdbacks, where you’re keeping an entire subsection of your player audience from your messages, campaign holdbacks (CHBs) only designate a portion of your campaign audience to use as a control group.

This allows you to use CHBs to measure revenue performance and uplift by individual campaigns.  By looking at data from one campaign event, you gain a better understanding of which elements are working — and which are not — in more depth and detail.  

With Leanplum, you’re able to set up a CHB with the push of a button. When creating a campaign, simply enter a holdback percentage for your audience. 

You can even compare results between different campaigns to determine which ones to stop, scale, or continue.

Linking actions and results with last-touch attribution

Last touch attribution (or LTA) is another analytics tool that offers a more readily accessible approach to measurement — no control group setup needed.

LTA, a method we also used in our Games Data Science Report, connects a player’s most recent activity with different campaign results.  In Leanplum, you even have the ability to configure the attribution window.  And, while correlation doesn’t always necessarily indicate causation, LTA helps gauge the impact your campaigns have on revenue.

For experiences that correlate with increased revenue, you can identify trends and methods to apply to future activities or make adjustments for enhanced results.

On the other hand, knowing which campaigns didn’t perform helps you pinpoint things to avoid going forward.

Personalizing offers with segment-level analysis

Segment-level analytics uses player data, such as spending behaviors, to create groups to target and help you customize the player experience.

For example, different players have different spend thresholds.  For non-payers, you’re just trying to move them past the psychological threshold of spending money on a game.  So, sending $0.99 offers makes sense for them.  

But, for other players who routinely spend $4.99 for additional virtual currency, your offers might be geared towards increasing that regular spend to $7.99 or $9.99.  

Using Leanplum’s RFM segmentation to segment according to spending behaviors, combined with variables that allow you to customize what your players see, you can present different offers to those different player segments and then analyze the results. 

With the right insights, the sky’s the limit  

There are admittedly some up-front costs to methods that may leave some players out of your campaigns.  In the end, there’s the long-term payoff from cost savings via operational efficiency and revenue lift that comes from understanding the impact your programs generate.

With constant testing and improvement, you’ll be able to track the effects your player lifecycle marketing efforts have over time.  You can apply your learnings, including what activates your players and which areas need adjustment, to future campaign strategies.       

You’ll see increased player engagement, higher revenue, and accelerated growth as you elevate your campaign tactics through testing. 

Interested in learning more?  We’ve got you covered.

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For app-first companies, Leanplum is the only solution that helps personalize and optimize all customer touchpoints, both inside and outside the app. Leanplum combines multi-channel Lifecycle Marketing with the ability to A/B test the Product Experience for complete, end-to-end personalization of the mobile journey. Break down organizational silos and eliminate point solutions to enable rapid growth.