GameDuell

Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, GameDuell is one of the largest cross-platform games communities in the world. The company produces and distributes digital card and board games, action arcade games, as well as puzzle games for the web, social and mobile platforms. GameDuell operates over 70 games in seven languages and has more than 130 million registered players across all platforms.

Challenges

GameDuell needed to track and engage its players at different stages of the customer journey. The company turned to Leanplum two years ago with a focus on two of its “free-to-play” mobile game apps: Belote, the top game app for a classic French card game, and Grand Gin Rummy, a famous card game enjoyed all around the world.

Prior to Leanplum, GameDuell was using a mobile engagement solution that was lacking in tracking and usability. Features that were missing include: inability to orchestrate campaigns across various channels, suboptimal A/B testing, no analytics dashboard, no audience segmentation model, and lack of email as a channel.

Solution

Leanplum delivered all the capabilities that were missing in GameDuell’s previous solution, offering a complete solution, including detailed product analytics and email. 

GameDuell uses Leanplum for three primary use cases: onboarding new users, reactivating dormant users, and engaging users.

Onboarding New Users

It’s critical for new users to have a great onboarding experience to become loyal users of the app.  Using Leanplum, GameDuell is able to provide users a smooth onboarding experience, and leveraging Leanplum’s pre-permissions settings to enroll them in push opt-ins to keep them coming back to the app. 

For the Onboarding Lifecycle Flow, with Leanplum, GameDuell has put in place a more structured flow, complete with naming and labels.

Current Onboarding Lifecycle Flow integrates:

• Onboarding push flow
• Engagement push flow – including promotion of special events, reminder of daily bonus, updates on the League system
• Reactivation push flow
• Monetization in-app flow: segmented based on user’s cumulative revenue
• Inbox flow
• Rating flow
• Push pre-permission flow
• Adhoc campaigns

The main benefit for the team is that GameDuell has now leveraged an automated system, which can be replicated across products. When the company develops a new game, it is able to easily replicate the flows, saving time and resources.

Reaching players at optimal time is key for onboarding. To do so, GameDuell uses a data taxonomy based on events and event properties focused on user experience and lifecycle flow. This allows the company to reach users at an optimal time by: a) segmenting users based on behavioral interactions, and b) triggering at the right time without interrupting the user’s game flow.

Dormant User Re-Activation

It’s common for a high percentage of users to go dormant after signing up for an app. As an industry average for hyper casual games, normally 60% of users uninstall the app on Day 1, leaving 40% up for reactivation. By segmenting users, personalizing messages and offering free rewards, GameDuell is able to reactivate and re-engage 20% of that 40% of users, which is considered above industry average. 

User Engagement

GameDuell uses Leanplum’s A/B testing capabilities to run different tests for engaging users along the customer journey. Engaged users are more likely to do in-app purchases and rate the app. 

A recent test involved providing rewards for various campaigns and testing different packages (different types of coins to keep players engaged).

Testing

As an example, for a long time NPU, GameDuell tested three variants of the same offer (low price / high discount):

• With game currency only (gems with which the user can purchase different game rewards)
• With game currency and boosters (rewards, which help the user to progress faster)
• With game currency and Collectibles (special items users can use in the game, like card backs)

Results

Test results showed that the game currency only offers performed 87% better than the others.