Optimizing your mobile game for maximum monetization value largely hinges on providing every user segment a tailored gaming experience. Thus, one of the single biggest challenges every gaming team currently faces is, how can you add more color and context to your user segmentation strategies in order to better retain and monetize your players?
Quite plainly, the better you understand your user segments - what they want and don’t want, what motivates them and what drives them to boredom, what makes them ‘can’t wait’ to come back for more, and so on - the better you can tailor your game to match player expectations.
Problem is, user segmentation is, and has largely been, at the mercy of lagging data. That is to say, publishers have had to rely on using a player’s history of engagement as their indicator for how they will engage with their game in the future.
But in a business of declining app retention, global privacy regulation and changing app store policies related to user privacy and experiences. Who can afford to wait? Why miss an opportunity to improve player experience?
Consider sourcing real-time feedback from your players directly in the game. Real-time player experience surveys can help inform your segmentation strategies by aligning gameplay with the exact motivations and preferences of your players. You can now literally reward players for sharing their opinions that will make their game experiences more rewarding and more engaging. Let’s dive into a few use cases.
The ability to acquire specific, high-value user segments is no longer as efficient as it once was in a post-ATT world on iOS.
As Eric Seufert points out in a recent post entitled Mapping the post-ATT future of mobile free-to-play gaming…
“...because Self-Attributing Networks like Meta and Google were so adept at building a feedback loop between in-game activities and advertising campaigns, mobile game developers were able to assume that the traffic they received from those channels was optimally targeted to their games on the basis of player behavioral history. For that reason, mobile free-to-play studios merely had to focus content development on a singular game experience: “the game” that the stream of curated, filtered cohorts of acquired users would play.”
This is no longer the case.
Because ATT makes it so incredibly hard to identify and acquire high-value user segments now, you have to try and figure it out on your own. Unfortunately, for many game teams, until recently the only way to segment users was to wait and identify early in-game behaviors and trends.
But waiting is precisely the problem. High churn rates early in game play means time is working against you. Game teams simply don’t have time to sit on their hands and wait.
So what do you do? Glad you asked.
Implementing personalization surveys early in gameplay can help you identify early signals of value. The quicker you can help players share their motivation for downloading your game, the quicker you can align their game experience to better engage them.
For example, imagine Game A attracts two types of gamers. One segment is Socialites. One segment is Creatives. Both play the same game but for very different reasons. If you know each segment has different motivations for playing the same game, wouldn’t you create unique gaming experiences for each? You bet you would!
Knowing WHY your users play early in the game gives you and your team the opportunity to personalize your gamers’ experiences. And combining proactive experience data with behavioral data can increase your ability to engage, retain, and monetize your players more effectively.
Personalization surveys early in gameplay help you identify and segment your players in a single, in-app, rewarded experience. And in a post-ATT world, that’s precisely what you need.
How you deploy your user segmentation strategies will depend entirely on your game, genre, content, and more.
Getting as much insight and qualitative data about YOUR user segments is critical to building and continually optimizing a game that will keep YOUR players coming back for more.
Let’s look at a couple examples of how game teams can apply in-app surveys to unlock new user segmentation capabilities.
Imagine you know that getting players to stick around to day 10 is a magic number for you because your data shows that players who make it to day 10 are 3X more likely to be retained. But getting a cohort of players to day 10 has largely relied on hit and miss theories and testing.
In-app rewarded surveys on the other hand let you get critical insight about your players. For example, on day 5 you can find out that you have a mix of players visiting your game who are Creatives, Competitors, and Socializers. With this insight, you can now have live ops create custom game experiences for each of those user segments from day 5 on, that significantly improves the chances of those individual user segments making it to day 10.
In this example, maybe you know that players who engage with a specific feature are 10X more likely to spend more on iAPs and 5% of those players go on to become Whales. But getting users to interact with the feature has not been as successful as you hoped.
Surveys can help you reveal misunderstandings that your players are having about the feature. Based on direct feedback from your players, you're able to create clearer messaging about said feature that increases engagement with it by 30%.
In a recent Fireside chat with Peter Williamson, CEO of Supersonic Software Ltd., he shared how important it was for them to get player feedback about a Booster Power Up they added to their game Picture Cross…
As you can imagine, there are an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to better understanding your user segments. In-app rewarded surveys help you unlock new user segments that haven’t been possible before until now.
Personalizing a user experience starts with better user segmentation and that starts with understanding what your users want. With in app surveys, you don’t have to wait for them to tell you what they want through their actions. You can proactively ask them what they want directly and Live Ops can now create a gaming experience that’s tailor made for each user segment.
Each user segment gets a more personalized experience which increases their engagement and likely facilitates iAPs and improves LTV. It’s a win-win!
Mobile game user segmentation up until now has been a wait and see approach. Additionally, it’s often missing critical elements that help you and your team get a clear picture of and deep understanding of who your players are and what they want and why they want it. With in-app rewarded surveys, you can now unlock new user segmentation capabilities that let you see a 3D version of your users like never before.
TapResearch makes it easy to collect real-time player feedback from all your players – not just the loud ones – so you can make better product decisions, with more confidence. If you're interested in learning more about player experience measurement 
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