Anne Steinhaus's blog

5 Lessons Learned

Let’s face it. We all love getting a deal. It’s a well-known fact that many retailers just mark up their prices so they can reduce them later on, but I’ll admit I get a small thrill out of seeing that “40% off!” sticker on a price tag. Even the message on my grocery receipt that tells me I saved 23% for being a “member” makes me feel like a smart, savvy shopper.

Well, social games are no different. Since only a small percentage of social gamers will ever spend money on a particular game, sales can be a great way to drive more paying users. Here at Viximo, we’ve developed a variety of tools to help us run sales and promotions in a fun and engaging way. This is a short list of what we’ve learned along the way.

1. Create a sense of urgency.  

We’ve experimented with various timeframes for sales, ranging from minutes to days. The result? We’ve shown we can create just as much - or more - lift during a 15-minute sale than a full day or even multi-day promotion. The reason? Social games are played in short increments (a typical session lasts just 2-5 minutes), so there is a relatively small window in which players make purchase decisions. A discount that’s only available for 15 minutes can therefore drive more of these impulse buys. If a player sees that something will be available all week, they’re much more likely to enter into the “Oh, I’ll do it later” mindset.

2. Mix it up.

While we try to run sales with some regularity, we’ve found that you can’t be too predictable. If you start doing special discounts every Friday starting at 5:00, chances are your players will catch on and wait until the end of the week to spend their money. With this in mind, we’ve developed a number of different ways to run sales, and try to make each one unique. Just a couple examples:

• Collectible sales - These multi-day sales reward players for coming back to a game each day with a higher discount on their purchases. Each day they also receive a special prize that they “collect” in a banner above the game. 
• Flash sales - These minutes-long sales can happen at any time throughout the day, with little advanced warning. 

3. Be relevant.

By far, we’ve seen the most success when we run sales tied to holidays or events. And because we treat every site in our network separately, we can make it relevant to the local culture. For instance, this spring we’ve done promotions for Carnival on Orkut (Brazil), St. Patrick’s Day on Yahoo (US), and Easter on VZNet (Europe).

4. Test your limits.

It’s funny how sometimes you can get more people to buy something when you have a low discount vs. a high one. Without getting too much into the psychology of purchase decisions, I’d say it’s all about the perceived value. Sometimes, “75% off” means “Please, take this crap off my hands”, while “40% off” means “Wow, that’s a bargain”. We’ve tirelessly tested different combinations of discount, messaging, and timing on each of our games and sites to maximize conversion rate and overall revenue.

5. Make it personal.

We’ve built a robust targeting engine to help us run specific promotions to a selected portion of our audience, based on behavioral data. Why? For starters, we can drive the behaviors we want without giving money away - after all, why offer a discount to someone who was probably going to buy anyway? We can also get specific with our messaging when we’re talking to a small group of similar users, driving a higher CTR (up to 60% higher!) on behaviorally-targeted promotions.

Sales are just another example of how we add value to our partners’ already kick-ass games. And through a process of development, marketing, and constant testing, we’re learning more every day. ...

To follow up on my last post, I decided to take a look at how men and women use social notifications on our platform. For the uninitiated, notifications come in three flavors:

●     Invites, which are sent from one user to another, encouraging new users to come play the game
●     Messages, also sent from one user to another, often used for sending gifts or other specific items
●     Activities, which are posted to a users’ wall or other social feed, highlighting an achievement, mission accomplished, level-up, etc.

Looking at behavior over the past 6 months, activities by far are the most utilized form of social sharing on the Viximo platform. Nearly twice as many people have posted an activity than have sent an invite. That doesn’t mean that activities are more efficient for viral growth; the conversion rates from invites and messages are higher than from activities. In other words, users are more likely to click on a private message from a friend, rather than an activity post that is likely to get lost in their social feed.

What about gender differences? On average, men on our platform are 10% more likely to post activities to their social feeds. Women, on the other hand, are nearly 20% more likely than males to send invites. They also tend to invite more friends (22 on average, vs. 18 for men). Both genders are equally likely to send messages, but women send nearly 50% more messages per user.

Is it any surprise that guys like to blast their entire friend group with posts about their accomplishments within social games, while gals prefer one-on-one interactions? Maybe not. But considering the long-held stereotype that social games are made for bored housewives, I wasn’t expecting men to be big social sharers when it comes to game activity (at least not publicly).

Notifications are an important component of social game play (they put the “social” in social gaming). Obviously, they are key to growing your user base, but can also contribute to retention. It can be a challenge for both game developers and social networks to make the most of viral channels. Knowing how men and women use different types of notifications can be a key part of the optimization process. After all, viral channels are free, and who doesn’t want to reduce their marketing costs?

Anyone else out there surprised by these results? ...

Now that social games have evolved past simple farming games to a full-fledged multibillion dollar industry, does anyone still believe that the typical social gamer is a 43-year-old woman? While most of the initial games on Facebook appealed to this demographic, social game content has grown in both volume and variety. Sure, there are still a lot of clones out there - look at the sheer number of farming games - but new genres and game mechanics have emerged that pull in a much wider audience.

To demonstrate this, I took a look at three of the most popular games across the Viximo network, focusing on gender.

GAME 1 - Big Business. This graph is probably what we would typically associate with a social game. Females account for about 60% of the users, views, and revenue for the game across our network:

GAME 2 - Ravenwood Fair. This game, deployed on similar sites as Big Business, has a slightly different pattern. Males make up half of the audience, but are much less engaged and certainly don’t monetize as well as females:

GAME 3 - Backyard Monsters. On the other end of the spectrum, this game blows the whole “housewives are the only ones playing social games” theory completely out of the water.

As these data show, social games aren't just for women in their 30's (despite what your core gamer friends might have you believe). As with traditional games, social games can appeal to many different demographic groups by providing carefully tailored content and functionality. Each segment of users has different - and potentially advantageous - usage habits and spending patterns. This is where Viximo comes in.

As a social game distributor, we use a game’s demographic data (among other things) to inform our approach to advertising, cross-promotion, community messaging, sales and incentives, and more. Making a great game is a big part of success, but getting it into the hands of the right users is even more important. ...

Read an interview with Viximo's CEO

Wondering what the opportunity is for social game developers beyond Facebook? Our CEO, Dale Strang, sat down with Gamasutra to enlighten them on the subject. Some of the highlights:

• Many developers either think the off-Facebook opportunity isn't there, or is too difficult to take advantage of.
• While Facebook may be the single dominant global player, there are a number of high-quality, regionally targeted social networks with engaged audiences across the globe.
• Understanding these markets can be a difficult task for developers (this is where Viximo comes in).