Friday view: Learn fast, start strong

Glen Kiladis, VP new market and media solutions games evangelist at app marketing firm Fiksu, discusses the importance of a strong soft launch 

Mobile game usage grew 66% in 2013, and games command 40% of consumers’ time in apps. In such a competitive environment, understanding your market is essential to success, and for that reason more and more game publishers are soft launching their games.

A soft launch is a controlled release of your game in a test market outside your primary market, giving you the opportunity to test your game’s market readiness in a realistic environment before launching to a wider remit, allowing you to determine if your game is market ready before conducting a broad and expensive launch.

For example, we recently helped a card battler game do a soft launch in Canada. Their metrics weren’t initially great – their user acquisition costs were higher than their average revenue per user – but through the soft launch they learned that they needed to shorten their tutorial and improve gameplay mechanics.

As a result, they saw a 28% increase in the number of returning users, a 31% increase in the number of users making a purchase, and a 15% increase in the number of purchases made when they eventually did their full launch.  Those changes flipped their monetization equation to the positive.

You won’t get these kind of results without careful planning and execution of a soft launch, though. Here’s how you can best use this technique to prepare for your own launch.

What data should you gather?

This really is the most important question about a soft launch – and it’s one that developers often neglect to ask themselves. There are three different broad questions you need to answer before getting into the details:

1)      What questions are you trying to answer?

It’s important to be explicit with what your outcomes could be. “Will users like my game?” is not going to give you a clear cut yes-or-no answer. “Does the tutorial teach players the basic mechanics?” or “How many levels will players try before they’re ready to make a purchase?” are better questions.

2)      What data do you need to answer them?

It’s important to understand what you’re trying to measure before you set out. You want to make sure that you have sufficient granularity to get the answers you need.

3)      What actions could you take as a result?

Make sure you can connect the outcomes to tangible improvements in your app or your app marketing campaigns.

Here are some examples of the types of questions a soft launch can answer:

User experience

• Do users get stuck at a certain level or point?
• Do they read or watch the tutorial before playing?
• Is there functionality that players are not using at all?

User retention

• Are players moving beyond the first level or two?
• How long do they stick around?
• What threshold do they have to reach to be more likely to become long-term players?

Monetization

• How long does it take players to make a purchase, on average?
• What activities or characteristics decrease that time?
• How much are players spending – and who spends more?

Virality

• Are people sharing your app?
• At what point do they share it?

Note that you probably won’t be able to answer all of these questions. Every new variable you want to understand adds a multiplier to the amount of data you need, to get a scientifically significant sample.

Choosing a test market

Once you have decided exactly what you want to test, the next step is picking a country that has market similarity to your target audience. User acquisition costs in the UK are generally too high for affordable soft launches, and other English-speaking countries might not provide accurate enough data, particularly around monetization.

Choosing a tracking partner

Accurate, detailed data is critical during your soft launch, and you’ll need to implement tracking and attribution technologies to gather it. There are two kinds of tracking you should use during your soft launch: UX (user experience) tracking and UA (user acquisition) tracking.

The first, UX, is done with in-app analytics. This data will show you what users do in your app, where churn occurs, what features they use, and where they get stuck. It also gives you information on user flow, session length, and social sharing.

The second type of tracking, UA, is about your app marketing and ROI. This type of tracking tells you where new users come from, how much they cost, and how much revenue they generated.

Some questions to ask when picking a tracking partner:

• Can you track all user acquisition sources – social, RTB, Facebook, etc?
• Can they connect when and where a user was acquired with the activity and revenue they generate to calculate ROI and LTV?
• Do they offer retention decay and retention activity metrics?
• Is there an API you can integrate to bring data into your own system?

Don’t forget to get the details tight

A soft launch is not for basic quality assurance: you don’t want to be paying to acquire users just to learn that your registration page doesn’t work. Don’t overlook the basics! Make sure that:

• Links are working and directing to the correct pages
• Rating tools and comments are operative
• Third party integrations are active and working
• Images and content are in the correct sections
• Social sharing capabilities are working

In addition to these types of bugs, we’ve seen server to server tracking connections break down in the middle of a burst campaign, and game servers collapse under the weight of large volumes of users.  While testing server performance isn’t as simple as verifying the basics listed above, it’s important to do, to avoid wasting your investment in a soft launch.

General scope

A soft launch can take roughly 2-4 weeks. The exact timeframe will depend on how many users you need to get enough data.

Your timeline will also impact your cost. The quicker you want those users, the more you’ll have to spend, because you’ll have to bid more aggressively to get visibility and user numbers. Expect to spend at least £6K or £10K, more if you have multiple goals from the testing.

Analyse, improve, update

Once you complete your soft launch, you should analyze the data you have collected and make changes to your app. If you’re not confident in the results, or you’ve totally overhauled your app, you can consider another soft launch cycle in the same or a new country.

Once you’ve learned enough to be confident, get ready for your major launch other target markets. A soft launch is a smart and strategic decision for your app. It gives you the opportunity to learn first so that you can start strong and invest wisely in your broad launch.