Deep dive into funnel analysis for gaming apps

In a world overflowing with gaming apps, competing for users’ attention is no easy feat. As new games continuously emerge and vanish in the market, developers keep searching for the secret to success. The answer, however, lies in one word: “users.” To excel in this competitive landscape, the developers must delve into user behavior data within gaming apps and leverage these insights for improvement.

Many game developers and publishers opt for a pivotal checkpoint in their game’s journey – the soft launch – to ensure its performance before the official release. During this crucial phase, you can measure and unveil how your players move through a sequence of predefined events, or steps, from downloading the game to progressing within your intended user flow. This strategic process is known as “funnel analysis.”

Understanding how to leverage funnel analysis for a gaming app’s growth and engaging with players is the key to unlocking success within the mobile gaming industry.

What is funnel analysis?

Funnel analysis is a valuable tool for comprehending user behavior in your gaming app. It provides a structured approach to visualize and quantify the progression of your players through a series of predefined events or ‘steps.’ This process involves tracking user actions in depth, from a specific stage, such as downloading an app, to a desired outcome, like purchasing an item. This detailed tracking empowers you to measure and optimize conversion rates at each step of the user journey. 

Why funnel analysis is a must-have for mobile gaming apps

Funnel analysis can provide essential insights that can supercharge your marketing strategy, enhance user experience, and boost revenue. Let’s delve into the reasons why funnel analysis is crucial for your mobile game’s success:

1. Enhancing marketing efficiency in the privacy-first era

In the past, audience targeting based on their behavioral data was relatively straightforward. However, with the evolving landscape of privacy regulations and growing user data concerns, access to data has become increasingly challenging. This shift has prompted a transformation of marketing strategies, moving from specific audience targeting to analyzing user data post-acquisition to identify the most effective marketing channels and campaigns.

Funnel analysis plays a pivotal role in this privacy-centric era. It helps you monitor the actions of acquired users for each marketing channel and campaign, evaluate their conversion rates, and optimize your marketing strategies. By allocating your budget to the most effective channels and campaigns, you can maximize your reach to the target audience. In the face of privacy concerns, funnel analysis becomes crucial for building a user acquisition (UA) marketing strategy and enhancing overall marketing efficiency.

2. Understanding user behavior and elevating user experience

Funnel analysis offers a systematic approach to understanding user behavior within gaming apps. It provides a detailed view of how users interact with your game and progress through it step by step. You can identify which stages present challenges, consume more time, or experience higher drop-off rates. Furthermore, it sheds light on whether users progress through the game as intended.

These insights prove particularly valuable in soft launch phases before the official release. For instance, if you notice a significant drop-off rate during the tutorial phase, you can refine the tutorial or provide more precise guidance to reduce the drop-off rate. It’s crucial to remember that improving the First Time User Experience (FTUE) can ripple effect on user retention and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). In short, funnel analysis empowers you to make data-driven improvements that enhance the user experience of your game, encouraging players to stay engaged for extended periods.

Setting up each step of funnel analysis

To kickstart your funnel analysis, you must establish a clear purpose and well-defined goals. Start by asking yourself what specific areas you aim to improve or understand. Your analysis objectives could range from increasing item purchase conversion rates to boosting subscription conversion rates. These goals will shape the structure of your funnel to analyze. Once your analysis objectives are set in place, the next step is to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs), data, and events for each funnel stage to label them.

For example, let’s say your goal is to examine the conversion rate of users acquired from paid ads within the past seven days and subsequently made a purchase. To optimize your performance across various marketing channels, you can structure your funnel analysis stages on Airbridge as follows:

Points to consider when defining funnel stages

When creating your funnel stages, there are a couple of critical factors to keep in mind:

1. One-way progression

It’s essential to ensure that the behavior of users moves forward through the funnel stages and does not backtrack to a previous step. This one-way progression is vital for accurate analysis. Using the earlier example, a user should only be able to purchase items after successfully signing up, driven by the game’s settings. This prevents accumulating duplicate data from the same user within a single step.

2. Consistent and readable names for each step

The names assigned to each stage in your funnel must be consistent and crystal clear, ensuring every team member can interpret the results within the same context. This practice simplifies the exploration of the reports, making the data immediately clear and sensible at first glance.

Once you’ve meticulously defined your funnel analysis stages, proceed to collect the data as per your definition and embark on the analysis process.

Analyzing data with Airbridge’s Funnel Report

When it comes to funnel analysis, you have several options at your disposal. While product analytics tools can certainly do the job, a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) offers unique advantages. Unlike other MMPs, Airbridge is a notable exception as the sole MMP with funnel analysis.

Airbridge, as an MMP, presents a funnel report that provides detailed analysis across the entire user journey, from ad impressions or clicks to in-app events, using the exclusive data that media channels share with their partners only. In particular, you can quickly create specific cohorts based on Luft, Airbridge’s in-house OLAP database. With the Funnel Report, you can understand when users tend to drop off and how the user journey varies by country or OS platform.

👉 For more information on the Funnel Report offered by Airbridge, check out our guide.

Benefits of funnel analysis with MMP

The standout advantage of employing an MMP for your funnel analysis lies in its ability to access a holistic view of advertising data, including that from Self-Attributing Networks (SAN). Only MMPs can use the data from SAN, exclusively through partnership, combined with their data to provide a complete picture of the user journey. In practical terms, even when product analytics tools and MMPs are integrated, product analytics tools fall short in analyzing customer journeys, including attribution data from SAN. Airbridge can bridge this gap by providing comprehensive funnel reports as an MMP.

For mobile game marketers, this means an opportunity to craft a more efficient marketing strategy by leveraging segmented analysis conducted through the essential solution MMP.

If you want to improve your marketing strategies on mobile gaming apps with funnel analysis, get in touch with us today!