2 Mistakes you are Making With IAP & how to fix Them - Athena Peters, Mobile Game Doctor.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] I'd like to welcome to the stage to talk about two mistakes that you're making with in-app purchases and how to fix them it's Athena Peters from mobile game doctor so come on up folks uh thanks for coming to talk a little bit about myself so my name is Athena Z Peters I am a business developer and a product Management Consultant and strategist for mobile gamedoctor mobile game doctor has been around for about 20 years it was established by a couple of folks who've

been in free to play games for for lots and lots of time over those 20 years we've helped hundreds of companies improve their mobile games as well as any free to play game so uh it's not necessarily just mobile even though that's what it is in our title we can help you out with your PC and console games as well as long as they're in a free to play Space um a little bit about myself um I've been in the games industry also for over 20 years um and I moved into the free to play Space when I started working at Warner Brothers I was the executive producer on Dungeons and Dragons online and Lord of the Rings Online when they were moved into free to play uh products and then I helped launch uh Warner Brothers games first couple of mobile games Batman Arkham underworld and Game of Thrones conquest and now I've been with mobile game doctor about three years and I have helped a number of clients in improving

their product management on multiple game titles over the years so that's then I'm going to click this Maybe by pressing the right button oh the big one this one all right so one of the things that we see often with our clients making mistakes with IAP especially if they're moving from a ads based Revenue model and trying IAP for the first time but even those who have been doing uh iaf AKA in-app purchases in case you don't know that uh phrase um is uh number one an iteration rate so uh folks are just not iterating fast enough making changes fast enough that is very important when you're talking about doing IEP and secondly they don't know their customer um and they're not getting to know their customer so we're going to dive into a

little bit of details here and the goal here is to try to be get your game up into this top grossing list of these games here know all there is to know about iteration and knowing their customers and that's how they get to the top of the charts and we want to make sure that you and all of our clients do the same thing so iteration the basis try more and try it faster um the top 10 grossing games uh in uh you know on that list up there that we just saw are doing updates weekly if not faster they are putting out a new build constantly um this is absolutely necessary because you want to know you want to test everything that you put out right you want to constantly be verifying that any changes that you make

to your game are things that your players are going to get excited about right and it's also going to bring them back in it's giving them new options you want to constantly be expanding your store because if somebody runs if they really love your game and they love the things that you're building for them the last thing that you want them to do is run out of things to give you money for right um so key things being here for one A B test everything if you are not a b testing the changes in your game that is one of the first thing you should do and and we're talking about like the simplest of changes so up here I have an example of Candy Crush testing out a new ux and as you can note up here the simple change of having a white background versus a back black background on their uh heading up there that is something that they a b tested right so they built it they sent both

versions out to a segment of Their audience and then they checked the numbers that came back from that right um and then they saw like did that increase their you know return rate of their customers did it decrease the amount of people who were dropping out did it increase Revenue right it can you never know right but even simple changes like that but for every thing that you think about changing in your game everything that you might want to add in um you know price changes Etc all of this stuff should be a b tested so put it out put two different versions out see what data comes back from that check what numbers it's moving and then make the best decision from there and then roll that out to your audience and then test something else but you should never be adding anything into your game that

you haven't checked this gets supported by your weekly releases right so that's part of it you're sending out a new update all the time with these little changes um and then you're testing them and then you're putting out a build that like confirms that one change and then you're starting in another one and the most important part of this is that you need to collect or review that data it doesn't help to a B test things if you're not checking the numbers that come back right so you should know why you're testing something right so if I've got changes to my my UI or my ux there's a reason why I changed that usually it's about like are players not completing the level for some reason right are am I seeing more dropping out of the game than I wanted to um you know my retention numbers aren't as strong or maybe even like maybe it's about my monetization numbers but first you want to know what exactly that changes What needle is that change

supposed to change make for you right know what that is so that when you run the test you have that check but then you also want to check your other data so important things are you know is your conversion rate going up or down after you make that change because sometimes right you're going to have a knock down effect from the change that you made that might not be related specifically in the thing you were aiming for that has another effect so we always want to make sure that we're not making even if we're making a change to increase our tension we want to make sure that we didn't increase our retention but at the same time reduce our Revenue per user right so we want to make sure that we're also keeping track of those numbers uh while we're testing and then that way you can compare those things and then decide was this a good move or not revert the changes if it was a bad idea and move forward with the one that

worked but that only works if you have that data so make sure you're checking that data um yeah and I and that was a lot of the thing that I'm covering there right so it's useless if you're not tracking it um check everything color changes quests pricing all that you can test all of it and fine tune every little bit the next big thing that we're seeing is people not knowing their customer and do you really know them so when you're working on just ad Revenue what we see is a lot of people for focus in on I just want the many as many downloads as I can possibly get because I just want to get people in my game and then watching ads and then I get paid through ads well when you decide that like ad revenue is no longer beneficial to you because of all the data changes out there in the world and you need to switch into IAP it's no longer good enough just to get people to download

you need to know who those people are and what they enjoy and what they like because now they need to be real people to you because you're selling a specific thing to them right you're not just getting them to watch ads you need to actually sell some things to them so you need to get to know them so key thing please please please create player personas for your game users for your game players um who is your Target demographic right don't just sit don't just stop at um I'm aiming for women age 25 to 35 um who enjoy dress-up games right I need more detail than that who is she where does she hang out what does she enjoy reading uh you know when she's not playing games what is she doing right all of these things tell me what types of products in

my game this customer I might be interested in purchasing or getting to know or content that they're interested in right if I know what movies what books Etc that she reads then I'm gonna better be able to craft my game to and the items that I'm selling in my game to be something that she's gonna get excited about and and this doesn't just mean like one right you might have five different player personas um because you can actually Target multiple customers with different iaps which is the great thing about IEPs and also being able to a B test you can actually segment out your group where you're selling some things to some people and other things to other people and the more you get to know your customers and who's coming in the better you're going to be able to do that and the better you're going to be able to cater specifically to their needs and their wants um key to this another little tidbit that we've got from the top grossing

games is eight out of 10 of those top grossing games are collecting an email within the first time user experience so that's how you get to know your customer you need their email or better yet if you can get them to sign in with Google or Facebook I really love Facebook because Facebook will tell you what the things are that they like their Hobbies what pages they've signed up to you know all of that data tells you about the personality of the people that are playing your game and thus you're going to be able to create your game to really fit in with them so one of the best things that you can do is attach sign ins to your game to one of those major sign-in groups like Facebook or Google so that then you can use Facebook and Google to get that data from them on your specific customer and get to know that customer um another thing you can do even without

those sign-ins if you have a Discord if you have forums if you don't even if you don't have those things you do have reviews you should be reading the reviews in your app store all the time right what are people saying about your game what are they saying that they like about it what are they saying that they hate about it right and why and then also like the the biggest thing you can do even to help with your review scores is reply back to those things even if it's a nice thing reply back and say hey thanks thanks for that positive score I'm so glad you're enjoying our game but really what you're doing is you're digging through that information to find out more about what that customer likes and dislikes and then that tells you what things you want to adjust back and forth once again collect and review that data uh don't just it's not gonna do you any good if you just read it you get it all and then you move on for the day

make sure that you've got spreadsheets databases Etc where you can collect that information and constantly monitor it so that as your player base preferences change Etc you can also adjust to that right um and then you can share it with your team and you know that every time your team decides to make them a new uh feature or aspect to the game that you're checking back to make sure that that's something that those those people who are playing your game especially those people who are heavily monetizing in your game are going to be excited about right so get make sure you know them um one of the things I really like is that there are several suffix sophisticated tool sets out there in the market that you can either work with as a third party or that you can develop within your studio that nowadays will allow you to deliver content so like I think many of us are

aware of the fact that we can serve up special sales and ads to a specific group one thing that I recommend really looking into is can you actually deliver a specific feature or a specific store item right to a target audience right so if you the more you get to know your customers the more you can segment them into a group of personas right you could have a group of people who are like I really really really love cosmetic items give me a new outfit every day I will buy every single one of those outfits right and then you have another group of people who never buy any outfits from you but they buy a whole lot of like you know get me through this level you know power-ups you can create your stores different stores to segment to those audiences

right so create your store and set up your store where it can find that Target user that really loves those cosmetic items and pull those up front center right so immediately they go into the store they see those things that get them excited and they're purchasing those things and then you know don't worry about the power-ups because you know they don't buy those power-ups but if you've got the people who really like the power-ups you can present them a different store View and then all of a sudden they're getting something different so these tool sets are going to be very similar to your a b testing tool sets right where you just segment your audience you present certain things um and then and being able to develop that means that you are specifically targeting that audience and you're going to improve greatly improve um how much uh buy through you get on your in-app

purchases so but this is like one of my favorite quotes from Walt Disney and is uh one of the things that I most love about the mobile games industry and why I love this platform is the way to get started is to quit talking about it and just begin doing that is like the best advice that I have to give anybody in mobile game development the one thing that is wonderful about this platform is that you can quickly go out to your audience reach them try a thing see if it works and and then if it doesn't do something different and the audience is forgiving of that it's not like PC or console where you have to release it and then hope it worked out and then never change a thing again uh mobile audiences will keep coming back especially if you have a good reach out system where you've collected their emails or you have them you know where you can send them

notifications and say hey we've got a new thing here you should come check it out they'll come back and check it out so there's no reason not to just experiment and try new things all the time to really have you know effect to really affect your game right and and really improve uh your modernization so yes IEP can be really intimidating um especially if you're doing more traditional Game Dev but it is far more forgiving so dive in experiment get to know those customers make sure you're tracking those numbers so that you can um really just improve your game as well as its Revenue um and of course if you need help uh mobile game doctor has a ton of experts this is what we do all day long uh we are happy to set up advising um you know either with audits or

um you know checking out your game and getting Consultants embedded in your team for a certain amount of time whatever you're needing my email or the my email is right there the website is right there reach out and we'll be happy to help you out in whatever way we can um yeah and I've got like maybe a minute for questions [Applause] I think that was great that was a really great a great summary of that let's have a look we've got a question over there so we've got to we've already got yeah we've got we can take this one question then we'll have to move on but that's perfect thank you very much can you hear me yeah yeah okay wonderful um so one question about the a b test everything um the the problem like I facing like through my career is like you cannot test too many things at the same time because you like you know diluting the bass too much right yeah so do you do you have any experience with that and like what is here you know yeah in that case I mean a lot of it's a matter of like you know structure out your a b

tests right like you can't test 10 changes at once right but what you can do is like roll out changes over time depending on what type of change it might be you could get data back in like a day or two um sometimes it's usually better to give you about a week or so to see if there's actual like monetization effects on it but if like every week you're testing something new you're constantly releasing so like the other thing is like don't try to do too much at once right because if you change too many things at once your test is going to be invalid because if like I put out five different changes I don't actually know which one of those changes affected the numbers right so if you're doing one change at a time and a b testing it then then you're good right great thank you yeah perfect we'll have to move on but um Athena Peters thank you very much I'm happy to send anybody this deck if you email me so just let me know perfect thank you amazing

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