Session: From Data To Dollars – How To Crush Your Web Shop’s KPIs - Archie Stonehill, Stash.gg

[Music] because I'm old so much so it is my birthday today you know um thank you uh and I it takes me back to the days where people like Tony used to give me games uh and but actually what it really takes me to is the moment when we stopped doing that and we changed over to having the OEM the phone manufacturer providing that balance so and the apple and I think there's a change over I feel that there's a a new wind in the air with the digitala with the whole conversation we just had about consumer experiences and yes I am padding time because they wanted to switch things over and that I think gives us a great opportunity to talk about what's happening in the world of web and that's where is going to tell

us all about that Archie over to you sir awesome okay I Chang slides with this I think can everyone hear me okay cool so today we're going to talk about how to analyze your web stores as products I think that's like the focus of this is you know stash is a business that builds player experiences and you know I think why always say like payments is not our product payments is our Revenue model our product our direct consumer player experiences um that will you know capture players attention so these are kind of the four pillars that make up Stash's approach so the first one is exactly that that like these player experiences need to be gameplay enhancing because they're higher friction they need to be a better experience to get players to opt into them the second is that in order to build those better experiences you need something that's pretty bespoke and custom and that templates and cookie cutters won't cut it uh the third is that these experiences need to be Unified so you know every experience and

interface your player has to your game needs to be a unified experience in terms of accounts segmentations Etc uh and then the fourth and final is that like you know the developers we work with big developers they have tons of assets capabilities they build up inh house like we try and disrupt that as little as possible like first rule is Do no harm create no additional work and then the second rule is how can you find the assets each Studio has and maximize their impact in new formats like the web so that's an introduction to stash but this tool will be really more about like how we think one way we think about web shops as products uh and so kind of two lenses we take one is metric and the other is user Journey so this will walk through the user Journey looking at metrics but the kind of holy of holy metrics for us is channel share so what share of your spend are you getting through your first party channels why is this such an important metric there's kind of three reasons so the first is you can Benchmark it uh there's some public data and there's increasingly understood benchmarks of what good looks

like for first party spend as a share of total spend the second reason it's important is because it isolates out um you know other factors that influence game performance from web Shop Performance so if you're trying to analyze web shops as a product this one isolates out game performance seasonality Etc and then the third reason is because it's the thing that if you shift it has the highest impact so that's what this sensitivity table shows you um this table shows what happens if you move an increments of 2.5% in terms of reducing your payment processing fees or increasing or reducing your share of Channel and if you look there like it is worthwhile to increase your costs by 10% going from 2.5% to 12.5% in payment proc fees if you can increase your share of spend by 2.5% because it's just so much more impactful um similarly like if you start at you know 10% uh uh kind of like processing fees with 20% spend if you increase your share of channel for $100 million game by 2.5% you're adding 2.3

million whereas if you decrease the costs by 2.5% the impact is more like half a million so in terms of what you want to move with your web shop it's this number um but like the way we'll run through kind of understanding what's driving that number is each step in a us a journey so we'll run through each step and then each step has a kind of commensurate metric like Topline metric uh that like kind of combined really are what drive your store Revenue so this is the equation one equation to get at store Revenue broken down by step and then the way I think about this kind of concept is as like a diagnostic tool so you can drill down to understand your web shop performance by looking in deeper and deeper layers at these numbers and you're looking at like one aspect of your product and your player experience so each of these metrics has like supporting metrics that give you a bit more Nuance so if something's changing in my web Shop Performance I would first look at okay well what's changing number of customers or LTV and then continue to draw down until I get to the root cause so we'll be running through each these steps the Topline

metrics the supporting metrics and how to optimize them so first step is first visit um this is obviously hugely important because it determines anything later that comes is going to be reliant on this being large and high quality say people over index on quantity here and Overlook quality it doesn't just matter how many users you're getting it matters which they are that's especially true for web shops which require them your users to like play the game um so the Topline metric of quantity kind of speaks for itself um but what I would say is like essential to understand here is that um you have quantity quality and then it's also important to note that like where your users are coming from influences their experience of your game web shop because if they're coming from a trusted Source they come in with a different first impression and so similarly this becomes like one of the best ways to filter your metrics um but in terms of looking at like the kind of like more nuanced metrics here I would highlight bounce rate and traffic sources as the two most important like underlying metrics underneath total

visits bounce rate is important because it tells you what your like first experience of your shop is if you think about players arrive at the shop you want to give them like a compelling reason to um you know link their accounts which is the next step you want to give them like an easy experience doing that and like an overall understanding of the play of the Shop's value prop um so bounce rate just tracks how many of your users did nothing else just landed your at your site and then exited you know if that number is high you can solve it by enhancing your value proposition or making it less like ction F to take the next step um and then the other aspect of you know your first visits is like site traffic uh as I mentioned this is like really essential as a filter Downstream uh but also because if you're coming from for example like an in-game link to the web shop you have a very different impression of it than if you're clicking a Facebook approach just in terms of trust and safety um so being able to understand how your shop is apping to different player types that are coming at it in different ways really important for explaining metrics later

how do you increase this obviously you know there are kind of like obvious ways to grow total visits um but I'll highlight a couple here that are really important so one is using what you can in game to link out to your web shop now everyone knows there are various things you can't do but you are actually allowed to link out to anything that isn't like a transaction related functionality so a bunch of product stash builds are like products specifically designed to be compliant with App Store policies that you can link out from and to to get them into your web environment like loyalty is a really good example that that the other thing you want to make sure of is like trust is something you need to establish up front so making the shop look familiar feel familiar that would increase the percentage of users that are taking further actions and kind of trust this experience so it's a way to decrease your uh bounce rate and then you know third you want to identify kind of untapped sources of users and go after them by looking at your sources of traffic and then you know using creative Partnerships Etc so once you kind of got users to trust your site they visited the next really important thing is linking like

one of the reasons this is so important is because it um basically establishes a prerequisite for doing a lot of Downstream user experiences require you to know who that user is because you want to personalize them so this is a really high source of friction OB uh like obviously and one of the reasons it's so high friction is because very few players on mobile games even have like a concept of a Multi-Device engagement with your game they've probably only ever engaged with your game from the game client on that device so this is the first time they'll have like a cross-platform experience so they won't know their password they won't remember setting up an account so the key is to make it like as low fraction as possible and as motivated as possible so you know account linking conversion is pretty obvious how you how you um calculate it but we break it down into like account linking initiation how many people start the process to link their account and then how many people complete that process and what that captures is initiation rate kind of captures like how attractive is my value proposition to motivate players to to

link their accounts um and then assume they try like how many are successful in doing that that's more of like an implementation question than like an attractiveness and motivation question so commenly like a lot of the things you can do to improve these rates the first one like initiation rate is really a design question can you design your value proposition to be more compelling so that people immediately understand that they would get value from this experience and then can you make the kind of like ease of use as low friction as possible and your like authentication technology work as seamlessly as possible to make sure those that try to link their account succeed in doing so for example these are some like you know stash web shops always offer like passwordless logins so using QR codes or deep links on mobile um and then similarly like being very clear about what the what the value of this shop is for players so that they they kind of understand what's going on here what the deal is okay so you've got players to link your account and now you want to get them to make the first purchase

again like this also breaks down into what I would call a kind of like motivation question versus an implementation question so at stash we use a c so you can purchase multiple products at once even if you don't though you want to look at how many users like made the attempt to make a purchase so how many did you successfully convince like this is a worthwhile channel for you to use and then separate that out from like check out abandonment which is more a question of how smooth is your kind of like design and how low friction is it how well do your payment methods work etc so add to car is really essential because it is one of the highest drop off rates we actually find the drop off from added to cart to purchase completion is pretty low if you can convince players to make a purchase on the web most of them will go and do it they'll find out how but it's really more about like this is obviously a very high friction channel for your players so can you create like a incentive that gets them to you know do this High friction thing so that's often commercial incentives like

discounts using the additional margin you have to like share some of that value but it could also be like other design incentives or design rewards to like proceeding along this flow the second part is like check out abandonment and what you're trying to do here is make it like as easy and accessible for players to purchase as possible so this could be a function of how many payment methods you op to offer but it could also be about reducing Clicks in the checkout flow or introducing like additional incentives at the checkout flow to motivate them to complete the conversion so for example if you look at number four here that is kind of checkout based incentives to convert like discounts or reminders of the value you're getting them um other ways to like increase your ad to C rate they're really really important uh providing a good catalog like a bunch of stores fail simply because they just don't sell products that people want to sell want to buy so that's one of the reasons stash is like so emphatic about having a unified catalog because because it enables you to sell all of the offers

from within your game in your web environment and therefore like sell the high conversion ones other ways you know that you can drive these M tricks up like uh running a loyalty program for example um that's kind of an obvious one uh or like using other web kind of native discount formats sorry I'm just going to have a drink all right so next is like the final step which is really kind of a catle for just like are you making this a recurring experience that your players want to undertake so assuming you've converted a player you then need to make sure they continue to spend in this Channel and a bit like some of the other metrics like this kind of breaks down into a you know how motivated are they to make this purchase and how easy it is it so the number one driver of repeat purchases is going to be the quantity of purchases you could also break this down into like repeat visit rate so the question you want to understand is like do players like have this in their mindset so that they to come back to the

store and that's a function of how are you messaging them retargeting them how welld designed is your like reward schema so that they associate this with high value um and then there there's like a question of once you get them back into the store which you can also do through engagement mechanics like often you want to create a web environment that goes beyond just the base commercial functionality so players have a regular reason to go there for updates or Community features or you know new content you're releasing once you brought them back into that environment like how good is your kind of you know on-site messaging to convert them that's a lot of stuff that like will also drive your first purchase conversion so really the most important driver here is definitely like repeat visit rate um so how do you boost this well one is like um you know use a plethora of messaging formats to continuously remind them about this channel like absolutely no store is going to be so good that every player remembers it all the time so you always want to have you know interruptions into their sales flow that like brings

players back into this environment um you know one way we've found of doing this is like you know through using loyalty programs and other kind of web ingame engagement based um like mechanics that mean you can actually insert messaging about your web web shop into your gameplay Loop um so our loyalty programs are like specifically designed to have a flow a linkout flow that is compliant for being in the game uh and all that you need to do to do that is like detach that loyalty bonus claim in from you know motivating them to make a purchase in the web um another way you can kind of boost this number is just by like being quite aggressive with how you're messaging this to players one of the great benefits of D Toc is that you get actual player identity data and like out of app um you know channels through which you can message them that could be email there are also you know great companies like Dynamo is um a really cool business that does like direct messaging to like VIPs on Facebook so a lot of you know those kind of community tools that developers are

already using to re-engage players or retarget laps players can be like redirected to driving them into your webshop similarly like you know create a codes is another great way to do that all right so that's kind of like the end to-end flow so I'll wrap up in a second here by just saying like I would always try and think about kind of your your users's journey when you think about your product performance and then figure out what aspect of the user journey is failing is it like a motivation question do they not buy a value proposition or is it like implementation functionality question is it not well-designed or usable um I would step through each of these and try and like identify where you are maybe lagging or over or overperforming competitors also to diagnose any like separate changes um and uh yeah I'll just wrap that by saying like it's stash we operate stash like so it's Auto optimizing it kind of like um does this on behalf of developers so we have a pretty sophisticated Suite of like analytics and metrics that don't exist Within game developers because game developers don't

operate Standalone e-commerce channels so you kind of need to stand up an analytics infrastructure that looks at this as like a conventional e-commerce funnel and flow which is a little bit different from in-game monetization which is really done by you know interrupting the flow of gameplay with kind of purchase prompts oh you run out of energy here's a reason you should purchase in the browser environment like users are actually browsing to make a purchase so you need to create what is functionally an e-commerce experience to enable them to browse to think about value to plan their purchases and then give them like some reason to make that purchase sustainably outside of the game environment and while doing that like while minimizing as many discounts as you functionally give because you obviously don't want to give away all of that additionally captured margin uh so if any of you kind of want to talk more about this or want to find out more about stash always around and like love talking about this stuff um Prem metrics every presentation but happy to share it with anyone off us so thank you guys very much [Applause] I