Session: The Perfect Player – Research Results & Characteristics Of High Value Users In Rewarded....

[Music] we've got our next speaker our next talk is the perfect player research results we've got Joan here to come up with the front awesome let's get started yeah super happy uh to get to talk to you today about um some exciting insights into a research study that we did and the world of rewarded user acquisition so uh my name is Yan um and I'm going to guide you through the next 15 minutes of that and before I get started um if you already have a question mark in your head what is actually rewarded user acquisition let me just take two minutes to guide you through it to get everyone on the same level

all right so essentially in one picture that's it um rewarded user acquisition that means we reward users uh primarily for mobile games to get the the games downloaded to progress within the games to test the games ideally to purchase within the games essentially every event you as game developer would like to uh yeah have done within the games and this is also what we do Al media um primarily through our app that is called free cash so if the next question mark pops up in your head why is this interesting for me why should I care if you are in user acquisition if you are part of a mobile developer um developing games um you might have heard of us already if not then you should listen especially carefully um essentially because it's been an insanely growing market so just in the last year loan um the market share um of rewarded user acquisition more or less doubled or more than doubled um if you

look at all the user acquisition budgets and um yeah so sounds great I mean sounds great for me great for my company um but actually also we ourselves are wondering why is this right like what's going on why has this been such an insanely growing market and uh what has changed what is happening and also then yeah we were wondering and we of course have our theories but then we thought okay we need some evidence so so what's the reason for this and that's why we decided then uh end of last year November December um to launch a study um and actually two studies so we asked both main stakeholders in in this industry so on the one side um 500 uh mobile game developers primarily user acquisition managers and also another set where we asked actually The Gamers so the users 2000s of them 1K from the US 1K uh from the UK and um yeah so it

was an online study completely randomized uh user base so nothing to do with free casual Media or us and yeah the study will be published in two weeks oh not in two weeks in a few weeks um but you are now getting some few exclusive results um and basically the very first sneak preview into what we found yeah and the focus actually will be now on the gamer side so the um the first part that one is published already the second part soon and I'm going to show you now a bit what we found with the gamers so yeah we have um asked them all sorts of questions about their behavior and their preferences and 30 40 questions and then as we du deeper we actually found some quite interesting insights and interesting data when we looking into the correlation and the cause and effects of the topic between

the rewards and the value um of a user so this is where we struck the go and the go yeah goal of the presentation will be to show you some of those new aspects and relations that we found and without further Ado here are the key learnings that we found so there are three and the first one um it's actually the most closely related to what you already know so obviously so rewarded use acquisition expands the possibility ities and the effects of rewards so because essentially you give rewards in the games but now on the rewarded use acquisition platforms you give the users additional rewards and I mean here the cause and effect are quite quite known I mean the whole reason why you do those rewards within the games you give the users you know Gems or all sorts of virtual rewards because you want the user to basically turn from a let's say low value player into a high value player it's all about getting them um yeah

engaged in the game and ultimately I guess getting them to spend or just spend time within the games what we see in our data however is evidence of another aspect and this is that this is especially um relevant for how high value Gamers so they care especially for those rewards as opposed to the ones of low value and also that they are actively demanding and searching and looking for those rewards the high value players so next part of the presentation will be to show you a bit in detail those three points um but before I get into that let me do a bit of scientific housekeeping um because some of the terms are already mentioned let's clarify them first one what's a high value gamer or high value player I'm going to talk a lot about this term um essentially two parts of it I mean what you also consider as high quality so it means either they're doing a lot of uh inup purchases um or they're spending a lot of time within the games so yeah because

either of course you can directly monetize this through ads or in the long run you know more engagement more likely will spend two more purchases so essentially it's kind of the same or like two sides of the same coin and this is also what we see in our database so just to like again get the basics um so the 2,000 Gamers that we asked you can clearly see so we asked them how much do they um spend on average per month month and how much do they play in terms of time um per day and you can clearly see that correlation so the more they play the more they spend yeah the the highest value players everyone who spends more than $500 on average per month I mean most of them play more than 5 hours while the users that spend nothing um spend yeah most of them less than 2 hours I think this shouldn't be something new to you I mean if you look into your game if you're a developer you probably see exactly that

and you see also exactly um I guess what we see in our um uh base that we asked so most of the users are not spending or spending very very little only like you have this tiny 1% there of the whales and uh they're a bit more let's say lenient when it comes to time um people are more willing to spend time and then when I'm talking about rewards so here again I'm going to talk about two types of rewards the real world rewards and the in-game rewards so in-game rewards that's everything that you earn only within the games and you cannot use outside of the game so again gems Stars levels certain progression certain avatars coins um and the real world rewards so that is something that can be earned outside of the game um primarily also very Cash Cash equivalence or cards or something that

you can use outside of the actual game all right then let's get into the first key learning that we found so especially high value Gamers care about rewards so in general if you look at all the results that we see and again this is something you should know and you probably know the whole reason why I guess your monetization teams in in in your games um are doing count IB testings giving rewards like in order to get the users engaged because they do and that's what they're saying themselves so 70% say you know yes it gets me playing the game more often and longer and also 23% say of course it gets me to spend more somehow only 7% say okay I don't care but then if we're actually now splitting um splitting the answers into the um sorry into the uh value of the user or the time

they spend so here again so this is going to be my favorite graph splitting our answers into their into their value what they say in terms of time spent or purchases um you see that the ones so nobody has obviously a negative uh let's say feeling towards rewards but what you can see the more time they spend the more they have a positive attitude to it so in one sense you can basically with these rewards filter um for those users and especially attract the yeah high value Gamers and asking the question slightly differently and looking now at the purchases you see exactly the same again very high correlation between purchases and time spent um the more they spend the more positive the more relevant for them are the rewards and if you're looking closely into the question how we ask it so it says to download or play the game um so it's not only about playing the game it is also about oh downloading it the circle moved a bit

but this is coming to my second key learning here so high value Gamers demand and look for rewards and this is especially um relevant for the topic of downloads um because we also ask the users where are they actually looking for games where do they discover the games and again we split it according to the value I'm just looking now at the two most extremes here on the one side our most valuable players and on the other side the no Spenders and what you can see here so actually yeah for the high value players the Loyalty or reward reward-based platforms are the number one source or way to discover games while it for the low value players it looks actually quite differently it's only on the fourth place um so yeah two insights into this I mean and if you really and we also didn't know about this but if you think about it it makes totally sense right so a player who already

knows that they're going to spend a lot um well they say I might as well go there where I get most for my money what I'm spending I want value I want some rewards I want something for it so I go there where I get the most and they also obviously then at some point get the attitude hey I I want something for my money and if I have the option here then let's do it of course for the low value players they get into the games through the classic ads in-game ads or abster recommendations rather um which also makes sense right because they don't have these expectations they're not going to spend any money so why should they also expect to get a lot back and again it's a good way to filter for those high value players when you do user acquisition furthermore some good insights in terms of um what happens after the rewarded downloads what actually happens after um the rewards end here we can see the same so in

general actually more or less like the majority of all users stay engaged so it's not only about the rewards right it's just about getting them into it they feel like they get an additional value and then again they like the game they play it and again it's especially the case for those high value players that um yeah they continue playing the game even after this initial reward ended and coming now to the third and last key learning so rewarded use acquisition offers a higher quantity and quality for rewards so quantity I think this is quite clear I said it shortly in the beginning um You're simply offering the the gamer and the user more rewards because you can give them yeah not only the rewards inside of the game they also benefit from them outside of the game so it's just more of something what they like um but if you're looking into the quality I think that's kind of again where there's I think few new aspects to

it and this is related to the type of rewards so um yeah unless you're a real money game which the majority is not most of the in-game rewards that that games have and give out are the in-game uh rewards so the ones here in in beige colored but actually what you can see here you're actually losing out on what the majority likes most which are the real world Rewards um yeah so gift cards or cash cash equivalent rewards and so yeah rewarded use acquisition is a great way for you to offer this if you in your game don't want to do this you're limited or you can't do it and basically with rewarded user acquisition platforms you can kind of double the type of rewards you want to give or double like the interest in terms of like user base or catering their preferences

[Music] and again splitting um the results into the value of the user um same results that we see for the in-game rewards rewards in general it's the same is true for the real world rewards um yeah the more they play the more engaged they are the more value they have the more positive they are um towards those in-game rewards again hardly anyone dislikes it again it's a way to overproportional attract I presume the players most of you want which are the ones that are highly engaged and if you think of those real world rewards in another way as cashback um it's yeah it's actually an established method that has been existing for 20 years in the e-commerce world right so where we also have these

5% cash back um uh deals of course which are given out in the hope that in the end the uh the consumers are spending more as what you give them um with the with the cash back and it works otherwise they wouldn't do it um and now with this rewarded user acquisition you have an opportunity to apply exactly that model that concept into the gaming World um basically yeah giving cash back uh to the users for purch and of course structuring it in such a way that in the end there's a positive benefit for you out of this yeah and these were the three main findings so to conclude it um again so we have seen like um yeah uh a new type of correlation or a new cause of effect when it comes to the value and the rewards so one thing is what you

already knew it works this one side that the rewards they encourage low Spenders to become High Spenders or high engaged users by playing but what's kind of new we also see the relation the other way around that the high value players these exante high value players that already are and that are there and they know it that they demand um those rewards and they want them and they're actively looking for it yeah because they expect more value for what they spend so in some if you want to get high quality traffic there are three key ways to do this so the first one is simply providing more rewards obviously outside also of the game um providing more real world rewards because many of them prefer those and third Point advertise those rewards before users downloading it right make clear through your advertisements hey if you come to me

play my game you get these kind of rewards in game outside of the game those dopamine hits that you want and luckily rewarded user acquisition provides exactly that so showing you now the last slide um the proof is in the numbers so here um we ask one of our clients to share um their results basically uh yeah one campaign from April last year Al media so free cash our company and then also compared with Google and you can basically see after half a year the average revenue per user um is almost three times as much as through a classic um user acquisition Source because yeah we overproportional attracts those high value players we get them to spend and with this I'm ending the presentation so um yeah if you actually want all the data in detail so pre-reg reg for the full study um you can also

already download um the actual first part of the survey just go on the QR code and with that I'm opening yeah it to the audience if you have any questions go ahead