Session: What Processing $500M In Transactions Taught Us About DTC Web Stores - Miikka Luotio.

[Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Let's get things started. Our first talk is about what processing $500 million in transactions taught us about DTC web stores. So, please welcome Mika from App Charge. [Applause]
Hello everybody. Good morning. Uh little bit less crowd than last year. I heard there was couple parties last night. I didn't go but maybe that's the reason. Anyway, good to see you guys here. Um

thanks for coming. Um so today we will talk about how does uh half a billion in in transactions um look like and what we've learned from it specifically in terms of monetization like how what are the kind of insights out of it and this this was a report that we actually released u at upcharge a couple months ago so I actually want to know how many actually have read the report or even glanced it hands up anybody. Okay, somebody. Okay, good. Good. So you guys, I'm actually showing you stuff that you don't know about. That's great cuz I was worried that you you've all seen already the report. So um okay, that's a good start. So uh what is Appcharts? So Appcharts, we are a direct to consumer um platform. Uh we've been operating for over three years uh in the business. Um, we are working with some of the largest publishers, mobile game publishers in the world, such as, uh, Huge Game, Trip, uh, Triple Dot, uh,

Product Madness, um, Candy War, list goes on. Um, and recently we've we've also started working in terms of, um, uh, expanding our business into into the Nordics as well. So, uh, excited to tell you more about that hopefully maybe next year. Uh so very excited about our our traction. Um so who am I? So I've been in the games business for 20 years, two decades now and and um uh started making mobile games um initially and then went to the dark side of of games business business side. In the last five years actually I've been working on payments and direct to consumer space. um little bit less creative side but uh really actually in in terms of especially direct to consumer the innovation has been really exciting. So I'm I'm I'm finding finding my day-to-day work actually being very exciting and and a

lot of innovation happening in the space which I'm talking about today. Okay. So specifically in terms of our report like I wanted to focus on couple sections of of the player journey in the web store. So, first of all, the first time web store sales, which is really the the point of entry where you are starting to teach your players um what is this web store and and and why do they have to what do they get when they go outside of the game and buy something. So really uh I think the last five years that I've seen in in in in direct to consumer the gradual shift from from the consumer side the player side is that they've started to understand what web stores are. And I I think we're already there and we can see some of the numbers that that that we're seeing across the board. 80% of the first-time visitors um are returning to the store now in 2.6 six days which is kind of median average

here um from first visit to first purchase. So basically you are able to grab a lot of those people that come to the store but you have to engage them. You have couple days to really grab their attention and make them uh do a first-time deposit which is the most important part because once they do it for the first time they learn that okay this is not a scam site or something I can actually if I buy something I will actually get it in the game. So once they learn that loop once we've seen that they are very likely to buy again. So what it means to the publishers um it really means that you need to guide the players toward their first purchase. So they're not this is really something that you got to focus on in terms of the the player journey. Um and and really focus on different vehicles to do that and that can be whether it's in in-game or outside of the game. and in-game it's

possible now in the US for example to actually promote for example welcome offers um or special VIP packages directly in the game uh because of the regul regulation changes of recently especially in the US so so you can even do that now so you can even link direct offers and promote them in the game so that's obviously a thing that you should be doing if you have a web store um and and since that's possible in the US And like we we seeing that regulatory updates are also opening up in Japan uh in December. So it's in a very exciting space because you will have more ability to reach your players directly in the game about these offers and that actually is going to improve uh uh a lot of things in terms of getting those people engaged in the first time purchase. Um okay so welcome offers I just briefly mentioned it. I think it's very important to

um basically recognize especially if you have an existing game that's been operating for a while and the players are being introduced to the web store the first time. So what you want to do is really target uh personalized welcome offers and personalization is key here is really making an irresistible offer for for the right cohort at the right price point at the right value point. And that's that's uh I cannot stress how important that is because that's really the first time deposit and if you're able to crack that they will come back again. Um okay so why is it important to track your players after the purchase? because well first of all this is where metrics come into play a lot because you need to understand um the their behavior like once they actually go to the store they buy something are they buying again and this is something that you should make sure you have the ability to track those

players and their behavior across the web store and in game and that's something that's very important to to to plan for when you launch a web store seasonality is super important. We've seen amazing sales from our partners, especially tied to different season events and most web stores where we see the best performing web stores really dance on the wave of these events. Like it really increases the monetization and I I would say that for web stores, it's probably one of the main ways to to monetize at scale. Um, so really bringing those seasonal offers, making them exciting, visually exciting, that's key. Okay, so we talked about the first journey, but uh what we are seeing from the numbers is that the players do stick around. So this is really encouraging because we can see that it's not just people going

to buy once. This is place where once they actually do their first time purchase or first- time deposit um uh they do half of them make a second purchase and half of those repeat buyers make their second purchase within 7 days. So once they learn that they get more value out of the web store which is important. So you need to clearly state the additional value that they get. Once they learn that uh we are seeing really good numbers that they they're going to go back um frequently and 63% uh of two-time buyers go to make a Turk purchase. So this is also telling you a story that most of these are really VIP cohorts that are heavy spenders. So your web store really is going to work for those cohorts the best. The VIPs the the players that spend a lot in the game anyway. So this is how you should be designing your store and those offers and and the more personalized those

offers and the store are uh the better they actually sell. 70% of players who buy four times will buy a fifth time. So they do stick around quite quite well. So this is we can see retention is important as well. So retention and how do you get to that retention uh and what does it mean for you as a publisher? Number one, for retention, daily bonus. This is very important. Um, obviously every time the player goes into the web store, they should get something. They should be rewarded for actually just visiting there. So, it can be a free gift. Uh, it can be something that gives them a little bit of incentive to go there and kind of h build a habit to check out the offers almost every day, day, daily, weekly. So that they create it as their habit like they go collect their free stuff there um every day

and progress bar obviously giving them a sense of loyalty and rewards on loyalty. So whenever they do purchases on the web store they understand that it's accumulating um loyalty and unlocking new uh better offers in the store. And then finally, things like being able to, one of the things we've seen is um uh funny thing is people just because it's a web store, there's a URL, people simply forget uh what the URL is to players like, oh, where where's the shop? What? Like they Google it and maybe they don't find it. So, two things are important. Obviously, you need to make sure uh your SEO is in place. So when players actually search for your game, ideally the web store is the first thing you get. Um and uh second is for example we are offering a feature where

you can actually uh bookmark uh the store into directly into your homepage and this is something that you can even incentivize for the players to do. So they get a free reward if they actually add it to their home screen and that's important for retention. and then uh tapping into the buying momentum. So post purchase offer um this is important because it like what we've seen um from our team's background which many of them uh come from building games uh from our product team. One of the most important effective ways to monetize is directly after the purchase. And it's very simple but it's very effective. And of course you don't want to let those first-time buyers go cold. Um so social checkout links this is where it's actually I feel like the future of D2C is going to pivot as well towards to so it's not just a web store it's actually

players able to send each other deep links of these offers which creates like a community thing in itself like whether it's Discord Facebook so they're able to kind of like share these offers with each other uh other players and that's how you kind of create those offers. and let them go viral in in their own right. And I think that's something that uh I feel like uh I'd love to see more publishers do. We we started to see some good numbers on that with some of our partners. So, okay, let's wrap it up. So, um thinking beyond the first purchase, that's important. Building seasonality, very important. leveraging engagement tools, daily bonuses, rolling offers, all of these features that really are fun for the players actually. So, I think that's that's what web stores ultimately should be. Buying stuff should be fun uh uh as well as playing it, of course, but it needs to tap into the same fun of the core game

that that uh the players love and and what the reason why they play it. Personalizing the experience. So segmentation by far is the biggest modifier of success in in web stores. Uh what we've seen is can be over 20% uh improvement if uh if you have personalization versus you don't. And that's really key. We consider personalization and segmentation as the MVP uh of all of the features uh when you when you're building a web store because if the offers are not personalized um they're not interesting. So, they need to be really targeting the the the right people. The offers need to trigger them and get them excited. Yeah. Thank you. And check out the report on the on the website um for more info and insights. You can also come talk to me, find me after the talk. Happy to answer some questions in private as well if you want or if you have some question.
Do you have any questions actually from the audience?

No, I have a question. Oh, have you got one? Great.
Hey, thanks.
How are you?
Perfect.
Thanks for the talk. Uh,
um, I'm I'm not an expert on on the topic, so this is a little bit of a dummy question,
but so the very last thing you you mentioned about the the segmentation, so I'm wondering how that works. If you have personalized um offers for someone, but then they end up in a website, does that mean that the website somehow needs to be coded to be per like personalized to that specific user?
That's a really good question. So um quite often um
hip hop
the first thing I ask when I start uh talking to a developer or publisher who are either building a website or or are trying to improve it. Um number one thing is to ask yourself is my does my game have segmentation in the first place. Uh so you need to have segmentation in the game in order to

kind of take it outside of the game. And the way that it works is for example uh at app charge we have a segmentation API that simply just pulls your cohort so you don't have to reconfigure that
um and that's how it should be because
otherwise you're duplicating the work of of all the segments that you build in the game
uh having to build them again that doesn't make any sense. So um first of all you need to have good segmentation in your game itself and you're simply displaying
those same cohorts uh on the website different offers obviously. So you're just keep these are new offers. They're just exclusive to the web.
Uh quick question. Um so as a leader in the space uh what do you guys see going back to the uh the social checkout uh feature that you're talking about? Um what do you see in terms of the difference in conversion rate on those purchases? is are you seeing higher conversion rate when a social link is provided to another person or what does that look like?
That's a that's actually a really

exciting question. Um the the simple truth is we don't have enough data yet. So that's why I was saying I wish more people would try it out. Um and I personally my my thesis is that absolutely it should have a better conversion. uh especially I feel like in terms of social offers uh that you can share with with people we do need to create more mechanisms to reward that like chain offers for example like if I send an offer to five of my friends one of them buys it or two buy it I'm going to get a discount too so I think there's ways to gamify that as well and I I think that needs to happen in order to really tap into the power of it but uh there's lot lot of room to innovate there so That's a great question.
Great. Right, I'm going to have to wrap it up. Nika is here to answer your questions, so do grab him anytime during the show. Sorry, Mika. I'm just invite inviting people in to speak to you. Let's have a round of applause for

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