[Android Tips]: Play Store 'staged rollouts' with Google Analytics

Recently the Google Play Store has added the ability for developers to release a new version of their application's apk progressively by means of staged rollouts.  According to Google this allows you to "get feedback on your new app or app update early in its development and make sure your users are happy with the results."  With the release of the latest version of Word Crank, our flagship game, we decided to take advantage of this new feature.

We released version 1.5.0 of our application to 20% of users initially and then monitored the results in Google Analytics.  In order to distinguish the engagement of the users on the latest version of the app from the others, we created two new custom segments in our primary Dashboard view.  The first segment included all users with version 1.5.0 of the application and the other segment included all other versions of the application.



 

Once these segments were created we monitored the statistics for a few days and then gradually increased the percentage of rollout to 100%.  This is an extremely useful tool in making sure your new release increases user engagement and the desired traffic goals of your application.

Have you tried staged rollouts?  Leave a comment below.

Why I love the new Google Developer Console

Today Google released the preview of their new Developer Console to everyone.  I love it!  Why you may ask.  Well as someone who checks the statistics and ratings everyday of several applications, it's much easier to read and navigate.  The layout and design of the tables is very clean, allowing one to quickly get an overview of the current state of each application.



The new design allows you to quickly move between the statistics, ratings, app description, and apk uploads.  Previously you had to navigate between tabs and do a lot of extra clicking to get to similar pieces of information.



Yes, the new layout is very refreshing and I look forward to the other features that Google has in store for us developers.  What do you think?  Leave comments/feedback.

Game Development: Using Google Analytics to track user flow

Recently we have begun to take advantage of the flow visualizations available from Google Analytics for analyzing user behavior in Word Crank.



What is a Flow Report?

"Flow Reports in Google Analytics illustrate the paths visitors take through your website...In one graphic, you can see how visitors enter, engage, and exit your site. " -- Google Analytics

One aspect of these diagrams that I especially appreciate is the ability to compare two different time frames and see how the user flow differs.  I really recommend this if you include a new feature in your application and want to see what impact it has on user behavior.

How to Compare Two Dates:

1. Select Compare to Past


2. Choose a second date range


3. Choose similar time periods ( full months or weeks )

Happy flow reporting!

Being Amazon's Free App of the Day: The Results

On Monday, August 27th, 2012, Word Crank Elite was the Free App of the Day in the Amazon App Store.  We were very excited about being given the opportunity and promised to share the results (find out how this opportunity came about, here).  So overall, we feel that the promotion was a success.  We were able to increase our game's visibility in the App Store and received some valuable feedback.

 

Here are a few statistics from the past week which help highlight the impact on our traffic:

Aug. 27 - Sep. 2 Visits: 50,677 Unique Visitors: 14,201 Pageviews: 38,010 Pages / Visit: 0.75 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:11:17

Aug. 19 - Aug. 26 Visits: 1,508 Unique Visitors: 251 Pageviews: 1,169 Pages / Visit: 0.78 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:15:16

Based on the above table you can see that we had a huge influx of traffic; an increase of over 33x. We also saw an increase in the number of downloads of the free version of Word Crank, in the other app stores, Google Play and iOS.

What was unexpected to us was the number of negative comments related to the use of OpenFeint in the game.  On Google Play we have 4.4 stars, but on Amazon with so many people complaining about the use of OpenFeint we have only 2 stars.  That is unfortunate as we thought that OpenFeint was allowing users the ability to compete with friends and gain achievements.  From what we have been able to find online, there really is no basis for such negativity.  However, as OpenFeint was recently bought by GREE we were already considering alternative scoring solutions.

So what were our major takeaways?

• we should allow users the ability to choose which game level they wanted to start with, 3, 4, or 5 letter words (this will be included in version 1.3.5)


• we should start the difficulty level at "Bonkers" (this will be included in version 1.3.5)


• we should move away from use of OpenFeint (TBD)

We will share some additional statistics within the next few weeks, as the impact of these types of promotions can have lasting effects.

Adding a Application Rating Dialog to your Android Game

UPDATE: Also get users to recommend your app via Google+

In order to increase the number of engaged users who were rating the Android version of Word Crank, we used a small piece of code from Android Snippets that shows a dialog to the user after a number of predefined uses to rate your Application. What were the results?

There were 0.2 App Ratings/day previous to adding the App Rater Dialog, after adding the App Rater dialog we went to 0.33 App Ratings/day.  That is equivalent to a 65% increase in user app ratings by making such a small change.  We felt that this was an important change as user ratings can help increase your placement in the Android Market.  Also, we were hoping to get more positive ratings as the dialog only appears after a user has played the game at least 3 times.

So why not give it a try in your game?  Let us know your results in the comments below.

October with HOT 99.5: How did we do?

During the month of October we ran a multifaceted campaign with HOT 99.5, a local Washington, DC radio station.  So how did we do?  Here are some of the statistics.

AdMob Revenue

During September we made ~$11 from the AdMob ads that run in the free version of our game.  For the month of October we made about ~$16, so we made about 5 more bucks.  Impressive?  Not really to us...

Word Crank Page Views

Our Word Crank page was another key aspect of our campaign, as it was the URL that we chose for the "Text Back" feature of our campaign.  We went from 28 views in September to 203 views in October.  That was over 7 times the traffic!  For us that was a huge win as it exposed people to our brand and hopefully helped us to get a few downloads and followers of the blog.

Number of People Playing

The October Google Analytics data is shown in the following graphic.  When the numbers were compared against our September data we saw a 25% increase in visits.  We are going to go ahead and give the HOT 99.5 campaign credit for that as well.

Reputation

Our reputation has been the clear winner for us.  Doing this campaign has increased our visibility and really given us tons of credibility with our friends and co-workers. Improved reputation can be a very strategic tool for any small company.  Before doing the campaign our friends and family were our biggest fans, but once they heard the commercials on the radio they began to create more buzz and do even more word-of-mouth marketing for us.  Read my post here about why word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful.

Overall, we are happy with the results.  We would have loved to get a bit more "bang for our buck", but we can always do it again.  Final words of advice to others who may be starting out and considering marketing opportunities, radio is not the best place to start out.  We were able to see comparable gains advertising via AdMob.

A Word Game That Does Not Try to Save the World

So what makes our products unique?  One of the rules of marketing is to know your product and be prepared with an elevator speech.  You know, a 30 second pitch prepared, the time of a typical elevator ride about your product and what sets it apart from all others.

So here goes:

Introspectively speaking, due to experiences in life unique solely to us, our acuity is shaped causing anything we create to be different from anyone else.  And blah…blah…blah…

So now that we’ve cleared the air and have identified on a cosmic scale what makes our product unique, looking on a more rudimentary scale, what motivated the creation of Word Crank?  Put simply, a desire to find a word game that we would actually play.

We’re not intimating that there weren’t any good word games out there, because there are.  We were simply looking for a game that combined elements of Word and Arcade style gaming that we both would be interested in.

You see although being siblings, we have two different backgrounds and stakes in our product.  Here comes the very exciting history lesson: 

Our CTO is a computer programmer by profession, and has single-handedly coded all of our projects. Her objective when creating a game centers on playability and usability.  The code has to work and memory allocation is central around enhancing the user’s experience.

The CEO’s experience with coding begins and ends with formulas for excel worksheets.  With a background in business and an avid “gamer”, for him it just has to pop and be fun.  “No chipped paint” as Walt Disney articulated around his reason for creating Disneyland.  It just has to look good!

Combine these and you get Word Crank our very first release.  A word game that’s not buggy, has a very expansive dictionary and does what it’s supposed to do (in our developer voice).  But then it does something else.  It creates an atmosphere with a beautiful UI (User Interface).  A word game with elements of grunge, hip hop, pop, and action!  (Guess whose voice added this)

You see, both voices played a major role in the creation of Word Crank.  We combined programming principles which allow our game to play smoothly and feel effortless.  We also brought arcade to our game by not just allowing you to make the word C-A-T and get 50 points, YAY *sarcastically* but we brought engaging music, cool animations, and some serious themes.

We thank all of our 5k+ downloads on the Android market and are excited that overall reception has been positive with only 6 users rating below 4 stars (send us a message on what you’d like to see to change that to a 4/5) We’re going to keep making cool apps that people like and promise to never take ourselves too seriously but remember it’s just a Word game that doesn’t try to save the world.

Advertising your Mobile Game's Fan Page with Facebook

So recently we have decided to advertise our Word Crank Fan Page using the Facebook Ads capability.  Taking advantage of social media to promote your Android or iOS application is becoming the standard among the majority of game developers today. Almost all of the top hundred apps have a Facebook presence, so we of course jumped on the bandwagon to help promote our game.

The Facebook Ads infrastructure allows you to target certain demographics for your ad campaign.  What's unique about advertising with Facebook is that you have the ability to target potential users via their interests and likes.  Not with that being said we initially targeted users who liked things such as, "music", "gaming", "reading", etc.  We believed that these users would be more likely to become fans of Word Crank.  However, we saw very low click-through-rates for those users.  The next stop was to just target anyone, regardless of their interests and the clicks started coming through.  Below are the results for the past few days with the new adjustment in targeting.



We were able to get 14 new "likes" out of the 34 people who actually clicked the ad.  Before this we only had 1 new "like" from the Facebook Ad Campaign.  We are happy with the results, and since this is a new game we will have to give it some time to see what impact the Facebook Fan Page is going to have on our marketing efforts.  One downside of the Facebook generated ad however,  is that you don't have a lot of flexibility in the layout and colors.  They use a standard template for all of the ads, so you have to be creative with the picture you choose and its accompanying wording.  I hope that soon Facebook will allow for more layout options.

Please feel free to ask questions/comment.  Thanks.

First Week on the Android Market

So we have officially ended our first week of Word Crank, on the market and wanted to share some of our statistics to help benefit others.  Therefore, below you will find what the Android Market currently has for our stats:

As you can see we had 807 installs for the free version and 4 for the paid version.  We are very happy with these results.  We were hoping to hit 1000 downloads by the week end, and even though we didn't achieve that goal, we came pretty close!

Other statistics that we wanted to share are from Google Analytics, we track user engagement with our game and were very excited to see the amount of time that people spend playing Word Crank, almost 15 minutes per user.  See below for more details.



Finally the Android Platform enables you to track the source of your downloads, we used this feature once we decided that we would run a short AdMob campaign.  We ran the campaign for the last 3 days of the week.  Here is a graph that shows the amount of users who play the game that came directly via the market versus those who came through AdMob.



We hope this data proves helpful to others who are launching their first game on the Android Market.