Sivart Technology's Word Crank is Approved for Google Play for Education

We were recently notified by Google, that our word game, Word Crank, has successfully passed review and is approved for inclusion in Google Play for Education!

What is Google Play for Education?  "Google Play for Education is a destination where schools can find great, teacher-approved, educational apps and videos on Play Store. Teachers can filter content by subject matter, grade and other criteria." -- Google

We are so excited to have this opportunity and look forward to seeing what results!

[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.

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!

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.

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.