Albert Lai and Jefferey Tsang from Kontagent gave a talk this morning at the Social Gaming Summit about measuring the health of your social game, and it was packed full of interesting statistics and observations. Most interestingly, they listed the top ten metrics that should be used by gamers.
Kontagent started by talking about what they’d learned in the last two years. I’ll summarize Albert and Jefferey’s key notes below.
- Viral growth is dead, it’s about ARPU. You need to figure out what each player wants and monetize them, because Facebook notifications are gone and you can’t ‘spam’ as easily.
- People launch higher quality applications now, and that’s killing the simple viral model of earlier games.
- User lifetime is important, the lifetime value is a new metric that is important. ARPU is the area to focus on now.
- Top 10 Gaming Metrics are:
- Entry event distribution, which determines which lead-in leads to the longest lifetime value.
- Outbound messages/user, which is how many messages players send on average
- Virality (k-factor), how many people are invited by a given person, successfully.
- Viral Message Clickthrough Rate, which is how often are people clicking invites and such.
- Engagement, which is the time spent on the site.
- Exit Event distribution, which is how are people leaving?
- Retention, which is how often do they come back.
- Lifetime network value, which is the value of a user over their time on the site.
- ARPU, which is the average revenue per user.
