Cross Promotion
One of Playstudios' biggest goals this year was to create a permanent method for promoting our new games through our strong games, using a well-known method called cross promotion.
Besides promoting the games, we wanted to create a special place, where players could enter from anywhere and get additional information about our games and themselves as players that would make them joy, interest and eventually, engagement.
The project was carried out with me as a product designer, alongside our head of product, and in collaboration with developers from various branches around the world.
The project went into one sprint of two weeks, and most of my work was focused on the research and design of different options, without wireframes, due to the limited time.
On this page I will present the research I conducted for the project, various design flows, and the project's results.
My Role
UX, UI and Product Designer
Product Research, Data Exploration, Competitors Comparison, Generating Insights, Prototyping, Testing and Visual Design.
Softwares used
Kick-off Meeting
Together with the head of product, we created the new product requirements document (PRD) for the new Cross Promo mobile "Area", which includes 3 main KPI'S:
* Engagement- Keep players engaged and retained within the company's ecosystem.
* User Experience- An excellent player experience that will make him receive personal recommendations, rating and promotion of the company brand.
* Monetization- Maximize monetization opportunities for entire games portfolio, increase downloads and potentially higher revenue.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge for me in the project was the relatively short work interval, of a single sprint - only two weeks, to research and design accurate screens that would meet all our needs.
I had to skip some of the steps of the classic ux work in order to design screens quickly.
First Product Research
Mobile game cross-promotion has been around since the early days of mobile gaming.
Not only is it still alive, but it is now more popular than ever before.
Ever since Apple introduced privacy restrictions, game marketers have been exploring different strategies to keep track of their users. In the light of this, cross-promotion has re-emerged as a valuable solution.
What is Mobile Game Cross-Promotion?
Mobile game cross-promotion is a strategy where gaming companies leverage the user base of another game to promote their titles.
This strategy appears in two different forms:
Promoting games in your own portfolio. Advertising your games to users who are already engaged with your other titles.
Working with other game developers. Establishing partnerships with fellow game developers to mutually promote each other’s games.
While both of these strategies have their advantages, the first one is far more popular.
At some point, users will churn from our mobile game, whether it’s because they get bored, it becomes too difficult, or they simply run out of time to play it.
As a publisher, we can use internal data and see where and when the majority of our users are churning and use this insight to try and understand why they are leaving.
Exploring The Data
The following image shows the promoted app's dashboard with a breakdown of metrics for campaigns running on owned media (af_cross_promotion) and other media sources. You can see that the number of installs and conversion rate for the cross-promotion campaign are much higher than those for the other media sources.
Finding the Right Game
We need to start with the most popular of our games. Which one do we think it has better chances to impress users and to invite them to install more games? Next, we need to create a list with our other games and go to the next stage.
Picking The Right Placement For Better UX
This activity should not interfere with our monetization efforts.
We need to understand that it is more important to increase our revenue when we have the chance, so it is crucial to test various options when it comes to deciding the right placement for our other creations.
Begin Branding The Portfolio
We need to make our players understand that we provide the same quality with all of our work. This way, users will realize that they will always find on our page great games and they will trust your apps.
Using Trailers Of Other Games
If we don’t know what is the best way to present other games, short trailers will do the job to conquer the interest of our current users.
We need to engage them with the most interesting moments of our other games and let them discover other elements when they will download them.
Adding “More Games” Button
After creating those clips, we need to design a button to fit our game style with the text “More games” and add it where we decide to completed the step 2.
We have to make sure that we won’t lose their attention for the current game and they will still continue to play it along with our other apps.
Using In – App Messages
If we already use in – app messages for communicating with our gamers then there is no reason not to send them invitations to check our other games, promising them more exciting adventure with many amazing characters.
Offering Incentives
A good solution would be to offer our players some virtual coins or other bonuses to encourage them to install our games.
The condition is to make sure that they really like the game and they don’t do that just for the incentives. We need to remember that we need to attract valuable users in order to increase our retention rate.
Running Retargeting Campaigns
If there is a special list of users we want to attract with our games, then a retargeting campaign is the right answer.
This method is highly beneficial, and one of the best options for using this technique with the main channels that provide this type of solutions, Facebook and Google.
Research Conclusions
After collecting all the information, I began to generate insights while thinking about actions that could address our three KPI'S: improving the user experience, engagement and ultimately also increasing the company's revenue. Here are just some of them:
* Cross-promotion is effective for acquiring new users within a gaming company's ecosystem.
* It contributes to increased user retention and engagement across multiple games.
* Cross-promotion strategies have monetization potential, leading to higher profitability.
* Finding the optimal timing and frequency of cross-promotional campaigns is crucial.
* Segmentation and targeting improve the effectiveness of cross-promotion.
* Positive experiences with one game enhance perceptions of other games and the overall brand.
* Cross-promotion can provide a competitive advantage in the mobile gaming market.
* Challenges and limitations, such as user fatigue and coordination difficulties, should be considered.
The research suggests that cross-promotion is a valuable strategy for mobile gaming companies, but it requires careful planning and execution to maximize its benefits while addressing potential challenges.
Inspiration
As part of the research, it was highly important to examine behavior of similar products and solutions and how to implement these solutions in our portal as well.
The influences include screens from companies such as Playtika, Google, Apple and visual solutions from dedicated design blogs.
Design the Solution
After a meeting with the data, product and monetization teams, we decided that the first game in which we will run the "Cross Promotion Portal" is Tetris, which has the largest number of players who play regularly.
According to the research I did, I thought at several options to attract the attention of our players, in the form of a hot area that attracts enough attention, but on the other hand, does not harm the gaming experience of the players.
I decided to design a small tab, in the upper left part of the game, that would create curiosity in the players and make them click on it and actually "peel" their game and reach the new portal.
The new portal will offer our players recommendations on games from our portfolio that are specially adapted to them, depending on the type of games they play.
Also, he will be able to explore the portal himself by clicking on the game genre - casual or casino and will receive relevant games. By clicking on the rewards button, according to the research, he will reach an area where he can complete tasks in the game, and receive coins, which he can use in the various games or to purchase physical benefits in the real world.
In the central part of the portal, the player will be able to see the player of the week and the game of the week, there may be a new game or a game that we want to promote at the same time and receive special offers if he downloads it to his phone. This part should cause high engagement among the players.
At the bottom, the player will be exposed to testimonials about our games, from other players in order to encourage them to play.
See how it works in this video:
More Versions
In order to provide a comprehensive answer to the players and to give more options to the company to publish different elements at different times, I created a variety of options for the home page of the portal, each time with a different emphasis.
One of the options we wanted to give our players through the portal is to register for special events, where they can meet each other, receive special information and feel that they are an integral part of the company and the games.
In this example I created a special place to highlight such an event:
Another option is to provide additional information about the games themselves before downloading, in conjunction with an event on the home screen, while incorporating download buttons, to make it easier for users to do so:
Another option is to offer our players to complete tasks to receive a reward, already on the home screen, where the area of downloading the games is slightly reduced:
In addition, we also wanted to test the possibility of a changing video on the home screen, which would help to attract users in a more interesting and "prestigious" way:
When moving to horizontal mode, in some of our casino games, it was important to design a corresponding example in the same language for the Cross Promo portal, which would give the same experience to these players as well:
Hands Off -
Developing the Design
Tetris's development team is based in South America, and thanks to the day-to-day work and design with Figma, it was very easy for me to illustrate the operation of the portal and the variety of variations I created for it.
I instructed the developers to download the designed prototype to their phones, so that they could see first-hand what each action looks like and look for design and development bugs themselves.
I shared the development feature "DEV MODE" to guide them in the document, and allow them to view screens in the form of code, css, color numbers, spacing
In accordance with our data security, a complete prototype can be sent separately.
Results
After finishing the research and designing the project in a relatively short time, and after choosing the game Tetris for the first run of the portal, we started running it on some users as part of the first a/b test.
We received a lot of clicks on the "peeling tab" in the first week of the run, and we could also see increases in the percentage of downloads of the recommended games (almost 2.5% for the first three games and another 0.8% for games found after the side scrolling, + 0.8% and 0.1% m/m respectively).
Also the new game that we released to the public at the same time and which was published on the portal as a new game - Bellagio Poker, received new download, clicks and many new users, mainly thanks to the portal.
Three months after its release, the portal showed direct results on game revenue, thanks to info about the source of traffic from the marketing and monetization team, and today it is one of the basic sources for bringing in new users from existing games, in addition, there is an infrastructure to introduce the portal into a new game soon.
The portal tab goes up and down from the air from time to time in order to embed a new configuration in the form of a/b to improve infrastructure, and test new features.
My Takeaways from
Robinhood Project
Working with a diverse and often changing team is essential for understanding other aspects of the company and understanding the products in a more comprehensive way.
The initial understanding of the product helped me to understand how the product works, but only when I got the full picture of the product and the problems from the users' side, I realized that I really know what to change and what needs to be done immediately and in the long term.
Iterations can be very simple in the first stages of the characterization and do not have to be designed at a high level, but only to answer the critical problems in the first stage.
Making the World a Better Place
This cross-promotion project is one of the only ones I've done in the company that touches the players of our games directly, and not through our internal systems, which I usually work on. This fact caused me a different excitement while working on the project and a special feeling of mission.
Its good results caused me satisfaction, which still continues, and to understand that I am in the best possible field for me :)
