Over the past decade, we’ve seen a major shift in the way that app users are monetized. Ten years ago, premium games were the norm. Users were willing to pay a considerable amount for access to a game. Things changed quickly, however, as freemium games began to flood the market.
Companies had to shift their focus to identifying and effectively monetizing their so-called whale users -- that is, those users who were the most willing to actually pay for access to premium features.
With less than 5% of freemium users ever making a purchase, there was a limit to how much a publisher could earn from in-game purchases alone. The result was an increased focus on ad revenue. With the recent introduction and success of hyper-casual games, publishers are leaning more heavily on particular types of ads, including video ads, offerwalls, and rewarded surveys.
What’s the moral of the story?
At the end of the day, different users are best monetized in different ways according to both their individual preferences and the style and interface of the app itself. Ultimately, then, effective monetization comes down to understanding your audience and giving them options. By better understanding your audience, you’ll be able to monetize them more effectively. Effective monetization leads to even better insights and improved user engagement. But in order to understand your users, you need to give them options. Without options, it’s impossible to learn more about a user’s preferences. How do you better understand your users?
Conduct Experiments and Perform A/B Testing
Performing A/B testing is key to understanding your users. With the right tests, you can learn more about your users’ preferences. The information gleaned can be used to improve your monetization efforts. Just as importantly, though, data gathered from A/B tests can help you build a better user experience and make decisions related to game design. Some publishers only engage in very limited A/B testing. But there are now excellent third party tools available that allow you to A/B test just about anything, including design, rewards, capping and pacing settings, and more. The important thing is to stick with A/B tests that can produce detailed, long-term insights into your users. Quick tests may seem like a good idea, as they promise to deliver feedback in a short period of time. However, the sheer number of external factors that can potentially influence user behavior can render short-term A/B tests misleading. By focusing on long-term testing, you’ll gain a better sense of your users’ true preferences.
Give Your Users Options
In addition to A/B testing, another useful way to learn more about your users involves presenting them with options. Specifically, giving your users different options to access premium features and earn rewards will help you gain insight into what forms of monetization work best with your user base. For example, you might present users with the option of making an in-app purchase, viewing a video ad, or filling out a survey in exchange for access to in-game currency.
Tracking which form of monetization your users prefer can help you make better decisions about where to direct your monetization efforts in the future. Rewarded surveys can be particularly useful when it comes to gathering user data. By reviewing the information provided by your users when they respond to an in-game survey, you can learn more about their age, gender, occupation, and a range of lifestyle-related preferences.
TheoremReach’s New DIY Survey Platform
At TheoremReach, we want to help publishers better understand their audience. To that end, we’re excited to be rolling out a new DIY rewarded survey platform for publishers. The needs of today’s marketers are changing all the time, and traditional survey panels simply aren’t able to keep up. These panels can’t deliver the kinds of quality respondents and responses that marketers need. With this in mind, our new DIY platform will allow publishers to take a real-time sampling approach. In other words, users can be surveyed programmatically while they’re still in-app, all with improved survey quality.
This will translate to both better data and faster results. This method will mean lower costs, too, which is good for both marketers and publishers. Our new DIY platform will mean better survey targeting and an improved ability to measure trends -- both of which will help with game design.
Gain Valuable Insights with TheoremReach
The better you understand your users, the better you’ll be able to monetize them, keep them engaged, and evolve to meet their changing needs. At the end of the day, understanding your audience is key to both building user loyalty and designing a sustainable, workable monetization strategy.
Want to learn more about how TheoremReach can help you understand your users? Click here to contact us, or sign up for a publisher account today.
