Jacqueline Zenn

Editor’s note: We wanted to give you the heads up that our Ads Dashboard is now live! Make the most of your in-game ads by seeing your data in our new dashboard. Improve your ads performance by answering the big questions. Advertising is part of nearly every mobile experience, and whether or not you personally approve of it, it’s becoming standard for most mobile games. After all, it’s a billion-dollar industry. And if you’re going to do it, you should do it well. Ads should be well-placed, high quality, and in just the right amounts in order to make sure your users and your finances are both pleased. Let’s start by going through some general categories of games along with the types of ads commonly used in mobile games, and then we’ll cover the guidelines or thought process that should...

The initial launch date – or soft launch date – of a new game is always one of the most exciting times for any game developer. However, like anything else worthwhile, there are some important steps that you need to take in order to make sure you get it right. It’s when you get to show the project that you’ve been working so hard on to the world! And then gain important insights with relatively low risk into its future success and any changes that need to be made for this and any future games you work on. Defining The Soft Launch Essentially, a soft launch is releasing the initial version of the game that’s ready for the public  in a limited geographic area and with a fairly tight marketing budget. It’s meant to assess the potential audience, work out...

Launching a new game is an undeniably exciting moment. After putting in the hard work, imagination, and effort that goes into a new title, you get to send it out into the world. But really, the work has barely begun, especially if you’re launching a free to play or F2P game that’s monetized based on ad revenue and/or in-game purchases. Once a game is launched, you should be optimizing, adjusting, updating, and reporting your progress throughout your game’s lifespan or existence, working to improve player retention as well as increasing downloads, getting lapsed players to return, and increasing the number and length of player sessions. All these activities and events meant to increase player retention and maximize the value of a game’s user base can be referred to as live ops. [bctt tweet=”What are live game operations and why may...

Do you sometimes wish that you could get to know every one of your players and the members of your target audience personally? Know their playing habits, what they like and don’t like about your game and online gaming in general, any similar interests and related activities, demographics and location, and whatever other tidbits that might have you improve your game’s user experience for them. While fulfilling that exact wish is pretty unlikely – especially with a larger audience – you can put a type of face to those data points by creating user personas that essentially characterize each group or segment of your audience. In fact, you can even name them, assign images to them for better visualization, or further flesh out their backgrounds to make them more “real” in your mind. Why You Should Develop User Personas… Personas...

Analytics reports or presentations are generally not the most exciting thing ever – after all, they are usually just a bunch of numbers and maybe a few graphs on a page. However, it’s all a matter of perception – data can be really interesting when it’s presented in a compelling fashion. And dare we say even exciting! What’s more, analytics reports and presentations are some of the most vital documents that you can produce for your business, so you definitely shouldn’t treat them like an afterthought. You just need to learn to make it tell a story – but that’s easier said than done. In fact, for many companies or brands figuring out how to tell that story might be the most complicated part. On the surface, analytics reports aren’t especially captivating. With rows and columns of data most often...

Editors note: we release bi-annual mobile gaming benchmarks report which pretty much includes all of the metrics mentioned below. Compare how your game is performing against up to 100,000 games in the industry here. What Are Mobile KPIs? So you’ve created an awesome mobile app. The design is perfectly intuitive and visually stunning. It works even better than you thought it would. In fact, you are starting to wonder how you ever lived without it. You’re even starting to see some measurable results based on industry standard key performance indicators. Naturally, you hope that your audience likes it as much as you do, or at least enough to generate some revenue! Figuring out your mobile app’s value and assessing your app’s performance starts with knowing which mobile KPIs (key performance indicators) and mobile app metrics are the ones that you should...