Engagement Funnel

 

Project Context

Timeline: shipped at 4 months (ad spend & data collection in-progress Q4 2023 to Q1 2024)

Team: Product Designer/User Experience Designer (myself), Growth Marketing Director, Data Analyst, Head of Engineering, Backend Engineer, Producer, Studio GM

Brief: Create tools to segment users, establish data collection process, & create multiple entry funnels to track conversions (create account)

Constraints: The audience technology could easily be a massive feature, as such we decided to trim to focus on an minimum viable product to implement. The main key performance indicator (KPI) is a user successfully creating an account using our 3rd party plug-in (Xsolla).

About

Artie’s Pong Legends is a WebGL mobile game

Background

Ad campaigns in social networking apps transform the standard ad into instant-playable experience. The standard set of tracking tools must be created internally. The initial user engagement key performance indicator (KPI) is defined as a user successfully creating an account.

Objective

  • Define a few entry funnels or test groups.

  • Define audience technology for engineering which will segment users into to groups as per definitions established by Product & Marketing.

  • Create tools to empower our Data Analyst help understand our players.

  • Gather learnings associated with the KPI from the various test groups.

User Research

In the initial minimum viable product for audience tech our team defined a few Engagement Funnels and provided guidance, product management, & verified the stability of the product engineering built. We are actively collecting data against the defined groups (Q4 2023). It was deemed cost effective to collect a minimum of 4,500 users data in three test funnels to better understand our users’ behaviors before building upon the system.

Process specifics

We defined a spec that all business partners could adhere and follow. After a few discussion cycles, we trimmed the defined user experiences funnels from five down to three for the MVP;

Control - current implementation

Forced - disallowing guest accounts, forcing a user to create an account on entry

Reminder - reminding the user after three games, to create an account if they are playing as a guest

Establishing the tool requirements include:

  • UX & Engineering partner to support additional in-game dialogs associated with new funnels

  • UX, Data Analyst & Engineering determine areas for click tracking for later analysis

  • Engineering required to create tech associate with Audiences

  • Marketing to establish audience tags per ad-impressions with guidance from Data Analyst

Impact

Data collection is in-progress from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024.

Known Risks & challenges

While it seems obvious that a forced account creation funnel is a very poor user experience we do believe in validating this funnel while the game is very young.

Standard practice of incentivized account creation was deemed to heavy a lift from Engineering and has been slated for a version 2 of the Engagement Funnel product.

Current ad-spend has been focused outside of Tier 1 countries. Often, these Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries primarily use a mobile phone number as their standard for signing in/up to various products. Engineering again deemed this as too heavy a lift and as such, this funnel has also been slated for a version 2 of the Engagement Funnel product.

Lastly, re-aligning users in funnels (post data-analysis) was expected to be rolled into the version 2 and would likely unlock users on a re-targeted ad basis; however, the inherent risk of lost users during the version 1 implementation due to poor user experiences (forcing a user to sign up to play) was deemed as an accepted sacrifice to validate process.

Feature Extension

Additional audience funnels to test conversion were defined and expected for a version 2. A mobile phone entry and an incentivized account creation are expected to be built out and tested against the current set.