A guide to using personalization to

Improve engagement and

monetization in games

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Introduction
It would be a wonderful scenario if all your players responded to your game in the same way,
everyone loved it, and your job was done when you released the game. In reality though, all games
have a broad spectrum of players reacting to challenges and rewards in their own way. Treating all
players the same inevitably means that some will be disappointed with the experience, they’ll leave
the game and fail to monetize.

With ever increasing competition in a crowded marketplace, developers need to get serious about
engaging their players by responding to individual needs. In this guide, you’ll learn how to apply a
personalized approach to engagment that will please more players while improving monetization.

The ‘Threshold of Engagement’

It would be very difficult to design an individual experience to engage each of your players. Instead,
you need to use segmentation to find groups of players who are similar and design game changes
for that group. This process of personalization works on the basis of understanding that there is a
threshold of engagement for all players existing on a scale between boredom and anxiety. If players
cross this threshold, it will cause them to leave the game.

Developers need to keep each player segment within the threshold by adapting the game-play and
marketing to suit their needs.

The ‘Threshold of Engagement’

The first advantage of treating your segments differently is that your players will enjoy your game
more. A player whose experience is tailored to what they enjoy – whether that’s fast game play,
building up coins, tricky puzzles, or plenty of hints – will keep playing and is more likely to monetize.
While it’s not possible for every game to appeal to every audience, a fixed difficulty curve, for
example, excludes a huge group of players who could love your game but are just a little too
experienced or inexperienced for it.

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And it’s not just player enjoyment that can be improved. Applying a personalized approach towards
the monetization experience can dramatically increase profitability, without upsetting players. So,
what’s the first step?

Defining player segments

Before you can start personalizing your game, you need to sort your players into segments. You
can determine segments using many criteria from the game data. Looking at where there is a drop-
off of players in your game is usually a good place to start. For example, if you have a low Day 1
Retention rate (the % of players returning one day after install), then the first place to look would be
on-boarding and early missions.

Measures of competency, such as the rate of acquiring XP, are commonly used, but there are
many others you can look at too; such as how competitive players are, resource usage, purchase
decisions, momentum, reward outcomes, competency, and collaboration with other players.
Here’s some of the data that’s most commonly used for building player segments:

ENGAGEMENT

• Unique days played / days since install

• Sessions / day
• Average session length

COMPETENCE

• Win / loss
• XP / death
• XP / task
• Tasks or achievements completed / session

SOCIAL

• Number of invites / day

• Number of gifts / day
• Number of friends

ECONOMY

• Amount spent / amount rewarded

• Rewards gained / possible
• Balance variation / number of times hit zero balance

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Once you’ve determined which criteria you want to segment on, you’ll need to use an analytics
platform which collects rich event data to interpret your game and player data to create your
segments.

Here’s an example of how this is done in deltaDNA using our Data Mining tool. In this example, we
have filtered players by Mission Completed, Lives Balance, and Total Days Played.

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Changing the game
Now you have different player segments, you need to look at how they respond to the game-
play. You might, for example, find a group of players who you have classified as ‘novices’ who
are struggling to move through the levels. You need to improve engagement for this segment by
making the game-play easier, but you don’t want to upset the game-play for others.

You might want to test sending a gift, easing off the difficulty, or offering hints and tips to get them
through that particular mission. Using personalization tools, like those in Engage on the deltaDNA
platform, will let you apply such changes to selected segments and evaluate their effectiveness.
Here’s what the player journey might look like for Novice players:

Boosting the skill level for Novice players who are struggling
with the level of difficulty with booster gifts will keep them in the game

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Expert player segments, on the other hand, may find the game-play too easy and need the difficulty
ramped-up:

Offering experts the opportunity to progress through the game to reach harder levels
can improve their experience (and can be an opportunity for monetization)

Segmentation isn’t just about player skill. There are many different aspects of player behavior that
you can target to improve engagement. You might identify a segment who are using your game’s
social features much more frequently, for example. In this case you’d want to set up offers or
incentives to keep this activity up.

Adapting the game-play to suit the needs of individual segments means that your payers can be
identified, protected and nurtured. But even the most successful free-to-play games only see 5%
of players make an in-app purchase, so how do you monetize the other 95% without upsetting
engagement?

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Maximizing monetization with personalization
Understanding how players monetize in your game and treating them accordingly can have big
payoffs. For example, you might find groups who want to spend in different ways; one segment may
wish to buy lots of grind currency, the other, lots of premium currency. Some segments attract new
players to your game, while others are happy to watch rewarded adverts all day long. You should
use personalization to augment their monetization experience to maximize your revenues from all
players.

The principle here is the same as when looking at game-play. In the example below, we’ve identified
a segment of players as Grinders; players who decline opportunities to make an in-app purchase
(IAP) but repeatedly return to farm daily play rewards.

Grinders who decline IAP can be monetized through ad serving

You know these players are unlikely to ever make an IAP, so this segment should be monetized with
a mixture of rewarded videos and interstitial ads. In the same game, you could choose to protect
payers by not showing them any ads at all. Note, it’s worth further segmenting these players against
their social engagement, as they could be helping aquisition.

The benefits of personalization are clear: it’s a win-win scenario for you and your players. So how do
you go about applying personalization practically in your game?

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Practical steps towards game personalization
First of all, you will need to define and create your segments by refering to your game data.
DeltaDNA’s game analytics & marketing platform has a range of sophisticated algorithms available
which can automatically define segments; both simplifying and speeding-up the segmentation
process, while providing reliably accurate results. The platform provides the tools you’ll need to
monitor your segments, as players move across different segments as they play.

Once you have accurately defined player segments, our Analyze tool-set can be used to determine
why these players are leaving or failing to monetize, and our Engage tool-set can be used to change
the game with real-time marketing engagements to stop this from happening.

The platform architecture collects, processes, and actions event data within milliseconds, enabling
you to identify players on the basis of segmentation criteria. You can then engage with them as they
play, with automated campaigns that feature image based rich messaging. Game balancing can
be set-up at any point in the game to provide players with additional resources or make obstacles
tougher.

The latest addition to the deltaDNA feature roster is AdVantage. By leveraging user-level data from
both In-App Purchase (IAP) and ad revenues, AdVantage makes it possible to calculate the true
Lifetime Value (LTV) of each individual player. Access to this centralized information transforms
acquisition, engagement, game-balancing and IAP strategy. Understand where you can acquire the
most suitable players and give your existing players exactly what they want.

Improving player engagement by balancing in-app purchasing and ad-serving with positive player
experiences is the most effective way of ensuring your game is successful.

Take a holistic view of your game economy and think about your game from the player
perspective.

To find out more visit www.deltadna.com, or email info@deltadna.com for a demonstration 8