Biz Tips: How to design your mobile game for maximum virality
GROWTH:
How to design your mobile game for maximum virality
- Originally published on Gamesindustry.biz & posted on account for Viral Patel
With Facebook clamping down on app invites, GetSocial COO Viral Patel offers tips on acquiring users organically through other channels
Until earlier this year, user-get-user referral marketing through Facebook had proven to be a popular source of organic user acquisition. It was common for anyone playing a mobile game to see a list of their friends and be prompted to invite them to play, or even reward them with lives or other bonuses if they invited others to join the party.
Unfortunately, Facebook sounded the death knell on this kind of user acquisition when it began deprecating app invites on February 5 this year. Facebook further deprecated its Invitable Friends API with little notice on April 4. This was the one feature that games relied on extensively to enable players to invite hundreds of their friends with just a click.
Shutting down these APIs didn’t just impact virality, the games also took a substantial hit in terms of social engagement.
Given these developments, it’s important for mobile game developers to diversify the different ways and mechanics they use to acquire users through social and viral channels, reducing their reliance on a single platform such as Facebook. An extremely important variable to measure the effectiveness of viral user acquisition is the viral coefficient — also known as K-factor.
Viral coefficient (k-factor) = i*c
The viral coefficient of a mobile game depends on two metrics: the number of invites sent by each user (i); the percentage of conversions on invites ©
How to increase your viral coefficient (k-factor)
Here are a few best practices for you to follow in order to increase your viral coefficient:
- Have a sharing mechanism in the first place
- Make it easy to find i.e. don’t hide it in settings
- Make sharing and inviting part of the core game loop
- Enable players to invite their friends through their preferred invite channel
- Clearly explain the benefits of inviting their friends
- Incentivize them for referrals
Our own analysis of 60 million gamers shows a 2.7x increase in invites sent and a 5.3x increase in sent-to-install conversions following implementation of these best practices. All of us have a tendency to skip a task if it involves too much effort. The same holds true for a user who is thinking of inviting his friends. The easier your sharing mechanism is, the greater the number of invites (i) they are willing to send.
A few placements of the invite/share button used by popular games to increase the number of invites look like this:
Visibility is just one aspect of a referral campaign. The key is to make the invite process frictionless. Some of the different ways in which apps implement their invite process include:
- Native sharing: Polluted with apps not related to sharing i.e. Paypal, Bluetooth, etc.
- Facebook game requests: Requires user to authenticate with Facebook and recipient to not have muted game requests
- Referral codes : Require users to copy paste referral code
These mechanics introduce friction into the sharing process. For instance, some e-commerce companies report breakage of 30% to 40% when using referral codes (the recipient forgets to enter the code). We’ve also seen instances where the developer moved from native sharing to a curated list of channels that resulted in an increase of over 100% in the number of invites sent.
To avoid these issues, it’s important to create a custom invite flow with a list of popular social media channels — such as WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, Email, KakaoTalk, and so on — as well as use attribution technology that can:
- Handle deferred and contextual deep-linking to avoid the use of referral codes
- Support link customization with a custom domain
- Support Cross-platform
- Prevent Install Fraud