The KPIs of a successful marketing game strategy

Gamified marketing campaigns are an invaluable tool for any business looking to increase revenue and boost growth, as they can improve brand visibility, collect data, generate leads, and convert users into customers. A successful gamification strategy applied to your marketing campaigns can deliver solid, quantifiable data which you can measure, and in turn use to inform and improve future marketing game implementations. By looking at quantitative metrics you can get an objective idea of the performance of your gamification strategy as a whole.

What’s a marketing game?

A marketing game, or gamified app, is a form of gamification: the strategy of applying game mechanics to traditionally less playful areas to improve performance. It’s still content, but it’s gamified content, it’s more interactive, and encourages potential customers to be active rather than passive when engaging with your brand and messaging. By tapping into people’s hunger for competition, for challenge, and enticing them with prizes and rewards, both virtual and real, you can use the format of a game to motivate desired behaviours and encourage users to take specific actions. This is especially effective in marketing, where marketing games can add more value than traditional forms of content by being more intriguing, more fun, and offering greater utility.

Modern marketing games work across different web enabled devices, so they can be played on touchscreen mobile phones, tablets, or even home computers. They can also be shared seamlessly across social media platforms, emails, and can be accessed by scanning QR codes, meaning they can even be advertised through legacy media like magazines, as well as on physical marketing materials like posters and billboards.

Because they’re online, any marketing games or apps created on the Drimify platform allow you to collect data in real time, meaning it’s easy to track your game’s performance by predetermined key performance indicators (KPIs).

What are KPIs?

KPIs are metrics used to measure the performance of an organisation, department, operation, or marketing campaign against specific goals and objectives. They are used by companies as part of their analytics to monitor progress, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions.

A clear set of KPIs are therefore crucial in the rollout of any marketing game strategy.

The KPIs of marketing games

• Total number of views, or the number of times the experience or app is played: this is the number of times users clicked on your marketing game link and started a session.
• Engagement and participation rate: measuring the engagement rate of your app allows you to understand to what extent players interacted with your game and how often. Are they playing once only, or are they repeating the experience? The rate can be higher than 100% when there has been a lot of traffic and users have played multiple times. While the most important number here will probably be the average engagement rate, it’s also important to consider the outliers. Did 1 or 2 incredibly keen players boost your average engagement rate score in a way that looks unrepeatable?
• Completion rate: this KPI measures the percentage of players who complete the game to the final screen. This can be useful in determining the effectiveness of the game design and the level of engagement and motivation it provides to players. You may be able to recognise an issue or UX problem around a specific level or screen if a lot of players are not completing the game.
• User satisfaction rate: this is the level of player satisfaction with the game experience, or the extent to which the game meets the expectations of users and provides them with a positive experience. This can be done through surveys, feedback mechanisms, or by tracking measures such as the number of positive ratings and reviews. High satisfaction levels indicate that the game is providing value to players and can lead to increased engagement and retention.
• Conversion rate: evaluating the performance of the game in meeting objectives and driving desired actions, such as leads, purchases, registrations or referrals. A high conversion rate can indicate that the game is successful in engaging players and encouraging them to take specific actions, such as becoming customers.

Return on investment

The return on investment (ROI) is a longer term concept than KPIs, and can only really be measured or considered after a campaign has ended. This is where a campaign, or marketing game strategy, or even a single gamified app, is analysed to see if it brought about returns to justify its investment. In a nutshell, it asks, “Was the performance worth the cost? Did it add value, and if so, did it add enough value?” KPI performance would be an important consideration when determining a campaign’s ROI, and informing future marketing game strategies.

By understanding the factors that influence these indicators, you can determine whether your marketing games have been successful and whether they have been properly and effectively executed. Each KPI provides valuable information about the performance of your marketing game project and identifies areas where further effort is needed to improve and add value.

Your marketing game KPIs should therefore be tailored to the specific goals and objectives of the campaign. For example, if the game was to promote a restaurant, and players receive discount codes for participating and giving contact details, how many times is that discount code being redeemed? Is it putting bums on seats, and turning users into customers? Is it adding names to the mailing list? Regular monitoring and analysis of these indicators can help companies make informed decisions on how to optimise their efforts to best engage users and ultimately generate revenue.

Improve your marketing strategy and KPIs with gamification

With Drimify, the possibilities for gamifying marketing campaigns are only limited by your imagination. Bring effective gamification tools to your business today with the built in functionality to effectively track and monitor KPIs. Collect user data and analyse the performance of your marketing games in real time from your dashboard on our intuitive authoring platform. You will be able to extract key data and analytics that you can use at different levels of your company to guide your decision making.

Implementing gamified experiences to your marketing campaigns is a great way to engage your audience in a more effective way, and clearly defined KPIs play an important role in evaluating the effectiveness of those experiences, and calculating the ROI of your gamification strategy. Taking these metrics into account, and being razor focused and clear in your aims, will help you not only make your immediate games more successful, but allow you to constantly improve new marketing game efforts by focusing on the key data.

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