How to measure the return on investment of marketing games

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When it comes to any aspect of marketing, it is important to consider the concept of return on investment (ROI). Calculating ROI is an important step in determining whether a marketing campaign delivered its desired results, and plays a huge factor in identifying possibilities for improvement.

Determining the ROI of marketing games can be challenging, as they aren’t directly generating revenue. Online games and contests as part of marketing strategies are used to promote products, develop a brand image, drive inbound traffic and collect data – they contribute to the bottom line, but not always in the most clear-cut way from the perspective of measuring ROI in the most traditional way.

In this article we’ll talk about ROI, and give you the basics of how to calculate the ROI of your marketing games and online contests.

Defining and calculating the ROI of a marketing campaign

What is return on investment?

Return on investment is the ratio between the net income of a project against its investment. In our case, we’re looking at the usefulness of a marketing game in delivering on our campaign objectives against the investment of time and capital in its implementation. In simple terms: we’re calculating how much benefit something yielded against its cost. In simplest terms: was it worth it?

You can think of ROI in terms of determining the overall profitability of a project within your business, and it can be calculated based on several factors, such as the amount of money initially invested, the labour hours that have gone into the project, the amount of money it earned, along with other targeted (or unexpected) results it bore.

How do you calculate ROI?

There are several ways to calculate ROI, but the most common method would be to calculate the net gain of the project by subtracting the costs from the revenues generated. Calculating the ROI as a percentage, you’d divide the net gain of the campaign by the total cost of the campaign, then multiply this number by 100.

Here’s an example: if you spent £5,000 on an advertising campaign, and the campaign generated £20,000 in additional sales, your net gain would be £15,000 (£20,000 – £5,000). If you calculate the ROI as a percentage, it would be 300% (15,000/ 5000 x 100).

How do you calculate the ROI of marketing games?

It is important to note that while ROI has traditionally been calculated in terms of a monetary value, it can be used to look at other factors. In gamified marketing games, this will often be the case, as it can be difficult to assign an exact monetary amount a marketing game may have generated. It may be clear that a marketing game has led to an increase in foot traffic, or more covers, or more orders, or significantly increased the size of your mailing list, but it can be difficult to be precise in terms of dividing gain by cost. Also, consider marketing games designed to match products with consumer needs: there is a clear user benefit in play, and a great online tool for helping a customer choose your product over a rival’s equivalent, but it’s very hard to assign a quantitative value to this.

For these reasons, it’s important to consider exactly what the aims of your marketing game campaigns are, and to define some relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your games in the short term, and to help you assess the ROI of your games to help inform your long term strategy.

Measuring ROI with a marketing games platform

With a modern marketing games creation platform like Drimify, collecting data in real time from your dashboard makes analysis easy. You’ll be able to extract key data that you can use at different levels of your project to inform your decision making, and ultimately calculate the ROI of your games.

Here are some key KPIs that you can extract from the Drimify platform to help you quantify the ROI of a marketing game or contest.

The main KPIs:

• Number of views or the number of times the experience is displayed
• Engagement rate, or the number of times a person plays the game
• Completion rate, or the number of times the game is played all the way through

These calculations play an important role in assessing the effectiveness of gamified campaigns and their marketing games and competitions. By understanding the factors that influence ROI, and then using the most appropriate KPIs to calculate it, you can determine whether your project was successful and whether it was executed correctly and efficiently.

Those KPIs can also be considered when calculating the ROI of a broader marketing campaign that includes marketing games as a component. They could also indicate key trends or benefits when comparing one marketing campaign against another.

For example, where marketing games have been used in the promotion of one project, but not another similar project, improved results could be indicated by the inclusion of gamified experiences. If two very different types of marketing games were used to promote similar products, but one was far more profitable than the other – depending on other datasets – it may be an indication that one type of game can give greater ROI in your industry than another.

Improve the ROI of your marketing strategy through gamification

The implementation of marketing games as part of your marketing strategy offers a far more playful and effective method to connect with your target audience and let them engage with your products and services than traditional methods. They also facilitate the collection of data from your customers, and allow you to easily incentivise purchases and patronage through prizes, discount codes, and effective inbound marketing.

To get the most ROI from your marketing games, you should approach it long-term, and learn from the data collected, and the calculations of previous games and campaigns to keep perfecting your approach. In a saturated digital landscape where consumers are numb to relentless corporate messaging, invite them to play with your ideas with each new promotion, and significantly improve your return on investment with each subsequent campaign.

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