Linking Discovery and Monetisation in Mobile Games
More discovery outside the store and cheaper payments through web stores are both useful. If you cannot connect the two, you still do not know what the player is worth.
I was reading a recent PocketGamer.biz piece on discovery and monetisation in mobile games. Two numbers in it stuck with me: TikTok Live did 8.9B hours watched in Q2, and Appcharge says 56% of US players buying through Payment Links were completely new to DTC.
The first question that came to mind was: what happens when you put both together?
Say someone finds your game through a creator, installs it, plays for a while, and later starts paying through your web store. How well can we actually follow that user through the whole thing?
Every part has its own numbers
Most teams will probably have data for every individual part of that journey. The creator campaign has its numbers. UA has its numbers. The game has retention and payer data. The web store has conversion and transaction data. Each one can look fine on its own.
But are the users from that creator actually becoming good players and good customers over time? How do we really understand that? And more importantly, who is actually looking across all of it?
We have dealt with versions of this problem for years. A campaign can look good until we check retention. Monetisation can look good until we break it by cohort. A web store can convert well without telling you whether the players it is converting are actually your best users.
The difference now is that more of the journey sits across different systems.
More discovery outside the store is useful. Saving money on payments is useful too. But if we cannot connect the two, we still do not really know what that player is worth.