It’s been about two weeks since we launched Blitz of Blocks on the web, and I thought it was worth taking some time to analyze our results and form some takeaways about our future direction. I believe in the power of being laser-focused on results (and that inattention to results is one of the key traits of a dysfunctional team), so it was important to me to build analytics and feedback mechanisms into the game from the start.
So let’s look first at Google Analytics.
It’s been a roller coaster of a two weeks.
The graph plots the number of players per day, with blue representing all players and orange representing players who have played before. Upon launch, I spent the weekend and next week promoting the game on social media and around the web, resulting in the initial spike. I also did some light experimentation with Google and Facebook advertising since they give new G Suite customers / business page owners some free credit.
While up and to the right generally seems good, the story gets complicated as you look further into the data and synthesize what it’s telling us.
Things Worth Celebrating
On one hand, compared to last year’s playtests that would draw around 25 players when we promoted them, it’s awesome that we’re attracting hundreds of players to try the game, with more than 800 visitors yesterday alone. This suggests that at the very least, our more focused scope and messaging about the game is working, and there’s an audience of people interested in the product.
We’re also slowly building a segment of regular players who are returning to play day after day. Anecdotally, the addition in the second week of leaderboards created a fun sense of competition, and it’s been awesome to see players coming back to increase their scores week-after-week for our Feedback Friday events. Returning players are also playing longer and leaving the site without playing (bouncing) less than new users.
Things Keeping Me Up At Night
On the other hand, a few things concern me at this point. First, engagement is incredibly inconsistent right now. As a reminder from our Product Roadmap, our goal for the month of January is to reach 100 daily active users, and the answer to whether we’ve achieved that milestone is, “it’s complicated”. While our highs are reaching well above that goal, our baseline is still well below. And when we look at where those players are coming from, it turns out that the vast majority are coming from paid search, which will become a drain on the budget as ad credit runs out.
The power of search
Looking even further into paid search traffic and where these users are coming from, it turns out that we’ve grown a sizable international audience, which is exciting to see…
We’re huge in India (or infinitesimally small but big compared to the US).
…until we realize what kind of device the vast majority of those users are playing on…
So many “Mobile browsers aren’t supported” error messages.
…and remember that our minimally viable product only supports desktop browsers :( This explains why the average session duration is only 30 seconds and why most users are quickly bouncing from the site. We’re bleeding users who arrive on our site on mobile devices!
I knew Android adoption was outpacing iOS but didn’t realize it was so drastic.
When we look at initial survey results and focus on Net Promoter Score (a popular measure of product satisfaction based on likelihood to recommend it to a friend), most of the scores are high, and ALL of the low scores specifically cite not being able to play on their phone.
Takeaways
The clear takeaway is that our game’s growth is crippled by its lack of mobile support. As a reminder from our Product Strategy, our business goals include reaching on the order of 10k daily active users, which we can’t hope to do when our product addresses such a small segment of the audience. We also need to establish a growing base on consistent players, which also seems unrealistic in our current state.
Next Steps
While I’m happy with the progress (this time a few weeks ago, I would have been happy with more than 30 players a week), it’s clear that we’re a long way from declaring success. But as disappointing as it can be, it remains important to focus on these results and use them as a baseline to improve upon from iteratively.
In the short term, that means prioritizing getting our game playable on phones, making the game easier to play, and making players return to play again.