Let the Games Begin: How Site Engagement and Performance Boosts Results for Online Gaming

It’s not just fun and games. 

With global revenues expected to top $200 billion in 2022, online gaming – a massive category that includes everything from multiplayer games to mobile apps and sports betting – is big business. 

But white-hot competition, a changing data privacy landscape, and an impending economic slowdown are leading online gaming sites to feel the same pains as other online businesses. 

How can online gaming sites break through? The most successful gaming brands optimize site engagement and performance to boost results across three critical moments of the user lifecycle.

• User acquisition
• Deposits
• Loyalty

Here’s how.

User acquisition: treating the CAC headache

The challenge: Acquiring new users is expensive. 

The rollout of new privacy restrictions with iOS 14.5 led to an explosion of Android spending – driving an 18% overall increase in customer acquisition cost (CAC) for gaming apps in 2021. 

And the playing field is even more tilted against smaller gaming companies. In the sports betting category, for example, giants like DraftKings and FanDuel pour advertising dollars across platforms – raising the CAC for smaller players. 

What to do: Don’t let a single advertising dollar go to waste. Once you’ve spent money acquiring traffic, make sure that it converts – by ensuring that your registration process is seamless.

Registration is a natural place to focus because regulatory requirements make the process complex for online gaming sites. And friction that users encounter with identity and age verification can suck the ROAS right out of the best-performing ad campaign. (See the screenshot – where failures in the age verification step led to a 67% drop in conversion rate.)

So make sure that your registration process is straightforward and error-free. Audit your error messages to ensure that they’re clear and user-friendly – and have a “bounceback” strategy in place to reach out to and assist users who drop off during the registration process.

Deposits: jumping the hurdle to LTV

The challenge: Gaming sites often have several critical milestones in the user journey between registering for an account and actually spending money. 

A classic example for a betting site is making an account deposit. (For other gaming sites, milestones might include finding friends on the platform or customizing a profile/avatar.)

These milestones are on the critical path to user spending – so any technical failure or unnecessary friction here has a direct impact on revenue. 

What to do: Make sure that you have real-time visibility into the success/failure rate of your brand’s “must win” moments – and that you have alerts set up to notify you if the failure rate exceeds a certain threshold on these milestones.

Loyalty: keeping them on the playground

The challenge: A user’s profitability and long-term loyalty are direct functions of how engaged you can keep them within your online gaming ecosystem. The more users engage, the more likely they are to take the action that ultimately results in profitability (e.g., buying virtual goods, placing a bet).

This is a big part of the reason that gaming companies roll out suites of games – to keep users “on their playground.” But even without a robust multi-product strategy, you should ensure that you’re not giving your users any reason to wander off. 

What to do: Any snag or point of friction is a reason for a user to jump ship and leave for a competitor. So it’s essential to immediately identify and resolve any issues – whether they’re related to technical errors or goal failures. 

Resolving back-end errors, improving user-facing error messages, and deploying customer care in real time can help prevent this kind of avoidable revenue loss. 

The bottom line

Online gaming sites stand to benefit from the massive global shift towards digital technologies – and consumers’ desire to connect with one another. 

But in order to build user engagement and profitability, online gaming sites need real-time visibility into errors occurring at every stage of the conversion funnel – and the tools to quickly quantify their revenue impact so they can prioritize solving them. 

Schedule a demo to learn how Webeyez can help.