Results from a 55,000 Player A/B Test
The Karmafy platform combines the bottom line benefits of gamification and charitable giving - in our customers' apps. Our latest app store trials have greatly strengthened our belief that we deliver improved user loyalty, higher retention and better monetisation.
We have been developing, testing and iterating our platform for over 2 years. Our first test gave us encouraging results some time back with our first customer, a subscription-based video and music streaming service. Although this was early days for us, our client experienced increased customer retention and increased average user spending. Yet, we were always aiming to see to what extent Karmafy could impact mobile games, as we believe that this is a market where Karmafy has great potential. Freemium Philanthropy should go well with freemium games, wouldn’t you think?
“Freemium Philanthropy should go well with freemium games, wouldn’t you think?”
The opportunity arose at the end of 2016 when we signed a deal with Gaming Corps for integrating Karmafy in Slam Dunk Basketball 2. Slam Dunk Basketball 2 (SDB2), together with its predecessor, has had more than 7 million installs. Although launched in 2014 (and a #1 DL rank), it is still receiving a healthy amount of daily installs. The App’s developers, Gaming Corps, encouraged us to verify the effect Karmafy had on players and allowed us to run a large scale A/B-test on new player installs. A/B testing in this regard is vital and invaluable for measuring impact as well as iterating on how the platform functions. Importantly, we could easily compare users not exposed to the platform to those that were within the exact same game.
Karmafy was fully integrated into SDB2 in a matter of days, and we chose to A/B test on new players in the US market, eliminating potential language issues. Additionally, to keep the user data as unbiased as possible, no marketing for Karmafy was done outside of the game.
From February to April Karmafy conducted a large-scale A/B-Test, allocating half of newly-installed, American players to the “See Karmafy” group, with the other half monitored as a control group. Using Google Analytics (verified through our server data to ensure accuracy), we were able to track progress as well as tweak the Karmafy experience throughout the trial. The numbers we got out were positive across the board. Most notably, we were seeing increased user retention, social sharing, and in-app purchasing.
“Most notably, we are seeing increased user retention, social sharing, and purchases. ”
6% Increase on 7 Day Retention
Users returning after 1 day (D1 retention), increased by 4%, while D7 rose by 6%. We were hoping for higher numbers but these were still satisfactory. User retention data past D10 was scarce so we had difficulties drawing any conclusions from later retention numbers. We concluded that Karmafy mainly had a positive impact on retention the first 10 days after install. It will be exciting to see how this trend follows in future games.
181% More Shares to Social Media
Screenshot of popular dialogue for sharing
Our high expectations for Karmafy’s impact on social sharing were confirmed during our trial with SDB2. While we further optimized the Karmafy experience throughout the test, our final results demonstrated a +181% sharing increase for users exposed to Karmafy. Looking deeper into the statistics, we found that Karmafy didn’t really take away users from sharing the usual SDB2 content, rather users shared significant amounts of additional Karmafy-related content. The Karmafy content that was shared was evenly distributed between “I just chose to support...”, earning Karmafy achievements and the personal charitable feedback “I have given X days of water…”. Technical constraints with the game made it difficult to track individual installs from each share and is functionality we obviously encourage developers to integrate and we expect our next game to monitor this correctly.
42% Increase in In-App Purchases
Finally, let’s look at the revenues. As with so many other games, SDB2 has always struggled with monetization. Although we were confident in Karmafy’s ability to increase revenue, we were not expecting SDB2’s revenue to increase the way it did. Players were making a lot more purchases (+42%), and revenue was up a massive +91%. As this was starting from a fairly low level given the age of the game and its internal monetization design, the numbers were clear and a great boost to the team and our platform goals.
Conclusion
To conclude, adding Karmafy to Slam Dunk Basketball 2 had a positive impact on the games bottom line. This benefit persisted even after sharing revenue with player selected charities as well as our own modest platform fees. At the end of the A/B test, Gaming Corps were glad to enable Karmafy for all their players, worldwide and give players a free and interactive way to support good causes. It doesn’t have to cost money to do good. Rather the opposite in fact - doing good can mean doing better! Play & Do Good with Freemium Philanthropy.
“It doesn’t have to cost money to do good. Rather the opposite in fact - doing good can mean doing better!”
