Ahoy Games increases purchases by 13% with Remote Config personalization
Introduction
Based in Poland, indie developer Ahoy Games creates social gaming experiences designed to bring the excitement back to tabletop gaming. With an agile team of just 13 people, Ahoy Games has accumulated over 2.2 million monthly active users, 30 million downloads, and more than 8 million daily game plays of hits such as Backgammon Legends, Rummy Club, and Okey.
Challenge
Ahoy already relied on a variety of Firebase products to keep players happy and engaged long-term, like Test Lab and Crashlytics to maintain a stable, high-quality experience and Cloud Messaging to send targeted, customized, and recurring messages. They also used Remote Config and A/B Testing to run experiments and dynamically roll out new features to see how players would respond. But running a lot of tests manually was a drain on their resources, and the results often came back split. And while the team knew there were differences between the preference groups, they didn't know how to segment their user base to run more specific tests.
Solution
As longtime fans of Remote Config, Ahoy Games was one of the first teams to try Remote Config personalization, a new feature that uses machine learning to help developers automatically optimize individual user experiences to maximize the objectives they want. Since personalization is built on top of Remote Config, setting it up was fast and easy, saving them time right off the bat.
Once set up, Ahoy used personalization in a number of their games for various optimizations. In Backgammon Legends, Ahoy Games used personalization to determine how long the Spin the Wheel offer should be shown to players, and to tweak the visuals and copy of their Piggy Bank feature to increase interaction. Within a week, Spin The Wheel and Piggy Bank purchases had increased by 13% and 12%, respectively. In Rummy Club, personalizing their reshuffle feature led to a 2% lift in rewarded video views. And in Okey, Ahoy Games used personalization to determine the right amount of premium currency to offer a player for watching a rewarded video ad. There, they saw a consistent 3-4% increase in conversions over the baseline, and a 20-25% increase compared to the default value.
Personalization allowed Ahoy Games to spend less time setting up variable tests and more time doing what they do best: developing their product and building new game features. Ahoy Games now uses personalization throughout their games to continuously optimize the experience at a much more granular level, serving the right variant to the right player in order to maximize their conversion goals with little to no effort from the team.
Results
12-13% - increase in in-app purchases
20-25% - increase in conversions compared to default value
"We are very impressed with how magical the personalization feature has been. It's so much more than an A/B test, as it continuously optimizes and serves the right variant to the right groups of people to maximize conversion goals. Without Firebase, we would have a harder time succeeding in an arena full of bigger corporations with our humble 13-person team."
- Deniz Piri, CEO, Ahoy Games