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Conversion rate

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November 9, 2011 | Nicholas Lovell

GAMESBRIEF FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES FORECASTING SPREADSHEET
intro | MAUs | DAUs | engagement | retention | conversion | whales | ARPPU | platform | CPA REGISTER FOR UPDATES AND DOWNLOAD THE SPREADSHEET

 As you move down the funnel, you need to start converting users into payers. Without conversion, you don’t have a business.

The key difference for a free-to-play game, though, is that conversion rates are very low compared to a traditional business model. After all, in a traditional business model, the only people who haven’t paid are the pirates.

Conversion rates vary wildly from game to game and platform. Picking the right conversion rate may be the biggest swing factor in your forecasts. I’ve seen everything from under 1% to around 17% for a free-to-play game. At the Social Games Summit, Joost Van Dreunen, managing director of SuperData, said that a conversion rate of 2-10% is reasonable. Martin Koppell said that on mobile apps, each additional step required between choosing to buy an IAP and actually completing payment reduces conversion by 15%. This makes Android currently harder to monetise than iOS, due to the lack of a comparable streamlined solution for payments.

If you are a start-up, or have an understanding boss, that’s OK. You pick your best estimate (I would suggest 1-5%, depending on the platform) and run with it. When you get your first month’s data, you see how well you are performing against benchmark. Then you tweak and iterate.

If you work for a large organisation, you have a harder time. Organisations are rarely suited to taking risks, and struggle to follow an iterative strategy. Hopefully some of the benchmarks that we give you here will help.

Benchmarks

Conversion rates

  • SuperData reports that the average conversion rate across the social games industry has increased to 2.5% in 2012, from 1.4% in 2011. (Source: GamesIndustry.biz)

iOS

  • Tiny Tower: 3.8% (number of unique lifetime payers divided by the number of unique lifetime paid players over the first six weeks of the game. Source: Gamesbrief)
  • ngMoco: 2.0% (2% of DAUs spend every day, sourced from a presentation/handout at GDC 2010)
  • naturalmotion: 2.0% (“We’re tracking above that. I can’t give you the exact numbers but we’re tracking pretty high overall at the moment.” Source: Pocketgamer)
  • Jetpack Joyride, Halfbrick: 5-10% (Source: gamasutra, 8/2/12)

Android

Facebook

  • CSI: 5% (claimed at MGEITF. Possibly flippant, and the Alex Farber’s comment ignores the importance of whales and true fans)
  • Speaking at GDC 2012, Giordano Bruno Contestabile of Popcap said that for Bejeweled, conversion rates are more than twice as high for iOS as Facebook.
  • Zynga: 4.4% (Derived from MUUs/MUPs. Source: investor.zynga.com)

Browser-based

PC online

  • Team Fortress: 20-30% (probably lifetime), according to Gabe Newell in a must-read Geekwire interview.
  • ATB, Reloaded: 7%, but their target is 10% according to Bjorn Book-Larsson speaking at GDC 2012
  • World of Tanks, Wargaming.net: 30% (probably lifetime) (source: Edge)
  • AI War, Arcen Games: 15% lifetime conversion (source: Cliffski’s blog comments)

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GAMESBRIEF FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES FORECASTING SPREADSHEET
intro | MAUs | DAUs | engagement | retention | conversion | whales | ARPPU | platform | CPA REGISTER FOR UPDATES AND DOWNLOAD THE SPREADSHEET

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  • Publisher

    Conversion rate is calculated as a % of DAU or MAU? When we talk about industry metrics… are we referring to DAU or MAU

    [Reply]

    Nicholas Lovell Reply:
    February 14th, 2012 at 10:34 am

    It’s really hard to tell. People are very bad at quoting whether they mean DAU conversion, MAU conversion or lifetime conversion. Wherever possible we try to tell you which one we’re referring to and provide links to the original article, but we don’t always know .

    [Reply]

  • Fernando Spengler

    In your spreadsheet you calculate the conversion rate on MAU’s, 
    correct?

    [Reply]

    Nicholas Lovell Reply:
    February 21st, 2012 at 9:56 pm

    I think it’s calculated on DAUs and then multiplied up, by an average of 30 days, but I’ll have to check (or just follow the cells in Excel yourself).

    Feel free to adapt the spreadsheet as you wish.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Fernando-Spengler/100001776314941 Fernando Spengler

    Hello Nicholas.
    I’m changing as have time. She has been very helpful for to do the monetization plan. I want to insert data from seasonality. You have some metric to serve as a parameter?

    [Reply]

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