An important part of turning your app into a business is to optimize your user experience to drive the bottom line results you want. A popular way to do this is through manual experimentation, which involves setting up A/B tests for different components of your app and finding the top performing variant. Now, you can save time and effort - and still maximize the objectives you want - with Remote Config’s latest personalization feature. Personalization harnesses the power of machine learning to automatically find the optimal experience for each user to produce the best outcomes, taking the load off you.
At Firebase Summit 2021, we announced that Remote Config personalization is officially available in beta! Let’s take a closer look at this new feature, how it differs from A/B testing, and how you can use it today to grow your business.
Remote Config lets you dynamically control and change the behavior and appearance of your app without releasing a new version or setting up any complex infrastructure. You can use Remote Config to implement feature flags, perform A/B tests, customize your app for different user segments, and now, with personalization, optimize your user experience with minimal work. All you need to do is specify the objective you want to maximize, and personalization will continuously find and apply the right app configuration for each user, taking their behavior and preferences into account and tracking impact on secondary metrics along the way. For example, you can personalize the difficulty of your game according to player skill levels to maximize engagement and session duration.
A/B testing and personalization are both good frameworks for app optimization. While they share some similarities, there are a few big differences that are worth pointing out. First, A/B testing requires you to be hands-on throughout the whole process - from setting up the experiment, determining the variables, monitoring and analyzing results, to rolling out the winning variant. With personalization, you determine the experiences you want to try and state the objective you want to maximize. Then, the personalization algorithm uses machine learning to do the rest. It automatically tries different alternatives with different users, learns which alternatives work best, and chooses the alternative that is predicted to maximize your objective.
Second, A/B testing finds a single, global optimum, while personalization gets more granular to find the optimum treatment for each user so you’re not leaving value on the table.
And a third important difference is the timing required for each feature. A/B testing usually takes at least a few weeks to run an experiment and return a result, whereas personalization goes to work immediately, optimizing selections from the moment it is enabled.
Halfbrick, the game studio behind titles like Jetpack Joyride, Dan the Man, and the instant-classic Fruit Ninja, used personalization to optimize ad frequency, which led to a 16% increase in revenue without affecting engagement or retention. They also used personalization to determine the best time (i.e. when users are most enjoying the game) to ask users to rate their app, and were able to boost positive app store ratings by 15%.
In their own words:
"The granularity achieved with Remote Config's personalization feature is impossible for a human to instrument. Personalization has given us new insight into how we can optimize our ad strategy and even helped us challenge our own assumptions that players don't like too many ads."
— Miguel Pastor, Product Manager, Halfbrick
Ahoy Games, another early customer, tried personalization in a number of their games and successfully grew in-app purchases by 12-13% with little to no effort from their team.
Their CEO, Deniz Piri, had this to say:
“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.”
Let’s walk through an example - say you wanted to personalize the moment you show an ad to players in your game based on how many levels they’ve completed, with the objective of maximizing the number of ad clicks generated in a gaming session.
We’ll suppose you have three alternatives that personalization can choose from:
Let’s look at how you can set this up in your application using Remote Config.
Alternatively, you can also check out this video walkthrough of the personalization feature which includes an overview and an example on how to personalize the timing for showing an app rating prompt to maximize the likelihood of users submitting a review. You can also check out the personalization documentation for complete instructions on getting started with personalization.
The first step will be to go into the Firebase console and into the Remote Config section to create an RC parameter that can be used to provide one of these alternatives in your application. This can be done by navigating to the Firebase console > Remote Config and clicking on “Create configuration” if it’s your first time using Remote Config, or “Add parameter” if you already have some created. This will open up the parameter editor as shown below.
Next, click on Add new > Personalization which will open the personalization editor where you can specify alternative values for the parameter, select the primary objective, as well as set additional metrics and targeting conditions for the personalization. In this example, I’m using ad clicks as the primary optimization goal, and tracking user engagement as a secondary metric to monitor as personalization delivers personalized values to users.
How to create a personalized parameter, including personalization goals and additional metric tracking within a few clicks in the Remote Config parameter editor.
Now you’ll just need to click on “Save” and “Publish changes” to make the new parameter available to any running application instances. The final step is to implement and use your new Remote Config parameter in your application code. You can follow the getting started guide to complete these final steps based on which platform your app is targeting.
From here, personalization will go to work immediately, selecting the best predicted alternative for each user, and collecting metrics along the way to help you determine the effectiveness of personalization in optimizing towards your primary goal. Over time, you’ll see a results summary screen similar to the one in the screenshot below:
The box in gray represents the baseline holdout group, while the box in blue represents the group of users who’ve received personalized values. The total lift shows how much additional value personalization has generated relative to the holdout group that didn’t receive personalized values. Since the baseline group will be much smaller than the personalization group, the numbers in the baseline holdout group are scaled up so that the numbers are comparable, and the total lift can be calculated. You can also breakdown baseline performance details to see how each alternative value performed individually.
As time goes by, you can revisit the results summary page to ensure that the personalization is continuing to deliver more value than the baseline group, maximizing your goal automatically as personalization and Remote Config do their work.
Now that personalization is available in public beta you can start scaling your app today without scaling your effort. Check it out in the Firebase console today, or take a look at our documentation to learn more.
This article was originally published on the Google Play Medium channel.
Mobile games have evolved rapidly in recent years. Player expectations have increased along with this evolution. Players now demand games with rich and compelling stories that run smoothly regardless of their device. At the same time, as game studios realized the opportunities in going mobile, there is an ever-increasing number of mobile game titles competing for players' attention. In this increasingly competitive market, the ability to iterate and improve player experiences faster than rival titles is vital. Therefore, having the right tools and knowing how to apply them is a key skill for any game developer.
For many years, Firebase has provided game developers with the tools they need to build, release, and operate successful games. More than 2.5 million apps and games actively use Firebase every month, including global game studios such as Gameloft, Pomelo Games, and Halfbrick Studios.
This article explores four scenarios that game developers deal with on a daily basis and shows how Firebase provides the tools and insights to help you stay ahead of rivals.
It’s easier to provide better experiences to players when you understand how they interact with your game. Knowing how much time players spend in the game, what activities they prefer, and how often they come back enables you to personalize the game experience to suit their behavior and preferences. For example, different groups of players have different monetization preferences. Some may choose to spend money to improve their experience, while others may prefer to see ads and trade their time and attention instead. Understanding these differences – even details such as what people prefer to buy and what they do before making their first in-app purchase – is crucial to optimizing player experiences.
Firebase offers robust integration with Google Analytics. This integration helps shed light on who your players are and how they’re engaging with your game by providing insight into in-app events and user properties. This short video will show you how to log custom events and interpret the data to understand your players better.
Through the audiences feature, Firebase’s Google Analytics integration enables you to segment your user base in ways that are important to your business. You can use these custom audiences to filter reports to understand how different players engage with your game and identify patterns of behavior within the audience. Then, you can use this information to send targeted notifications and personalize the game behavior for player profiles. Take a look at this video to see how to set up audiences for your game.
Push notifications can be used for everything from reminders about opening a chest to letting everybody know the biggest update of the year is available. As push notifications allow real-time communication between a game company and its players, they’re often a critical part of a retention and re-engagement strategy. Most successful games have players worldwide, which means choosing just one language and time of day to communicate with them all is not ideal. After all, you don’t want to annoy players by sending them a push notification at 2 a.m.
Firebase Cloud Messaging lets game developers send targeted messages and notifications, which can be customized to suit your brand and align with player preferences. This video shows how you can send push notifications to players with devices set to a particular language and schedule delivery at an appropriate local time. Firebase Cloud Messaging also lets you target by game versions, geographies, your custom audiences, and many more variables. After sending the push notifications, you can see how many were delivered, how many were opened, and, if you choose to set it up, how many conversions happened.
While many players will gladly invest money in the games they enjoy, other players prefer ads in exchange for the gameplay. Many games employ a hybrid monetization strategy, meaning they include both ads and in-app purchases. As a general rule, the more ad impressions, the greater the revenue generated with ads. However, many other factors need to be considered to optimize and balance user experience and revenue. Differences between ad formats, their sizes, and how often they’re shown without disrupting the game experience are important factors.
Once you decide on these factors, how can you determine if the selected formats are the best ones? Is the frequency right or too much, and is the frequency negatively impacting retention? These questions can be answered quantitatively with Firebase A/B testing. A/B testing can be used with Firebase Remote Config to experiment with different combinations of ad types and frequencies to find the best option. To set up an experiment, all you need to do is define a goal, like increase total revenue, and identify secondary metrics such as D1 and D7 retention.
This video walks you through the process of setting up an experiment to test different ad formats so you can identify the best choice for a game. These parameters will vary from game to game, so it is always good to test the options available.
Pomelo Games, one of the top game studios in Uruguay, used Firebase Remote Config and Firebase A/B Testing to test the effect of showing interstitial ads to their entire player base versus a specific segment. Then, they used Google Analytics to measure the impact on revenue and retention. They also used Firebase Crashlytics to keep an eye on their game vitals. After two weeks of testing, the Pomelo team discovered that interstitial ads led to an average 25% increase in AdMob revenue and, surprisingly, a 35% increase in in-app purchases too. In both tests, there was almost no effect on retention. (Check out the full case study.)
Releasing new game features can be nerve-wracking because you may worry about how players will receive the new features. Will players enjoy the new feature you worked hard on? Will the new feature increase engagement and session time? One way to gain confidence that new features will positively impact your key metrics is by slowly rolling them out and seeing how they perform with a subset of your players before wider release.
In addition to gradually rolling out new features, it's also important to continually experiment with new content or in-game mechanics to optimize the player experience. However, constantly iterating your game can be a time-consuming and tedious process if you don't have the right tools.
Firebase Remote Config lets you dynamically configure your game and confidently roll out new features so you can deliver highly personalized experiences to your players without publishing an app update. This video shows you how to set up and tweak Remote Config parameters and instrument feature flagging.
Conclusion
Firebase is a powerful platform. It’s a great fit for game companies that want to enhance how they optimize experiences to delight their players and improve engagement and monetization. To get started with Firebase, you create your project in the Firebase console. To see more examples of how to use Firebase to supercharge your games business, check our Games with Firebase video series, where we walk through each step of the implementation process and share common use cases.