Why Do Gaming Businesses Need Analytics for Their Games to Succeed?

Customers are at the heart of every successful company. The days of competition being based on price and one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns are over. To acquire and retain customers, businesses have to interact with them and build one-on-one relationships. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Successful modern enterprises need to use data-driven insights to help them understand their customers’ needs in today’s fast-changing world, and to enable them to tailor their products to meet those needs proactively. Most of today’s disruptive businesses like Airbnb and Uber have data analytics as key components of their business models. With this in mind, you don’t want to be left behind and get put out of business by your data-savvy competitors or a new startup managed by a data-focused entrepreneur. 

In this article, we will explain what all this means and why it’s important for your business.

What is analytics?

With most business operations moving online, it is now more important than ever for businesses to adopt the best data analytics practices. Websites and e-commerce portals capture vital business metrics such as site visits, demographics, bounce, and conversion rates, and the analysis of this information reveals how the business is performing at a certain time. 

Data analytics is, therefore, the process of collecting, sorting, studying, and processing business metrics using statistical models and transforming them into insights. The goal is to determine which sets are useful to your business and how they can be leveraged to increase efficiency, solve problems, and boost the company revenue. In short, it’s implemented to identify actionable business information. 

Analytics helps companies understand the causes of past events and create predictions for upcoming campaigns. It is commonly used to eliminate guesswork when making corporate decisions and to accelerate business growth. With the insights data analytics bring forth, it allows companies to tweak their investment strategies to keep their ROI attractive. A survey found that 49 percent of respondents used analytics to make informed decisions, 16 percent used it to implement key strategic initiatives, while a further 10 percent used it to improve relationships with the customers and business partners. 

Why do you need analytics?

When measuring the success of your company, you might first look at your customer base, the bottom-line results, or sales figures. And yes, these are all important growth indicators, but the picture these figures convey is incomplete. Why? For three key reasons. 

1. They don’t show who buys your products. 
2. They don’t explain at what point you gained or lost customers and why that happened. 
3. They also don’t tell you what the business needs to do to remain competitive in future. 

All these issues are solved through data analytics. The insights generated from data will help you optimize your resources to cater to the needs of your customers. They will also help you innovate your products to keep up with the changing market trends. There are a lot of things businesses stand to gain from analytics, and here is a closer look at some of them. 

They help you make informed decisions

From the survey highlighted above, respondents said that they used data analytics to make informed decisions about their businesses. Data analytics is particularly important when it comes to marketing, as it allows marketers to reach the right customers at the right time to ensure business success. Understanding how data works enables businesses to predict purchases and analyze customer behavior. 

Data allows companies to gain vital insights about the people who are interested in their products or content and those who are engaging with it in real-time. With this knowledge, companies can personalize their messaging and marketing efforts based on the client’s specific online behavior. By connecting the data to user experience, businesses can segment their audiences and create buyer personas that help them run purposeful digital strategies and highly-targeted marketing campaigns. This targeting allows marketers to deliver content to the right audience based on factors such as average income, age demographics, and purchase motivators. 

Analytics also show whether a business is progressing as predicted and if not, if something can be done to steer it back on track. It helps identify the needs of the market while showing why certain products are doing well as other lag behind. 

Such information can be used to make vital decisions such as market expansion, pricing policies, widening the range of the products, and customer care. A company that makes decisions based on the analysis of collected data always gains the upper hand over its competitors. This is because it can base those decisions on accurate data and not guesswork or ambiguous details. 

You have a greater chance of a positive ROI

Although digital marketing strategies are more economical than traditional advertising means, they still cost money. If these strategies are not generating adequate returns, then the entire marketing strategy needs to be reviewed, and this is done by calculating the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing spend. 

For the best results, your ROI has to be high, or it will eat into the company’s profits. Acquiring and analyzing marketing data is, therefore, very important as it allows businesses to gauge how much they are spending and how effective their marketing efforts are. 

One of the main goals of marketing data analytics is to understand your customers to be able to predict the products they want as well as identifying the marketing methods that are effective on them. Examining these data sets, however, will not automatically improve your ROI. It is what you do with these insights that matter. 

Let’s say your company is running two marketing campaigns, and the analysis shows that one campaign has a lot of impressions but very few clicks. The other has fewer impressions but a higher click rate. Without a proper understanding of analytics, it is easy only to see the numbers. Still, a web analytics agency will tell you that a higher click-through rate (CTR) makes the second campaign more successful. 

From these insights, it would be wise to increase the marketing spend on the second campaign to generate more business. To make full use of the analytics, you need to examine the metrics of the first campaign to see what needs to be improved to increase the CTR. With these actions, you will have a greater chance of a better ROI as both campaigns will be optimized to generate more business, as seen in this article here. 

They can help you fine-tune your operations

Through data analytics, companies can run their services smoothly and efficiently. This is because business owners can determine the sectors of the business that need more financing and those that are consuming unnecessary funds. With a clear understanding of your business’ health, it is easy to pinpoint the areas where investment should be reduced, the products that are popular with buyers, and the technologies that can be adapted to reduce operational costs. 

The ability to make this sort of adjustment allows businesses to run more efficiently and serve their customers better. Data analysis makes each of these actions precise, thus helping companies fine-tune their operations. By avoiding filler activities that add no value to the business, SMEs can concentrate all their efforts on their strong points, and this will result in enhanced customer experience. This makes it important for companies to work with Web Analytics Services to help them make sense of all the data they collect. 

Data analytics can also be used to assess the performance of your sales team and make the necessary adjustments to boost your revenue streams. Let’s say you have a senior sales rep who receives most of the leads. When analyzing the performance report, you realize that the top sales rep is less effective at closing deals than another sales rep who received fewer leads. This information will affect how you issue leads to the sales reps as you would want the sales rep with a high conversion rate to handle most of the leads. The performance data, therefore, provides the clarity needed to make informed decisions to ensure the business generates more revenue. 

They give insights to help you predict trends

Predictive analytics is a subset of data analytics that is used to make predictions on future outcomes using historical data and techniques like statistical modeling. Through the use of predictive analytics tools, businesses are able to use current and past data to forecast trends with a significant degree of precision. With this information, companies are able to positional themselves to take advantage of opportunities and detect risks to ensure continued growth. Models can be set to assess the relationship between certain behavior factors and to determine the promise or risk the conditions present. 

Such analytics allow businesses to look into the future with more accuracy, thus helping them find ways to cut costs and generate more income. By using predictive analytics to optimize their marketing campaigns, businesses can create more customer interactions and promote cross-selling opportunities. It also helps them attract and retain their customers since their products and offerings are tailored to meet the changing customer behavior and needs.

Start tracking like a pro

If game marketing wasn’t hard enough, add analytics into the fray! This is a crucial part of your campaign, and something you’ll need to master if you want to get results. But it’s dangerous to go alone! Take this: The Game Dev's Complete Guide to Game Marketing Analytics.

Analytical data is the information that will help your business survive in the rapidly evolving world. Game Marketing Genie can help you find your data, set up practices to help you accumulate more, and use it to make informed decisions for your business. Our team of data scientists and marketing strategists can help you find the best web analytics solutions for your business.

Need more info? Let's have a chat about how we can help you become the business you want to be!