Great question! While our Playable Platform allows any number of doors you can think of (within reason ;) ), for an advent calendar most of our customers choose to go with either a 24 door calendar (with one door per day of December) or a 4 door setup, with one door per advent sunday.
A main characteristic of an advent calendar is that consumers play repeatedly on the same calendar to open a door every day. We measure this behavior on game replay rates. With more doors, one can expect a higher replay rate, and this holds true in regards to absolute numbers. On 24 doors, we observe an average replay rate of 6.7, whereas 4 door calendars have an average rate of 2.3. However, compared to the potential of the campaign, this results in an average 28% door opening rate on 24 doors, versus 58% on 4 doors!
It should be noted that we see variations across industries and the respective target audiences. We see that 24 door calendars in the Public&NGO (12.3) and Low Interest (9.3) sectors have significantly higher replay rates than the total average. Likewise, Media & Entertainment on 4 door calendars (3.5).
Registration rate
Another important metric is registration rate, i.e. how many sessions on a calendar convert to a registration. Here, we see on average a better performance of 24 door calendars with an average of 71% vs. 56% on 4 door calendars.
Generally, the registration rate is higher on Christmas campaigns than non-Christmas campaigns. Interesting to note is that on Calendars, the correlation between number of registration fields and registration rate is not as pronounced as in other campaigns, indicating a higher willingness to leave more data on Calendars (we typically see a strong drop in registration rates with more required registration fields).
User behavior
Finally, a note on user behavior across the advent time. Generally, we see a drop in activity during December, indicating a certain level of saturation or fatigue in the players (between 10% to 40% drop from the first week to the last week of advent).
Looking at the weekdays, you should be aware that on Sundays, and on the extended weekend (Friday to Monday), we see higher calendar activity than during the middle of the week. This effect is especially pronounced on 4 door calendars, with approximately 30% higher activity on the extended weekend.
If you are interested in reading more about our Calendar you can check out these articles: