There are four essential steps on how to track your Playable campaigns to boost success and to consider before you launch your campaign; reflecting on what you want to achieve with your campaign, identifying your goals, setting KPIs to measure success, and enabling tracking on your campaigns using tools and integrations available on the Playable platform.
Whether you're a marketer aiming to create gamified campaigns for the first time or seeking to optimize your existing strategy, these elements will help you to achieve your goals effectively.
1. Reflect on what you are trying to achieve
Before starting a gamified campaign you should consider where in the customer journey you are meeting your audience with this campaign. Accordingly, what next action are you trying to unlock? Are you meeting them at the top funnel and seeking email permissions? Are you aiming to drive a purchase? A more efficient repeat purchase? Maybe you are launching a new product line and need to generate awareness around the product’s USPs.
The opportunities with playable campaigns are endless and that can sometimes be a bit confusing as we often see customers wanting to achieve too many things in a single campaign. At Playable, we say that a gamified campaign should help unlock the next step in the customer journey. That’s where your focus should be.
2. Identify your goals
With the above in mind, it is evident that before you start building a campaign, you must determine what action you are aiming at driving. This will help you determine what the main goal of your campaign is. Sometimes, you might have one or two slightly less-of-a-priority goals. Ensure you identify these goals and can measure all of these with the right KPIs.
For example, if you want to increase sales with your campaigns, a great SMART goal could be to reach X amount in direct sales before the end of the campaign.
3. Set KPIS
Depending on your goal(s), there are different KPIs that you could keep monitoring. Some essential KPIs for evaluating gamification campaigns might include the number of users engaged with the game, the time spent on the game, the number of conversions or sales, and the increase in brand awareness. These KPIs help to determine the effectiveness of the game and can provide insights into how to improve your gamification campaign to achieve better results.
Here are a few interesting KPIs you can use:
Number of discount codes redeemed
One KPI you can use to measure the success of your gamified campaigns is the number of discount codes that were redeemed from your campaigns. If you want to use this metric, you need to ensure that the discount codes you are using are unique to your campaign. Hence, if they are redeemed, you know it’s directly linked to the campaign and not from other promotional activities.
The redemption rate
You can also track the redemption rate (total vouchers handed out / redeemed vouchers) and compare this to your other promotional activities to see if your playable campaign is working better or worse than the others. Keep in mind that our experience shows that if a customer wins a voucher, the redemption rate is significantly higher than if they are given a voucher. Thus, we always expect playable campaigns to work better than regular campaigns giving discount codes.
Other KPIs worth considering
Using discount codes to measure the success of a campaign is a first-level method of analyzing its effectiveness. Therefore, you should dig deeper into the data if you want to learn more about the overall effectiveness of your campaign.
These are a few other KPIs that can prove helpful:
basket size compared to site average
time to purchase compared to average journeys (repurchase, first purchase)
effectiveness of the campaign on different channels (if you are promoting on owned and paid media for example)
4. Enable tracking on your campaign
Data is of the utmost importance when tracking the success of your playable campaigns. However, data collection is also vital for building up customer intelligence, collecting leads, and so on.
That is why at Playable we always recommend to implement all tracking capabilities available in the gamification platform. These options are listed below:
UTM tracking (traffic going in and out of the campaign)
If you can implement UTM on the traffic pulling people to the game, Playable will display this under “UTM (top 10)” statistics in the platform. This helps you to see the most effective promotional channels you have and which ones need improvement.
You can also set a generic/global setting to ensure that UTM tracking is placed on all buttons linking out of the game, which will help you evaluate the “nudging” after the game. By adding UTM parameters to external links you can track Playable as the traffic source.
Google Tag Manager
Adding Google Tag Manager to your campaigns allows you to track all activity within the campaign and work with this during and after the campaign. It is extremely powerful to have this data if you wish to have a full overview of your customer journey, your campaign impacts and help with attribution on your campaigns. You get data to your analytics account by adding Google Tag Manager in the platform.
Facebook pixel integration
The Facebook pixel integration is very relevant if you use Metas platforms to promote your gamified campaigns and in targeting your audience. Adding the Facebook pixel will allow you to better build custom audiences as well as do specific retargeting after the game. This is very powerful if Meta is a big part of your marketing mix and will help you be more effective.
You can add Facebook pixel on the campaign level, if for example you wish to retarget all winners of a game or you can add it globally if you “simply” need to know who has entered the campaign. You can track using the Facebook pixel by adding it to your campaign.
Need help setting up your tracking strategy?
At Playable, we are aware of the potential of gamified campaigns to collect pertinent data and help you build a thorough understanding of your audience/segments. Our experience spans across different industries, including financial services, B2B, ecommerce, retail, and sports, where we have helped clients at every stage of the customer journey.
We are eager to explore how we can support you and are available to discuss your requirements anytime. Please feel free to contact us.