7 killer tips to improve your game playables performance

For game developers and marketers, playable ads have become a crucial battleground for acquiring high-quality users.

But making a playable that truly converts is an art and a science.

We've dug deep into the data behind hundreds of playable campaigns to uncover the most critical performance levers.

Forget the guesswork: these 7 killer tips are drawn directly from user behavior and hard numbers, revealing the key moments where players drop off or become deeply engaged, and providing the basis for how to move the needle on your playable performance.

1) The initial 3 seconds already decide the success of your playable

Perhaps one of the most important things data teaches us is that the best playables drive the first real interaction after about 3 seconds.

As a median, 46.7% of users drop off in the first three seconds without interacting with the playable at all.

That being said, playables with a great first-time user experience are able to improve that figure by 45% and see a drop-off of only 28.6%.

The area of playable first time user experience (FTUE) clearly presents one of the highest opportunities to improve playable conversion rates. If players are confused, unclear, or indifferent about the playable that just popped up on their screen and drop off, you lose before you even start.

2) A great tutorial is everything

The median time until a user interacts for the first time is 8.76 seconds. A great tutorial can decrease the time to interaction by 40.7%.

That tutorial has to be super clear, enabling a user to understand the game and its first action in a few seconds.

Relying on a lot of text or trying to explain too much at once will overwhelm the player and kill your time to first interaction.

The longer the time to first interaction, the worse your drop-off curve will be.

One example that comes to mind from the data is playables that start without a clear tutorial but also with some action happening on the screen. 

For example, enemies start to move on the screen before the player interacts, which leads to confusion, "am I watching a video or am I supposed to do something?"

In one extreme case, we saw the average time to interaction in such a playable was 26 seconds! Users simply didn’t know they should interact until very late in the session (and, of course, that playable didn’t perform well).

3) The quality of the core loop can improve engagement time by 100%

The time people engage with playables is long, with a total play duration of 35-40 seconds on average, depending on the redirect rule and the playable level design. 

Infinite playables often show play time of a couple of minutes, and in some edge cases, even more.

The variation is big, though. The playables that are able to engage users for the longest are twice as good as the worst ones.

These are not people who are simply trying to exit the ad or close it in any other way.

These are people highly engaged within the core playable game loop, showing that the quality of the core game loop can drive a massive improvement in how long people play.

4) Imbalanced difficulty and lack of fun kill engagement

Not all play is equal, though. The data shows us that in certain cases, when the playable is too difficult or lacks a clear user motivation, we see drop-off spikes after 20-30 seconds. Users interacted quickly with the playable and started to play the core game loop, but they either:

→ couldn’t successfully complete the loop

→ didn’t enjoy it 

In one example of a word puzzle, users showed a lot of interest, engaged quickly, and started playing. 

The issue was that the puzzles were too difficult! Looking at user behavior, it was clear that a very large percentage of users were not able to make successful word completions, which correlated with a strong drop-off after trying a few times.

5) Redirect rules at the wrong time miss out on emotional engineering

Building on the previous example, playables come with strict redirect rules: the moment users get the app store pop-up that asks them to download the game.

If this moment is not aligned with when users are at peak emotion and anticipation, it can severely impact conversion rates, as we saw with the previous point where the drop-off rates peaked at 20-30 seconds after users experienced a frustrating time.

On the contrary, data shows us that when players are immersed in a fun core game loop, they often close the store page and go back to playing the game until the end, where they have to go to the store or close the ad.

You should think about each playable as its own level, plan redirect rules according to the emotional player journey, and of course, test your hypotheses to evaluate what works better.

6) Tutorial isn’t just for the first few seconds, guide players clearly through progression loops as well

We saw the impact a great core loop can have, but without some sort of progression, it’s going to be broken.

Progression must be embedded into the core game loop experience itself in a way that clearly shows the player how they progress.

Another data-driven example here comes from a playable ad that added a progression loop of earning coins and using these coins to upgrade the character.

There were three upgrades, visible from the first screen, but they had unclear icons, meaning users didn’t really know what they were doing. No clear guidance appeared to guide a user to buy an upgrade once they earned enough coins.

At the same time, the core loop itself was perfectly fine, so data showed that 63.4% of players, even though they earned enough coins, didn’t buy any upgrades. They simply continued with the core game loop, got bored, and dropped off.

7) Test diverse playables

From this initial look at more than 3.5 million sessions, we can draw a conclusion. 

To win with playables the best teams continuously explore a wide range of concepts (different mechanics, levels, themes, etc.) and iterate quickly, testing hypotheses that relate to the core experience itself: 

• Improving the tutorial efficiency and clarity 
• Guiding players through the core loop and testing how satisfying the play is 
• Adjusting and refining the core loop to make it more fun 
• Optimizing progression mechanisms to improve fun and improve play duration 

This is extremely different from throwing out playables from templates and seeing what sticks. It's systematic exploration. 

Wrapping Up

We will continue to study and analyze playables and the best ways to use them to win in UA, find winning creatives that drive most of the spend and performance. 

One of the missing pieces in this puzzle of trying to find more winning creatives for your UA goes through a deep understanding of how players engage with winning playables, and what separates the good ones from those that never catch a significant share of spend. 

Stay tuned as we walk this journey with you while you build a UA creative winning machine.