Comments on Bret on Social Games: Do Gaming Networks Work?: Reach and Engagement Num...

Regarding Joe's comment:I checked with Compete and...

2008-05-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

Regarding Joe's comment:
I checked with Compete and they do give a domain credit for embedded iframes.

So in fact, the number reflects every time the gamebar is displayed, NOT just when it's clicked through.

You make an excellent point about Compete only tracking US visits. Totally forgot that. Will update post accordingly.

Hey Bret - Very interesting topic but i think ther...

2008-05-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hey Bret -

Very interesting topic but i think there may be a fundamental flaw in your data set...

I'm pretty sure compete.com does not give a domain credit just for serving an embed like the zynga or SGN toolbar within a page on another domain. Therefore, i don't think pageviews user's spend playing games count in these stats at all.

Actually, i'm pretty sure the only traffic measured here are the CLICKS people make on the toolbars - which appear to briefly redirect the user through the subdomains you are looking at before sending them to the destination app. Presumably, clicks are only a small subset of total traffic.

Oh, and compete.com is US traffic only - whereas facebook actives are global - so there is that too.

Sorry to be a downer on a very interesting analysis.

Best,
Joe G

(Email me if you want - joe [at] flixster )

Thanks for the interesting post Bret!We've been ex...

2008-05-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the interesting post Bret!

We've been experimenting with both networks on our games. When we first tried the Zynga bar we were very excited because we got a lot of clicks in so we expected to see a lot of growth but during the whole month we implemented it our growth went flat. We discovered this was due to engagement, users were clicking in and clicking out and not spending any time in our actual game. We attribute much of this to the design of their (large) bar and believe it was confusing our users. Our theory is the users see their friends and our logo and probably expect to engage with our game when clicking on it but instead end up exploring the "game network".

We decided to switch to SGN because they offered the smaller bar that was presented to the user more like a link exchange. This performed better for us and our growth returned.

Since then Zynga has implemented their own small bar but we haven't been able to test it yet. SGN has also recently introduced a large bar.

Both offer competitive and engaging features. They are great at driving traffic, but caveat emptor to independent game developers. You will have to do a lot of experimenting to find the right implementation that works for you and your users or you might just become a pipeline of clicks.