Onboarding as the first step in user monetization

In September, I had the opportunity to participate as a speaker at the WN CYPRUS'24 conference. This was my first experience preparing such a presentation, and I spent a long time searching for a way to present the material. A funny analogy came to my mind between puppies and the projects I have to work on. Thanks to this wonderful idea, the presentation was prepared. Don't be surprised by the excessive number of pictures and the unique way of presenting the material. Let's just relax a bit and talk about puppies)

Puppies are masters of manipulation. They have an excellent understanding of human psychology and know how to achieve their goals. They clearly understand the difference between their owners—loyal audiences, and guests—new audiences. Owners can be used to achieve long-term goals, while guests are unknown but represent a large user funnel. Most of them will, of course, drop off and never return, but some will definitely come back again. However, each of them can be converted into a source of profit. For this reason, puppies pay great attention to working with new audiences. This is what we will talk about.

Imagine you’ve come to a barbecue at a friend’s house. Beforehand, he told you he bought a puppy. You walk into the room, and there greets you an adorable puppy. In its eyes is a storm of emotions. A new friend has arrived, and it must befriend you! And play! And do this as quickly as possible and by any means available. Throughout the evening, this puppy will make every effort to get to know you, even if you’re not particularly interested.

Projects are very similar to this puppy. At the beginning, the user and the project don't know anything about each other. However, it is vital for the project to get played with. Both the project and the puppy need to make a good impression to befriend the user. This process is called onboarding.

The puppy will start the introduction with basic mechanics. It will bark cutely and wag its tail. This will establish the first contact with dog lovers. However, if the person loves cats, it won’t have much of an impact on them. But the guest was informed about the pet, so they don’t have any hatred towards dogs. Therefore, the puppy hasn’t lost all hope.

At the very beginning, the user gets acquainted with the core mechanics of the project: battles, parkour, shooting, and so on. Unfortunately, we cannot influence these mechanics in a way that will please everyone. If the user is not interested in the core mechanics of the project, we will likely lose them. However, if the core mechanics are acceptable to the user, we have every chance of becoming friends.

After the absence of open aggression during the initial introduction, the puppy moves on to the attack. It starts bringing you various toys to attract your attention. This could be a ball that you can throw, a rope for tug-of-war, or a squeaky chicken that makes funny sounds. The puppy understands that it can't stop at just the ball if it didn't interest you—it needs to try other options.

We cannot immediately know the values of each player, but we can create them ourselves. This is what meta-cycles are for. In well-configured meta-cycles, we provide players with a wide range of goals they can set for themselves. For some, it’s competitions and leaderboards; for others, it’s an interesting storyline or the opportunity to play together with friends. For some, it’s simply a way to spend time pleasantly and diversely. Through meta-onboarding, we establish goals for the player and explain how to achieve them. At the same time, we demonstrate the depth of the game, showing the user that the game won’t get boring quickly and that we have plenty to keep them engaged. This is how our meta team works on user retention.

The most interesting part begins when the puppy wins your affection. Having fun with a new friend is only half the battle. The next step is to wait for lunch and try to take advantage of the friendship. The goal is to snag a piece of bacon from your plate. An experienced puppy won’t try to shamelessly eat all the bacon from your plate; instead, it will politely and elegantly ask for one piece at a time. It won’t annoy you with excessive insistence but will occasionally step away to play with its toys within your sight. It’s impossible to refuse a puppy’s pleading gaze when you’ve just been having fun together. Experienced puppies are masters of psychology and manipulation.

When we see a puppy joyfully accepting a treat, our brains release happiness hormones. These hormones enhance the feeling of joy and satisfaction from having done something nice for another creature. The task of the monetization team is to ensure that players experience similar emotions when doing something enjoyable for themselves. For this, every 'piece of bacon' spent by the player must be justified in their eyes. Monetization onboarding prepares the emotional foundation. It establishes the habit that a payment leads to pleasant emotions. At the same time, monetization can create goals for the player. It is not just a tool for processing meta; it is an entity that generates goals and gameplay. This can include various marathons, battle passes, and other paid activities.

The main tool of monetization is offers. During onboarding, it’s important to explain this to the player and show them a starter pack. This can be a single offer or an entire system of offers. By this point, the player should have established goals and a basic understanding of how to achieve them. The offer will provide them with valuable entities that allow them to reach their immediate goals. And if, for some reason, there are no goals yet, it will capture their attention with vibrant visuals.

In one of our projects, we deliberately made soft currency the most valuable resource. It was the main blocker of player progress, and this was emphasized during onboarding. Sales of the starter offer showed that we had successfully accomplished this task. One day, while testing hypotheses, we conducted balance tests. For one of the groups in the A/B test, we completely removed the influence of soft currency on blocking progress. In this group, soft currency ceased to be critical for players. It became a secondary entity that adorned the gameplay. We expected a significant drop in soft currency sales, and that’s exactly what happened. However, due to the positioning established during onboarding that portrayed soft currency as a valuable resource, the drop in starter offer purchases was less than 20%. Players continued to buy the starter offer with a clear understanding that everything it contained was valuable and useful.

All our actions are influenced by emotions, and the strongest impact on emotions comes from first impressions. Let’s take a look at these wonderful guys. Which one would you try to pet? I personally wouldn’t want to touch the one on the left. However, he might be a great friend—affectionate and sweet. But we’ll find out about that later. At the start, we’ll try to avoid unnecessary contact with him. The reason for this is simply an unfortunate first impression.

The situation with offers is similar. You can present the player with a highly valuable offer at the start, but if it doesn’t make a good impression, it will be overlooked. In the first session, the user is absorbed in the gameplay, and everything happening around them becomes background noise. Because of this, they might miss an unassuming offer, even if it is incredibly beneficial for them. This problem is solved by high-quality visualization of the offers. When we transitioned from the standard visualization of the starter offer to a well-designed one, we were able to increase conversion to purchase by 15%. Try testing this in your project; it doesn’t require significant investment and yields clear results.

Let’s return to our puppies. Which of these puppies do you think has a better chance of getting a piece of bacon from your plate? Yes, there are puppies in both pictures. The first one is sitting next to you, gazing into your soul with hungry eyes. The second one is playing in the yard, waiting for you to come to it with a treat.

Pop-ups are an important component of offers. Not all users are willing to go and search for where to spend money in your project. Long searches for a useful offer kill the emotional aspect of the purchase, leaving only cold, pragmatic calculations. This negatively affects conversion rates. It is essential to minimize the user's path to the offer as much as possible.

By using these simple onboarding rules, you can achieve maximum player engagement in the monetization of the project. Players will establish goals tailored to themselves, and they will understand the game’s values that will help them achieve their set goals. In addition to all this, they will have a good emotional anchor from the purchasing experience.

But don't be mistaken that only bacon will bring happiness to the puppy. If there isn’t enough bacon on your plate, the puppy will happily switch to other treats. The puppy will try to get the most out of whatever is available.

According to Appsflyer data, the number of projects with hybrid monetization is gradually increasing. Advertising brings in good revenue. Some companies fear that players will react negatively to the introduction of advertising monetization in the project. Advertising can indeed cause negativity. The problem lies in the positioning that advertising provides users with content for free. This is not true—advertising is a payment, albeit a peculiar one, and it should be treated the same way as in-app purchases. Onboarding is also required for advertising.

There may be a situation where you can't share your food with the puppy. For an experienced puppy, this isn’t a problem. Thanks to your presence, the puppy can receive treats from the owner. The puppy just needs to start performing tricks. For this, the owner will definitely reward it with something tasty. And you will simply need to watch the process.

Rewarded videos require the same approach as in-app purchases. They are the same offers but aimed at a different audience. It is essential to prepare initial placements to immerse the player in advertising monetization. The conversion and user experience will be influenced by the reward at the placement. It should align with the values created for the player and help them achieve their goals. Additionally, it is important that players do not have to search for offers to watch advertisements. These offers should find the player at optimal moments. All of this will allow for tracking and adjusting the conversion of players into their first ad view, which can build a positive experience of interacting with advertising and engage players in further views.

Some puppies, as they grow up, develop unpleasant habits. They may chew on certain items or pieces of furniture. To avoid unpleasant incidents, owners usually warn guests about such characteristics of their pets. In this case, the guest will preemptively put away their shoes or belongings in a place that is out of reach of the puppy.

We need to explain to the player that intrusive advertising in the form of interstitials is unfortunately inevitable. However, the developers have made every effort to ensure that this advertising causes the least discomfort to the user. At the same time, it is essential to give the player the option to shield themselves from all types of intrusive ads. This can be done by disabling ads through a subscription or offer, or simply as a gift for making a purchase. The same rule applies as with starter offers—the player should not have to search for a place to disable intrusive ads. A timely pop-up will help us in this matter.

A few words about marketing. The behavior of users coming from organic sources and various marketing campaigns can vary significantly. When possible, it’s worth adapting the onboarding process for different audiences. Retargeting audiences also require onboarding, even though they are already familiar with the project. Avoid overloading them with an abundance of new information; focus on the basic values.

Perhaps if the puppy can learn to work strategically with guests, it will be able to get all the bacon in the world!

I would like to summarize some key points from my presentation.

Onboarding is extremely important for effective project monetization.

• Provide players with a variety of goals.
• Show them how to achieve these goals.
• Ensure bright emotions from monetization.
• Treat advertising as you would in-app purchases.
• Tailor your approach to the audience.
• Keep a close eye on the puppies.

This was my first experience with public speaking. I tried to cover the general aspects of onboarding in a light-hearted manner. In the future, I will aim to delve deeper into each point individually. I hope this article has brightened your mood.

And finally, I would like to express my immense gratitude to Nikita Frolov, who helped me generate these wonderful puppies for the presentation in a short time.