Results 2020: Vera Karpova from devtodev about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2020 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Vera Karpova, the product manager devtodev.

Vera KarpovaHow did 2020 go for the company/product?

Vera: Despite everything that happened in the world in 2020, the year turned out to be very successful for the company. The gaming industry continued to flourish. This has had a positive impact in terms of new contacts, cooperation and the growth of the team itself.

As for the platform, this year we focused on adding flexibility to existing reports. One of our tasks was to make sure that a wider range of tasks were solved with the help of reports. We have added a variety of filtering capabilities, new types of display, and other additional functions.

Our priority was, firstly, to provide an exhaustive set of ready-made reports for young companies that do not have an analyst on staff; secondly, to give additional tools to those who want to delve into data analysis. We plan to work in this direction next year as well.

We also plan to launch a completely new product in the near future — a CRM system that will link the analytical platform with our outsourcing of technical support for users in games and applications. With the help of the new CRM, customers will be able to interact directly with each of the users individually.

Our educational activities deserve special attention. We continue to contribute to the development of game development. This year we have released 7 new courses that covered completely different stages of working with the product: from optimizing the application page in the app stores to conducting A/B tests and using Live Ops.

In addition, this year we have made absolutely all courses free, so now everyone can get access to lectures by experts of the gaming market.

By the way, this year the number of our students (those who attended our courses) has reached the mark of 25 thousand people. This is a good confirmation of the demand for this kind of information.

What new trends in your niche do you consider worthy of attention?

Faith: If we talk about analytics in general, the interest was definitely attracted by the release of iOS 14 and all the restrictions associated with it.

It is curious how they will affect the analytics of purchased traffic in the near future, because this is not the first change related to the confidentiality of user data.

I note that initially, when analytics was born, we went from absolute and generalized metrics to browser-based and cohort analysis. Now, it turns out, we are returning to depersonalized information.

For our part, we took into account the specifics of obtaining advertising identifiers in iOS 14 and changed the way they are stored to determine that the user is not new after reinstalling the application.

I also want to note the growing interest in Machine Learning (hereinafter ML), a rather promising direction that can reduce marketing costs and work effectively with users, for several years.

The bottom line is that standard monitoring tools are no longer enough today. I want to react faster to user behavior and act more accurately in conditions that are still unknown exactly, as well as react to events that have not yet occurred. ML is already helping with this.

Large companies have recently reached a high level in working with traditional analytical methods: they have learned to segment the audience coolly, work with each segment, promptly monitor and respond to any changes in their behavior.

devtodev was no exception. This year we have developed a test version of the model using Machine Learning methods to predict Lifetime Value for various periods. Now we are gradually launching it for our customers.

What new trends in the gaming market as a whole would you note?

Faith: Perhaps the pandemic set the trends this year. Quarantines and lockdowns have greatly influenced the growth of interest in the games. They now have a more significant role in people’s lives, and they take up more and more time. Downloads have increased, and with them the active audience and its retention.

There is, as you can see, a grateful situation for the use of advertising monetization. It is not surprising that the popularity of advertising mediation services has grown at the same time. The trend is not that completely new, but it takes place.

What will be the bet on when developing the company/product in 2021?

Faith: As I mentioned earlier, we are focused on developing report customization tools. We plan to stick to this direction in the future.

This is due to the fact that the culture of working with data is growing in gaming companies today. Many people try to be data-oriented, pay great attention to analytics and building processes around it. In addition, the level of specialists in this field is growing. Here I mean both the growth of general qualifications, and the growth of experience in working with various tools, and the emergence of an increasing number of specialists with good analytical and mathematical bases, as well as personnel who are able to draw correct conclusions and offer interesting hypotheses.

Thanks to this, working with analytics often begins to go beyond the same reports, becomes somewhat creative. And the tool should not limit this creative process. Therefore, we strive to give our users the freedom to work with the collected data. We plan to add tools that will allow us to realize the desired freedom.

We have plans for next year for an SQL query editor that will allow us to access the data collected in devtodev without resorting to downloading them, as well as a graphical editor that will allow us to visualize the results. Serious improvements are also planned in working with custom dashboards and custom events.

Another area that is also under development is various Live Ops tools: trigger push notifications, mechanisms for creating offers based on remote confings. Together, they will allow you to conduct experiments faster and improve the gaming experience of users with less time and money.