Turf Analysis

How do you decide which game features to include in your communication strategy? Well, I’m a huge Baseball fan so you sort it out on the TURF of course.

Inevitably every time I ask a dev team to tell me about their game, I get a laundry list of features. Of course, they love the game they are making and could not imagine other people not wanting to hear all about it. But when it comes to having the right message at the right time to convert that potential player into buying or installing you only have a short amount of time to convince them and thus only a couple of the features you can communicate.

The TURF at Dodger Stadium (my favorite team) is immaculate! Meticulously manicured and cared for. The grounds crew have painstakingly worked to keep that “surface-layer” of the field so beautiful it’s hard to take your eyes off it even though there is so much more beyond that first couple of inches of grass.

Yes, your game is deep and can satisfy players of multiple levels but just like the TURF at Dodger stadium we marketers (your grounds-crew) need to manicure it and focus on that “surface-layer” to maximize player conversion. Well maybe that analogy didn’t work exactly how I wanted it to.  

TURF in this instance stands for = TOTAL UNDUPLICATED REACH and FREQUENCY analysis. It is the potential impact that determines the right combination of game features communicated in a marketing message to maximize a player action (conversion). It simply tests a list of features to show how combinations of each feature lift purchase/install percentage. People can only take in so much information about your game before there is diminishing returns, so the TURF study usually provides the 2-4 most important messages to combine in your marketing to maximize results.

This quantitative analysis helps provide focus to your marketing creative teams when determining image and copy for your ads. It also helps provide non-biased data to share with the development team to help them understand what is most important to communicate about their game to maximize conversion.

Below you will see an example of a TURF study my team did for a Mobile game that never came out of soft launch based on the Avatar license. From that analysis we had 4 features we could test in our UA to maximize conversion. This was immensely important to our soft launch UA campaign and greatly reduced our CPI in key territories.