Quantitative Marketing

Low conversion in free-to-play is a feature, not a bug

An article excoriating the supposed plague that is free-to-play made the rounds recently, citing engagement statistics from Swrve's April report…

Avoiding Simpson’s paradox in data analysis

Simpson's paradox is a statistical phenomenon in which a population, comprised of different sub-populations (“classes”) with differing statistical properties, exhibits…

When does marketing become arbitrage?

Jon Radoff, the CEO of mobile gaming company Disruptor Beam, gave an excellent presentation at GDC 2014 about mobile gaming commerce…

Launching a free-to-play game: Ladder vs. Trampoline

In my recent GDC presentation, I introduced the terms “Ladder launch” and “Trampoline launch” within the context of globally launching…

Advertising dynamics in freemium apps

Freemium app developers are almost universally dogged by the question of whether ad placements should be included in their products.…

The click-through rate conundrum

Mobile performance marketing campaigns are often evaluated on the basis of Cost per Install (CPI), or the cost per app…

Bayesian Bandits testing for mobile apps

A/B testing, while a useful and popular tactic, suffers from a few fundamental shortcomings for mobile apps: Many mobile apps, especially…

Two Methods for Modeling LTV with a Spreadsheet

The following presentation was given on Wednesday, November 13th at the Slush Conference in Helsinki, Finland. Linked to within the…

December 2, 2013

Defining Viral Growth for Mobile Apps

Virality is a contentious topic within the field of mobile app development because it is almost impossible to precisely instrument:…

October 21, 2013

Visualizing the importance of retention in Freemium

A freemium product's retention curve is generally accepted to assume the shape of a negative exponential function, as below: A…

October 7, 2013