With nearly 17 million users, CricHeroes is the world’s largest cricket network. Originally a scorekeeping app for grassroots cricketers, it has evolved into a social sports network relying on performance analytics to improve how members play, watch, and understand cricket.

With CricHeroes, you can do the following:

• Score, analyze, and discuss cricket matches
• Receive detailed insights to improve individual player and team performance
• Find teams to join, tournaments, grounds, umpires, and more
• Register and manage your own tournaments

Smartlook features used

Session Recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of user behavior on your website. Replay sessions and segment recordings to focus on important user groups.

Events

Track all clicks and interactions across your website. Identify the most crucial events and browse session recordings to explore user interactions in-depth.rn

CricHeroes was looking for precise data regarding how their app is used so they can help improve user engagement and retention rates

CricHeroes wanted to continually improve their app’s features to grow their user base and ensure their customers were getting the best experience possible. The problem was they didn’t have access to data that allowed them to visualize how the user journey unfolded, including where users misclicked and got stuck. Without this data, CricHeroes couldn’t make informed decisions about how to upgrade their app’s features or develop new ones. 

To solve the problem, CricHeroes implemented a behavior analytics tool to generate the data and insights they needed. Specifically, they wanted:

• A step-by-step understanding of how people use their app
• To encourage behavior linked to higher user engagement and retention
• Identify points where users stop engaging and mitigate them
• Identify points of strong user engagement and amplify them

“If we can give users the value they are searching for in week one, they’re more likely to keep using the app. So, although onboarding is very important, it’s difficult as we have different user personas. So we needed to know which activities users were doing right after signing up. Based on that, we can improve our onboarding to retain more users.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

Smartlook is a flexible, affordable way for CricHeroes to analyze user behavior

CricHeroes chose Smartlook as it includes the behavior analytics features they wanted at a competitive price. 

Once Smartlook was implemented, the CricHeroes team was immediately able to access and explore insights into the user journey.  

CricHeroes improves and streamlines the user experience with data and insights from Smartlook

CricHeroes’ product growth team uses session recordings and events to streamline and improve the user journey. Now they have access to precise, real-life data regarding how users interact with their app. With this, they can adjust existing features and develop new ones to optimize the user experience. 

This includes improving the onboarding experience, removing unnecessary features, and encouraging user behavior (such as direct messaging) which leads to stronger engagement and retention. 

Boosting direct messaging by 11% by giving relevant nudges

Direct messaging is one of the app’s core engagement features. CricHeroes uses automated nudging to encourage users to exchange messages with one another. 

By analyzing session recordings, they successfully identified new points along the user journey where users are likely to contact other users. After adding extra nudges at these points, users sent 11% more messages.

Improving the onboarding experience to optimize user retention 

Now, CricHeroes is no longer in the dark about what users do after signing up. By pulling up data on specific events — such as viewing scorecards, creating teams, and visiting leaderboards — the CricHeroes team can view all relevant session recordings to identify and analyze behavior patterns. 

Seeing what users do before and after a specific event helps CricHeroes understand what users are looking for, what makes them stick around, and what turns them away. These insights enable CricHeroes to adjust their features and workflows to provide a smoother, more enjoyable user onboarding experience and maximize the likelihood that users will continue coming back.

Streamlining the user interface by removing unnecessary or unpopular features

Using Smartlook’s session recordings, the CricHeroes team realized that users rarely responded to pop-ups encouraging them to check their achievements. Instead, users tended to view their achievements after prompts from notifications. To resolve the problem, CricHeroes simply removed the pop-ups.

Analyzing session recordings for specific workflows helps the CricHeroes team identify and mitigate the obstacles that led some users to drop off early. For example, users can challenge other teams to matches. Before, users were required to share their contact information with opposing teams. But once CricHeroes realized this requirement was causing some users to abandon the challenge, they changed it.

Resolving customer queries faster using Smartlook

CricHeroes’ customer support team uses Smartlook to help them resolve customer queries faster. By filtering session recordings to search for user IDs, the team can see what occurred when a specific person was using the app and quickly determine how to resolve the underlying issue.

Next steps for CricHeroes and Smartlook

The CricHeroes team is excited to continue updating and developing new app features based on insights gained from Smartlook. Next, they plan to improve nudges that encourage paid users to repeat purchases. They’re also exploring how insights from Smartlook can help their sales team optimize their landing pages and sales funnel.

“Using Smartlook really makes my work easier. It’s informative, insightful, easy to use, and features a nice user interface. Even though there’s a lot of information, I don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s very easy for me to view whatever I want. And there are so many features to help me work collaboratively with colleagues — sharing sessions, adding notes, saving a particular segment, and revisiting it.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

The post How user journey insights helped CricHeroes improve their user engagement and retention rates appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Rooted in Istanbul and Tallinn, Vertigo Games is a small game development company that aims BIG. Their goal is to develop and self-publish first-person shooter (FPS) games with the best gaming experience and high quality production values.

Currently, they work on Critical Strike – an FPS game with fast-paced battles that entertain:

• 250k daily active users (DAU),
• 3M monthly active users (MAU).

They want to provide their users with the best gaming experience possible, polished graphics, and bug-free gameplay.

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Funnels

Funnels let you analyze website user behavior step- by-step. Watch session recordings of each funnel step to discover why users drop off.

Heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

Events

Track every click or interaction on your website. Identify which events are the most crucial and browse session recordings to explore interactions in-depth

Vertigo Games wants to improve their game development process

These days, gamers want a smooth mobile gaming experience. Errors, bugs, or crashes take players away from their devices and leave a bad impression on the game. Also, the chance a player will reach for the game again is rather low.

Vertigo Games know all this and the fact that game players are very demanding customers. But at the beginning of the development of Critical Strike, the product and development team didn’t know:

• How many gamers will complete the full onboarding guide
• If players complete the game’s missions according to the initial design
• What are the exact paths that lead to a bug and how to reproduce the issue?

Vertigo didn’t have any mobile analytics tool in place, so in case of bug detection they were driven by guesswork and assumptions. A less-than-ideal situation. 

As a result, the development process was time-consuming and didn’t lead to any valuable discoveries. 

“Before Smartlook, we couldn’t find the reasons for the drops occurring in various parts of the funnels in our game. In order to find a solution when we had a high drop rate, we were trying to experience it ourselves and to determine the source of the error in the specified place, which caused a great waste of time.”

Sinem Bulut Selduz

Game analyst at Vertigo Games

Soon, Sinem and Hazal from the Quality Assurance team, realized they needed to invest in a mobile analytics tool that could help them dissect gamers’ behavior.

With user behavior analytics, they would know how many gamers complete the onboarding guides, what are the bug sources, and at what point players encounter those problems.

Also, Vertigo Games believed that a behavior analytics tool would help them improve their KPIs – gamers’ engagement, retention, and in-app monetization. 

Smartlook adds an analytics layer to the Critical Strike mobile game

After doing some thorough research, Vertigo Games decided to invest in Smartlook. The analytics tool lets them analyze Critical Strike and all in-app user behaviors.  Setting up Smartlook was fast, so the Product and QA teams started gathering insights in no time at all. 

Vertigo Games reduced the number of bugs and provided their users with a swift mobile gaming experience 

Smartlook works in the background, so it doesn’t affect the gameplay or cause FPS issues. 

Vertigo Games uses screen recordings, event-based funnels, and heatmaps to get to know the full gamer journey and gamers’ experience. They literally can analyze their product through the end users’ eyes, with amazing results. 

How do screen recordings help Vertigo Games?

Screen recordings serve the QA team to monitor Critical Strike for any bugs. 

Also, when there is a complaint from a certain player, the team can easily check the recorded screens of that player. It lets them detect the problem, and it’s easy to reproduce the issue step-by-step and apply fixes.

The Product team also watches players’ screen recordings. They are most interested in the recordings of new players – they check whether a gamer completes the onboarding guides. 

Also, they verify if gamers get a great first impression of the game. It’s important, as the better the gamer experience, the higher the number of daily and monthly active users will be. 

But Vertigo uses other Smartlook features too.

How do heatmaps help Vertigo Games?

Heatmaps help the Product team view the gaming experience through the gamers’ eyes and understand where gamers click the most often. This knowledge helps develop a game that’s fully optimized for its users.

How do funnel analytics help Vertigo Games?

The most prominent feature for Vertigo Games is the 30- and 60-step funnel based on different events – tutorial, game start, game end, show offer, buy funnel, upgrade popups, etc. Both the QA team and Product team use them to verify the functionality and gamer experience throughout the game. 

As there is no limit in the number of steps in each funnel, the teams can adjust the funnel length when they add new missions to the game. 

Whenever the QA team sees a high drop-off in one step of the funnel, they can immediately scrutinize the problem. 

With Smartlook, Vertigo Games saves 10-12 hours of their development time

Thanks to helpful insights from Smartlook, Vertigo Games can analyze game players’ behaviors and spot any problems that cause drop-offs in the Critical Strike funnels. 

These insights help them design the whole game according to their game players’ needs and expectations. 

But the best success indicator comes with numerical values. And here, Vertigo Games can be proud of their accomplishments. In general, with Smartlook insights, they found an average of 10 bugs and saved 10 to 12 hours of their development time for each release. 

“We chose Smartlook since it provides us with every single data that we could ever ask for. The platform offers many advanced features. For example, thanks to your API, we can easily access and monitor in-game behaviors. And Smartlook’s stable SDK in terms of development are real time-savers. We can also recommend your customer service – whenever we faced a problem, someone from support helped us a lot.”

Hazal Bulut

Quality assurance tester at Vertigo Games

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post Vertigo Games uses Smartlook to improve the mobile game development appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

You can still encounter difficulties explaining problems.

Problems that you can only guess as to why they’re happening.

That’s why we talked to award-winning studio Madfinger Games about the problems they face and how Smartlook has helped solve them. They develop their games in the Unity engine and use Smartlook to record players’ screens.

“There’s this situation in Shadowgun Legends when the player comes back to the world hub, and we expect them to go get a reward,” says Miroslav Ondrus, a CTO in Madfinger Games.

“But there’s 20 seconds where we simply don’t know what’s happening. They have finished a mission, come back, but don’t go get the reward,” explains Ondrus.

So then what?

Speculation. Sometimes the team could only guess why something was happening.

They would brainstorm possible reasons and perhaps use the customer care team to get in touch with users who behaved in unexpected ways. But not every player would be willing to talk about it. “It was fairly laborious to deal with those situations,” adds Ondrus.

Ondrus and his team would spend a lot of time thinking about the possible causes of the problem. But they wouldn’t be sure if they had found it and would have to confirm it in various ways.

How is Smartlook going to help Madfinger create better games?

“When we can’t see the problem right away, we have to spend a lot more time on it,” says Ondrus about why they started using Smartlook.

With screen recordings, you’re no longer in the dark. No longer having to speculate about blind spots.

Which left us wondering… does Ondrus know what events they are going to track?

“No. That’s the cool thing about Smartlook — we often have no idea what we’re going to need. And Smartlook captures everything for us. We can always set up an event later and start focusing on the problem when it pops up.“

People from Madfinger need to know how players interact with their game.

They need to understand where unexpected user behavior comes from. “Videos from Smartlook are another step forward for our analytics team,” says Ondrus.

But he also expects other people to use it. “Definitely the game director uses it, I use it because I am really curious, and probably our level designers”. They can watch if people complete a mission in a way they had originally anticipated. “I am quite excited about it, to be honest.”

Did the Madfinger team have any worries or concerns?

Ondrus mentions that their games are always cutting edge. “We’ll put most of a mobile’s resources to good use. So we were afraid that Smartlook might put too much additional strain on players’ phones.”

They decided to control the tool from the Cloud to choose what devices to run it on.

“We’re going to use it on high-end devices first, and we can always turn it off,” explains Ondrus. The plan is to slowly start using it on older phones, as well.

There were two more things that were essential for people at Madfinger.

They needed control over the recording bit rate. And information about how video uploads work.

Smartlook actually allows you to choose the screen recording quality yourself. You decide on the size of the file and associated FPS rates, and it uploads recordings only when a phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.

It works in the background. In a non-invasive way to make sure that no users are annoyed. It doesn’t cause FPS issues, doesn’t drain battery, and doesn’t exhaust cellular data.

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How this award-winning studio uses Smartlook to make its games better appeared first on Smartlook Blog.