How DoubleDown Bet Big on Analytics—and Got Results

DoubleDown Interactive’s newest offering, DoubleDown Fort Knox, offers users an immersive virtual casino experience complete with top slot machines from Vegas. To make sure those users keep playing, the social casino maker relies on Amplitude for key data.

Indeed, DoubleDown has already seen results, with significant improvements in engagement, retention, and monetization.

To ensure new users were activated as quickly as possible, DoubleDown studied the new user experience leveraging Amplitude’s Pathfinder and Funnel analyses. What they found was surprising: some of the new features the app had introduced to drive engagement and retention were actually slowing players down.

“Amplitude was very helpful in seeing that there was a very long time in between the point where players installed the app and when they got activated,’” said Riley Pannuk, also a product manager at DoubleDown. “We took action immediately to reduce the amount of time those features took them to navigate.” The result? DoubleDown was able to get those users to reduce the time it took to activate users by 32% and also increased activation by 6%.

DoubleDown also tested an in-app promo for new users. The campaign’s goal was to drive long-term retention. DoubleDown team saw some initial wins with Amplitude Sessions and Event Segmentation – their biggest boosts were in session length and engagement. The experiment drove a 9% improvement in session length over a control group and an increase of 10% in spins per player, driving up core engagement metrics that are leading indicators of long term retention.

Of course, DoubleDown wanted to make sure those new users were frequent players. To gauge the impact of a new daily challenge feature, DoubleDown ran an A/B test, using Amplitude Stickiness charts to measure the feature’s effectiveness as a betting incentive.

“We saw significant active day improvements for players in the test group,” Riley said, equaling an additional session per day or a boost in stickiness of 11%. “With Amplitude, we’re able to see and measure how much the players engage with the game, whether or not the challenge is appropriate for them, and if the challenges are priced too sensitively for their intended users,” he observed.

DoubleDown also credits Amplitude with important user insights that have led to new targeted campaigns. “We had been looking at a simplistic model of nonpayers vs. payers vs. VIPs, but thanks to Amplitude’s LTV charts we were able to isolate subscribers into their own segment,” Riley said.

Using Amplitude Cohorts, Riley said, his team found that 48% of DoubleDown subscribers were ‘subscribers without credits’ – players whose only purchase was the in-game subscription for our app, a premium service which unlocks an additional feature. Riley and his team tested targeted offers for this subscriber without credits segment designed to convert them to “subscribers with credits” – subscribers that also gain credits in the app. The results were impressive, boosting the conversion rate by nearly 30%.

Best of all, said Keith and Riley, Amplitude has made this sort of critically important data immediately accessible, doing away with the need for the business intelligence analysts the company once relied on by offering anyone a direct view into data. The result is a company that’s more efficient–Amplitude has cut the time it takes to receive query results from two weeks to as little as 30 seconds–and more responsive. It’s a change felt throughout DoubleDown, from product to customer support, which homes in on a user’s profile as soon as he or she contacts the team.