Supercharging discoverability with Stadia (Google Games Dev Summit)

[Music] hello thanks for joining me today as I talk about supercharged and discoverability with stadia my name is barely product manager on Stadium and I'll be co-presenting with just your Burma law engineering video see you supercharged discover Billy so I want to start with a quick definition of what I think's discoverability is discoverability is the degree to which content can be found in an information system by people who would get value from it so what happens when you can't measure discoverability let's take an example where you have three users that you're trying to reach and let's say the top user the red user is the one that would actually get value for your content so let's say you have two messages an airplane base one a road side base one and you want to understand which of these two messages is actually the one that's in and resonate with that red user you also don't even know if either message is necessary maybe that red user would have found your content regardless so it quickly becomes apparent that without the ability to measure the efficacy of your discoverability efforts it's really hard to know what to do next and that's what this talk is about is about enabling developers and publishers to maximize this credibility this talk will be split into two parts I'll give a quick overview and background the what and why's of discoverability and how stevia helps and then the second part Shishir we'll go over a deep dive onto how this actually looks working the state so let start with background earlier we said that discoverability is that the degree to which content can be found in an information system by people who would get value from some of those information systems are listed here for example search or digital print different conversations these are all places where users can learn about content with all of these options to get your message out there discoverability should really be easy turns out there are challenges and the challenges in three parts the first is really just knowing which channels work to get to the users that you want so where are those users are they on YouTube are they looking things up on search and the second is once you get those content into your ecosystems how did you even know how they arrived there to start with how do you know which channels contain the most users that you actually want to experience your content and the last challenge is even if you could answer those first two questions being able to do so in a timely fashion so that you can optimize and figure out which discoverability is really work for your media efforts that's also really challenging so hi I switch over to going over some quick research as we were digging into this area we asked where gamers going to learn about games and we also asked what specifically are they looking for so I want to share some of those results we found that 44% of gamers are using video interviews to discover new Triple A games we also found that when researching games YouTube is the single most popular platform with gamers spending 22 percent of their time researching for content after we're gamers go when they want to learn about gameplay 95% of gamers surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed that YouTube was a good place to discover new content Nicole of course isn't too over-index on YouTube it just happens to be the video channel that we have the most access to in terms of research what we really want is for publishers and developers to find out which channels are best for discovery of their content for themselves and it's not just something we want in a separate study we actually asked a lot of our partners what feature we should be building to help them with their discoverability efforts and we heard really clearly two things the first is they all want these ability to experiment with messages and which messages work best and the second thing is they really want the ability to understand once users end up engaging with their content how they got there so going back to the three-part challenge with stadia we're really trying to deliver a full cycle time discovery technicians that matter and to do it in days the Sun please so let's go through an actual concrete scenario let's say you built a game and you want to make sure gamers who enjoy a chance to engage so you have a hypothesis here and maybe it says people who search thriller RPG and game are more likely to be interested in and engage with your content than otherwise and so maybe you have campaign 8 which is targeting users who search for these terms and maybe you have campaign B which is targeting users who are on a social media site who might be it's those two veterans so you want to be able to test your hypothesis as a developer and publisher on stadia we think we can not there are three key parts to this first as Phil Harrison promised earlier this year we're going to be pulling down barriers to accessing the platform and this is the first ingredient the second ingredient is you'll want a hypothesis and an ad channel of your choice to run your tests on and the third is you'll need stadia snuke attribution reports if you're coming soon once we have these three ingredients first gamers smear campaign messaging anywhere on the Internet that message has a special call to action this is a link that will land the user to a tailored gamer experience so let's say the the gamer hasn't purchased the game yet the tailor experience of this gamer would experience is that okay landed onto a storm page where they can actually purchase the game and then after purchasing the user complaining anywhere because the messaging happens with stay dealings and because gamers always end up on stadia the platform you'll always be able to fully understand which messages work and how gamers talk to your game so in short to maximize discoverability stadia will enable you to experiment with your messages and also really understand the actions that users are taking and improve your further about each methods with that I will hand it over to Josh shear to dive into the actual mechanics of how it would work for you as a CTO developer or publisher Thank You Betty my name is Shivan Mila and an engineering meal in the stereo team so as Betty said this section is going to do a deep dive into how this would work for you the most important prerequisite right now is that you have to be a stadia developer or publisher once you become a senior developer or publisher an organization is created for you instead yet you'll be able to log in to the partner portal and download the stereo SDK which will enable you to develop on your local machine and test on stereo instances when you're ready to publish you will want to think through your discoverability strategy since you will have awesome discoverability you will have happy and engaged users let's take a deep dive into the mechanics of supercharging discoverability and a high level you will want to go through these steps step one it's always a good idea to ponder over and plan out a question before seeking answers your questions could be about what you should be doing next what audiences work matter what messaging to use or what call to action to take step 2 you need to set up your ad campaigns accordingly you will need a link for each campaign you're setting up step 3 set up your ad campaign with the corresponding campaign links this system is not necessarily perhaps you could also just set up links from different parts of your website or blog to stadia and see how they perform it's just a link you need to make it visible somewhere people click on it and come to your store on Stadium the Internet's your store you get the picture step 4 run the campaign make those links visible let there be clicks step 5 analyze the results you are now getting results in days step 6 optimize discovery we'll walk to an example to illustrate these steps next so plan the question this example is a bit more involved then and it wants to show how experimentation can impact both what you message as publishers and what you design as developers let's say you have a list of users of your game jump in and your goal is to boost reengagement you've done two things you've created a new event and a new set of armor you can ask two questions the first is where is the best place for existing users to discover your content the second is what kind of content is most effective at getting users to re-engage we can set up a two by two experiment like the one shown here wearing the content type Yarbrough versus new event and the messaging channel YouTube and game news sites at the same time now that you have a plan for what questions you want to ask and how to answer them let's go through what the setup looks like you will want to get the campaign links from the stadia partner portal the stadia partner portal is a website where stated developers and publishers manage the content that they're developing prostate you can create four links and label them as needed in this example we can label them as news Plus armor news plus event YouTube plus armor and YouTube plus events you go to your ad platform and set up your ads when you set up your ads you will use the corresponding link that that was generated on Cydia partner portal in this example we're trying to set up a campaign on YouTube for new armor so we're using that link you will go through similar setup for each of the three campaigns that you want to run and leverage each of the remaining three stereo mix next we want to run the campaigns we have set up so you go to your ad platform and run the campaign and wait for users to click on the ads go to Australia and engage with your content so now comes the interesting part we can start analyzing the results so you go to stallion and get daily attribution reports for the time range you care about on the stadia partner portal you can download different types of reports one of these is an attribution return the report will tell you how many purchases you have for each of the four campaign you ran in this example we see that the reports are aggregated on a daily basis you see a count of purchases and the campaign aims they're attributed next you aggregate and join with information you get from other sources your ad site in this case and see in this example you get a count of impressions from your ad platform you can use the bias and impressions to figure out the conversion rate you can now analyze this and get insights into what you care about if you care more about bias per dollar you can compute that too in this example we see that YouTube disabled compelling channel to re-engage your users new events are more compelling to users we can also see the users on YouTube are markedly more compared to new events and key news sites now you can optimize you can use this information to optimize what you do next in your game development as well as your next messaging strategy for starters you can use the findings to generate new questions maybe you want to run a few more experiments to confirm the when events are really much better at getting reengagement than armor if you find it's actually a registrants repeatable strict signal maybe you will end up shifting your development strategy and do more of events than Armour similarly on the messaging side maybe you confirm that YouTube is actually more effective place to help users to discover your content or maybe you find the opposite the power is in your hands to find out and to change your messaging accordingly to summarize stadia can help you experiment anywhere on the web and understand the value of different discoverability techniques stadia will enable you to explore a bunch of things and track the source of traffic to identify which ones bring you more value from your website your blog your social network pages your ad campaigns to your affiliates all of this is going to be on stereo in the coming quarter do you want to take part in shaping the future of salia sign up to work with a product team to develop our roadmap follow the link in the presentation thank you so much for your time and I wish you all the best happy [Music]