Gamification

on Yummly

by Vito and HB

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

Does it work?

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

Does it work?

  • Bell Media: incorporated "social loyalty" rewards
    • 33% increased retention
  • SessionM: adds game mechanics to mobile sites/apps
    • 25% reduced bounce rate
    • 35% increased retention
    • 400% increased traffic from social media
  • ​Muchmusic.com: gamified various user actions
    • ​59% increased RUs
  • ​USA TV: "Club Psych" for TV show Psych
    • ​130% increased pageviews, 40% increased retention
  • ​Deloitte Leadership Academy
    • ​46.6% increased DAUs

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

Does it work?

  • Autodesk Software: Gamified free trial, incentivizing users to learn how to use the program.
    • 54% increase in trial usage
    • 15% more Buy clicks
    • 29% increase in revenue
  • Moosejaw: Clothing company
    • 76% of sales revenue from gamified activities
    • 560% ROI from initial marketing expenses​
  • ​Teleflora: gamified social engagement
    • ​105% increase in traffic from Facebook
    • 92% increase in conversion

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

Why does it work?

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

Why does it work?

Types of Players:

  • Explorer: traditionally our "power user"
    • Reward them for feature discovery (Filters, Shopping List, Guided Search, "Made It")
  • Socializer / Philanthropist: wants to help others, may want to be seen as an authority in the site community
    • Reward them leaving meaningful reviews, comments, thumbing/flagging other user content
  • Achiever / Completionist: gotta catch 'em all
    • The more badges, the merrier.
  • And other types of players. BUT...

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... here's the thing

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

What can go wrong?

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

What can go wrong?

  • Need to keep our goals and metrics noise-free.
  • If we give ongoing badges for 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 Yums, some users may Yum whole pages of results regardless of their actual taste preferences. This doesn't help us, and it doesn't help the user.
  • We don't just want to encourage "earning badges", we want to encourage meaningful behavior.

GAMIFICATION on Yummly:

What can go wrong?

  • Reward discovery, not grinding: "First Yum", "First Collection", "First Review"
  • Validate activity:
    • "# Reviews" is bad, UNLESS we require a number of Thumbs Up or other verification of quality.
    • "# URB submissions" is bad, UNLESS we verify they are not duplicates or invalid recipe pages.
  • Cap activity per day, week, month:
    • "Yummed a recipe this month"
    • "Visited Yummly this week" (while registered)
    • "Wrote a Review this week"

DEMO
(working on updating the demo)

GAMIFICATION on Yummly

There is not One Right Way to do gamification. But there are hundreds of case studies for us to examine gamification done well, and done poorly.

 

When done well, gamification has a proven track record of very significant boosts in our key metrics: registered users, returning users, virality and traffic, revenue.

 

 

Gamification

By HB Stone

Gamification

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