“F-ck your offers!”

You’re a game developer and you want to make money online. The most obvious solution? Develop a game that utilizes virtual currency and set up online payments, which come in two flavors– traditional (PayPal, credit cards) and alternative (mobile, offers). You’re especially excited about alternative payments, because you’ve heard (being a savvy industry-hot-topic follower) that offers can generate 50% of your game’s revenue.

Everything goes live, and within a few hours, your numbers are looking sweet. Offers performance is strong and your revenue is steadily rising. You don’t have to do a single thing other than focus on your game. Who knew it could be this easy to work with online payments?

And then suddenly, you see this user ticket:

immediately followed by this user ticket:

3 Game-Ending User Complaints

At Gambit, we handle thousands of active offers, with more being added every day — that’s a lot. Subsequently, we also see a high volume of user complaints.

Around 80% of these complaints fall into 3 categories:

1. “I did your offer but didn’t get my points. FIX IT!”
2. “I did your offer even though it took forever and now I’m getting spammed. FIX IT!”
3. “I did this free offer and now I’m being charged all this money. FIX IT!”

There are several reasons for these game-ending user complaints:

1. “I did your offer but didn’t get my points.”

Culprit 1: Third-party cookie blocker, anti-virus, or ad blocker software.

If a user’s browser doesn’t allow for third-party cookies, that can interfere with the conversion process; similarly, anti-virus/ad blocker software can also prevent a completed offer from converting properly.

Culprit 2: Multiple offers from the same advertiser.

Often, “free” promotional or quiz offers that require a user to enter personal data– the offer, in other words, pays the user for giving up that data– actually belong to the same advertiser. Because the advertiser has only the one database, duplicate info is worthless and therefore gets scrubbed. Because of this, users can legitimately fill out multiple offers, but if they all belong to a single advertiser, they’ll only get credited for the first offer completed.

Culprit 3: Advertiser-side technology.

Technology on the advertiser’s side isn’t always up to par, and when dealing with a flawed system, conversions don’t get posted back to us, which means our system can’t know to credit the users (and thus won’t).

2. “I completed this offer even though it took forever and now I’m getting spammed.”

Culprit 1: Didn’t read the Ts & Cs.

As mentioned above, “free” offers operate under a transaction of virtual currency for user information. Unfortunately, most users fail to read Terms & Conditions before submitting their data, and so remain unaware that they have now opted in to newsletters and promotional e-mails (i.e., spam) from all of the offer’s associated ad sites.

Culprit 2: Filling out more offers than they thought.

What’s more, “free” offers almost always require the user to go through a co-reg path before it converts to a lead. The length of a co-reg path varies by offer– some can take up to 20 minutes to click through– but the purpose is always the same: to get a user to fill out more offers. Users aren’t required to complete any of these additional offers in order to reach the end of the path, but users unaware of this will complete a few, again not reading the T&C, again opting in to more promotional e-mail.

3. “I completed this free offer and now I’m being charged all this money.”

Culprit 1: Didn’t read the Ts & Cs about the ‘trial period.’

Generally, this is another case of not reading the T&C or the fine print. Many offers welcome new users with “trial” products or memberships; the item is touted as free, and all the user has to pay for is shipping or processing. Some services, like movie rentals or credit monitoring, don’t require the user to pay anything in order to sign up. Once the trial period is over, however, the user gets billed the full, standard amount if they haven’t yet canceled their account.

Culprit 2: Advertiser’s mistake.

There are also a few instances where it’s simply an error on the advertiser’s side, and users will suddenly find numerous, erroneous charges on the credit card they used to sign up.

There’s one last explanation behind user complaints that may be more common than you think: they’re flat-out lying. Misreporting about the offer experience is a problem that’s gaining traction. This Facebook  group dedicated to scamming Super Rewards shows that users aren’t shy either.

Why it matters: Offers affecting users affecting offers

Okay, so a few users are unhappy about offers. You already know that users will complain about anything, so why should this matter to you?

It matters because your users are having a bad experience with an aspect of your game– and not just any aspect, but one that’s supposed to be making you money.

Crappy offers can ruin the user experience and in turn ruin conversions (i.e., your revenue):

Yes, we drew this. We're thinking 2010 t-shirts.

A user who has a terrible experience with offers the first time they try alternative payments will be heavily inclined to never try them again. Usually, the users who are attracted to offers are the ones who already have no interest in directly paying for the virtual currency, so by losing their interest in offer completion, you’ve now lost a potential paying user.

People talk. Unhappy people talk a lot. People who seek justification for their unhappiness by talking to other unhappy people (via forums) also find justification for their resolution to never complete offers again.

In other words,

[ users avoiding offers of their own accord ] + [ users convincing others that they should definitely avoid offers ] = [ fewer users completing offers ] = [ offer conversion drops like a lead balloon ]

Finally, remember that if a user completes an offer, has a good experience, then uses the points they earn to have more fun in their beloved game, they’ll be more likely to pay directly moving forward.

What to do about it

Since we’re the publisher of these offers, we at Gambit take several steps to make alternative payments easy and headache-free for users (and the developers who monetize them):

• We review offers actively to make sure they’re safe and accurate.
• We provide a detailed FAQ about offer completion right in our offer panel.
• We have our customer support team respond quickly to user complaints in order to resolve issues.
• We also publish offers with particular conditions to minimize later confusion on the user’s behalf.

That last step is all about prevention, which is our biggest priority (we don’t want to stay up all night reading venomous user mail either!).

To make sure we can sleep at night, we take these additional preventive measures:

• Regardless of whether the advertiser is claiming a “free” product, we only label offers as “free” if there is absolutely zero cost to the user to complete the offer and receive points.
  For mobile offers, we make it clear that users are subscribing to or registering for a service once they confirm their PIN

• For offers that belong to a single advertiser, we have a grouping system in place that prevents a user from being able to complete any of that advertiser’s subsequent offers once an initial offer has been converted.

As the developer, it’s important for you to take action as well.

If you know that certain offers are causing your users a significant amount of distress and irritation, remove those offers, even if it means a loss in revenue right now. By doing nothing, you’re telling your users that you care more about making a few quick bucks off them than you do about keeping their loyalty and trust– and no user wants to feel, well, used.

3 things you can do right now

1. Get the underperformers out!

To help developers look out for their users and cull the underperforming offers, Gambit also provides an offer ranking method that balances revenue against complaints. Specifically, the rank takes into consideration how much revenue a game is making from a particular offer versus how many complaints that offer is generating for that game’s users– the higher the ratio of complaints to conversions, the lower the ranking. Developers are then able to log into their account and manually remove low-ranking offers from their panel, making it faster and easier to filter out offers that could discourage users from alternative payments. When we were on the game developer side, this was a feature we would’ve loved to have, and we’re hoping it’s saving some of you precious time and users.

2. Go in there and complete some offers.

On a more intense level of involvement, you could also go through some of the offers yourself to understand what your users are experiencing; you wouldn’t push a new game feature live without testing it first, right? Online payments may not be an inherent component of your game, but they become a part of your game by association. By understanding the offer experience first-hand, you avoid being blindsided by users turning on you with complaint after complaint.

3. A warning.

We’ve seen some developers respond to these complaints in a way that we think you should avoid. It’s the quick-fix of simply awarding points to every user who complains. All this will do is encourage users to complain even more (again, through forums, users will inform others that they can quickly get free points just by filing a complaint, legitimate or not). What’s worse, your game will become flooded with currency, reducing its value and cheating you out of profit. Don’t do it!

Bottom line: Pay attention to user complaints – don’t allow those pesky messages to be carelessly dismissed. Invalidating your users’ concerns will only drive those users away (either from offers or from your game, or both), and without users, you wouldn’t be making any money at all.

Keep users happy, make more money.

• Ignore Cougars, Follow the Money: 3 social gaming tips for monetizing younger users
• Facebook changes, ‘Scamville,’ & fact vs fiction in the offers debate
• All NEW Way To Engage Users, Grow Revenues: Say Hello to Gambit Tasks