How gaming company Miniclip is getting to know their players

“It’s all about the gamers,” Paul Bugryniec, Head of Business Intelligence at Miniclip, said.

Every gaming company wants to build a better game and provide the best experience possible for its players. To do so requires an understanding of the gamers themselves—what games they like or what actions they take in the game.

But asking each of Miniclip’s 200 million monthly active users “what they like” about their 45+ different games isn’t feasible. Instead, the London-based gaming company collects user data to understand how gamers buy and use their products.

In order to achieve this understanding of their gamers, Bugryniec—with a team of data scientists, analysts, and engineers—sought out to centralize and streamline how the entire company thought about and worked with customer data.

The search for a cloud-based analytics platform
The first step was getting the right tool in place that made customer data easily accessible to everyone at Miniclip.

“We had limited engineering resources, so I knew I wanted a cloud-based analytics platform that did not require a lot of engineering work to implement,” Bugryniec said. “But more importantly, the tool needed to be easy to use, so our non-technical business users can self-serve and pull the analysis they want.”

BIME was selected from other BI competitors, like Chartio, because of its vast ecosystem of connectors and user-friendly interface. Today, BIME has become the central point of the entire company’s data and reporting.

To get the whole company started on data collection and analysis, Bugryniec and his team sat down with key stakeholders from every department—from product to user acquisition to the web team to community support—to understand the data and metrics they wanted to track, and to determine how they wanted to consume that data.

A centralized view of the customer
Bugryniec and his team are working to streamline customer data from all parts of the Miniclip business and create a central place for everyone to look at core business metrics, such as revenue per user, daily active users by game, average tenure, and customer LTV by cohort. “We are creating a centralized user record of our customers in BIME,” Bugryniec said. “We measure how we acquire them, which games they play, how much they pay us, how they engage us on social channels, and if and when they churn.”

As a result, Miniclip is able to keep a better pulse on the performance of their games and their efforts in customer acquisition and engagement—with everyone better able to access the analytics they need. The product team monitors their KPI dashboards in BIME. The advertising team goes into BIME to see how their mobile ad campaigns are performing while the user acquisition team reviews their entire funnel. The web team uses BIME now, instead of Google Analytics. The community team can use BIME to review social media reporting from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, all in one place. And the executives get their email reports sent directly to their inbox every month.

“We are now collecting data and measuring the numbers we want, but it’s not enough,” Bugryniec said. “This year, we’re going to get more granular to dive deeper into our business drivers and start being more proactive in how we handle churn. Can we get ahead of customers and better anticipate and predict their needs?”

That is the eternal data question.

To learn more, visit BIME by Zendesk.