When I started looking at the recent push by developers to bookmark or become a fan of an application, I quickly realized there was no publicly available information about the number of bookmarks and what applications were being bookmarked the most. In recent discussions about platform changes, the Facebook team noted “At the moment we are not planning to make whether an application has been bookmarked query-able via our APIs.”.

Only since the beginning of this month has Facebook provided a way for developers to know how many users have bookmarked their application. Much like I looked at Fans per Monthly Active User (MAU) as a way to benchmark your ability to connect with users, a developer can now look at what percentage of MAU are bookmarked. But even this data doesn’t provide much detail as to how many of those bookmarks are actually visible in one of the current six available spots at the bottom of each Facebook page.

So how are users responding to all these requests to bookmark and what are they doing? I took a very non-scientific and not completely representative sample (42 of my friends and family) to get a very rough idea of what’s happening. The results surprised me: about half of the users had not taken the time to change the default Facebook bookmarks.

There are six visible bookmark positions on left hand corner of the Facebook footer, but five of them are pre-populated with Facebook applications by default: Photos, Groups, Events, Marketplace (new since March) and Notes. And that’s not all. If a user uploads a video, then Videos is inserted between Photos and Groups and Notes is dropped; also if a user manages or has their own Fan Page, they will have “Ads and Pages” as the first Bookmark, pushing Photos and other defaults down a notch.

When a user bookmarks an application, the icon for that application slides into the sixth bookmark spot. After that, every new application bookmarked replaces the bookmark in the sixth spot (e.g. if you had FarmVille in that sixth spot, then are asked to bookmark Pet Society, Pet Society replaces FarmVille). And that’s exactly what over a third of respondents are doing – leveraging a single bookmark spot for a non-default application.

This split was pretty similar across gender line – but users who considered themselves frequent game players definitely were more proactive in adding more non-default applications:

• Self-defined heavy game players had modified 3.67 of the six bookmark slots
• Medium game players modified 2.27 of the six slots
• Low or non game players modified 1.16 of the six slots

While some of the heavy game players had not figured out how to manipulate the bookmarks (just adding a single non-default app in the sixth spot), over half of them had modified five or six slots. Anecdotally, most game players tended to play ONLY the games that were in their bookmarks, rarely straying to play something not readily visible either through a bookmark or in their newsfeed or notifications.

What applications appear to be breaking through?

Some 60 different applications were bookmarked and visible to these 42 users. The top non-default applications bookmarked (showing percentage of all users that had it in their top six):

• FarmVille (26%)
• Mafia Wars (21%)
• Café World (14%)
• Bejeweled Blitz (10%)
• Farm Town and Cities I’ve Visited (7%)
• And ten more apps were at 6%

Again, the sample is heavily skewed here by my friends and family and the applications they play (although the numbers easily reflect the ranking by DAU), so you have to be very careful about making generalities. But this does point out where the saturation strategy by Zynga could pay off: if you can occupy two or three of the six available bookmarks, it’s that much more difficult for your competitors to break through.

Also interesting was the position where the application is in that order of six. The average user has a bookmark that looks like this:

But while FarmVille sits in that sixth spot, they actually are featured more frequently in a slot other than the last one. Here are the top three games and the frequency distribution across those six slots:

Again, a horridly small sample size, but none of the top three were ever placed in the number one spot and for the most part skew to slots five and six. Again, from my anecdotal conversations (and this pattern above) most users either don’t know how to modify bookmarks beyond adding an app to the last spot or find the current bookmark system too cumbersome and not worth the bother to try and navigate.

Fixing the Broken Bookmarks

By definition, if half the users cannot figure out how to leverage and modify bookmarks, then there’s a pretty major design flaw in the bookmarks tool as it’s currently configured. In addition, Facebook has its own issues trying to make room for its default applications into homepage real estate that can currently only support six slots.

Luckily, by the end of the year Facebook is actually planning on moving Bookmarks from the footer to the left column allowing for more potential space to display bookmarks. In this image of the proposed design, Causes, Digg and FarmVille are examples of bookmarked applications.

Details are still forthcoming as to how many bookmarks will be visible on the page but according to the Facebook team, “A user will be able to click ‘see more’ to see all of their bookmarked applications if they aren’t displayed by default.” Still, the most coveted spots are going to be those that are visible and there is no API in the works helping the developer understand what slot the bookmark is in.

While these changes may make bookmarks more accessible, they don’t help us get better data to identify industry benchmarks – that may ultimately be data only the developers themselves can view.

In the meantime, the push to get users to bookmark applications moves on. The Movies app, which is a heavy user of Notifications, sending by my estimation nearly one application-to-user notification each day, is faced with elimination of this promotional tool. In response, they recently sent out the following Notification:

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.

The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in the footer of every Facebook page is the only way to be consistently “above the fold” and in the view of a user. However, more social games are also encouraging users to become fans of an app, too. More on that below.

Recent changes and trends are making these channels more meaningful to developers:

• The Facebook homepage newsfeed has defaulted from a real-timefeed (where users only typically see it if they get online within four to six hours after the item was posted) to an algorithmic feed that users may never see,
• Notifications (which at least are continuously highlighted till you click on them) are going away in the very near future, and
• A recent study of US women by Q Interactive showed that 85 percent of them use five or fewer games/apps regularly (you can make your own inferences that there are only six bookmark spots in the Facebook footer).

It would be interesting to understand the correlation between being bookmarked and visit frequency (which I think itself is highly correlated to propensity to pay). Lacking that data, most Facebook social game users can make their own inferences based on the number of promotions to “bookmark this app!” – like this one in YoVille:

Taking advantage of the recently released Bookmark Button that allows developers to put the “Add Bookmark” button anywhere on the page, FarmVille on Friday pushed a landing page that prompted users to become a fan or bookmark the app:

It’s obvious this is important enough to Zynga as this is being pushed immediately after the ubiquitous “send a gift to a friend” screen as a default. (Optimization is still to come because they obviously know that I’m both a fan and a bookmarker, but apparently not early enough to avoid defaulting me this promo).

While we can’t get the top bookmarked games on Facebook, we can look at the other continual push by developers: the number of fans of each application, on each app’s Facebook page. Gathering fans is becoming an increasingly important way for applications to speak directly to their users and improves the possibility that these updates get into the newsfeed stream.

Here are some of the top games, their number of fans, and the number of monthly active users (MAU) – then I look at the Fans per MAU to see what percentage of users can the application connect with:

One of the things that leaps out when looking at this list is that most of the Zynga titles are around 5% or lower with the exceptions of Café World and YoVille. Café World, though, is part of an overall effort by Zynga to drive fans for the application. To push the number of fans to 1 million, Zynga offered users an incentive of unlocking special higher-than-normal revenue producing menu items. Now that this has been achieved (earlier this week), they are now pushing to reach 5 million:

So what about YoVille? Currently with a 13.8% direct communication level, it’s second best-on the list to Pet Society which is at 15.4%. To a very broad extent, YoVille and Pet Society have very similar game play mechanic (except one is your avatar and the other is with a pet avatar), so it’s possible that some game play mechanics could intrinsically have better ability to drive a number of fans. But while FarmVille and Country Story are around 5%, SlashTown’s Farm Town is closer to 10%.

Likewise, FishVille is only at 2.1% compared to Happy Aquarium’s 9.9% — although to be fair it FishVille has only been out for less than a month. In these initial stages where Zynga is pushing for viral growth, the game pop-ups focus on “Asking for More Neighbors” instead of “Bookmark” or “Add as a Fan” (although both options are there as tabs). This may speak more to the launch tactics of different developers – where Zynga is very focused on traffic growth, other developers are driving more relationships early on. That said, as Zynga games mature (and the mechanisms with which you can interact with your users continue to change) these relationships become more critical.

While still a very broad metric, the Fans per Monthly Active User metric is an interesting way to look at which developers and applications are focusing on (and to some degree how much success they are having in) getting a more direct relationship with their users.

When you get purchased by someone as huge as Electronic Arts (EA), there is definitely a bit of turmoil as everyone tries to understand how the two companies will co-exist and work together. One of the more interesting things we’re seeing is a decline in daily active users (DAU) across the top Playfish titles since the acquisition last week.

Although Pet Society is down only 2.4%, Restaurant City is down 6.8% and Country Story is down 10%. While Playfish COO Sebastien de Halleux noted that “EA gives us more resources to grow right now – more marketing budget to reach new users in new ways,” it doesn’t look like the initial push is to try to match Zynga’s aggressive advertising to grow the user base on Facebook.

Indeed, if you listened to the EA quarterly earnings call discussing the acquisition, EA management clearly saw the Playfish as a way to “open up doors to folks that aren’t console players” and upsell their IP. This manifested itself shortly after the announcement, with Playfish titles like Pet Society and Restaurant City running cross-promotions of EA’s Pogo.com casual game portal and the Sims 3 iPhone application.

While it is very possible that these cross promotions helped drive daily traffic away from Playfish titles, you also have to wonder if the Playfish team has cut back on some of its advertising so that it can begin to coordinate efforts with EA.

Pet Society Introducing More Game-Enhancing Virtual Items

Amidst the turmoil, the product teams at Playfish continue to roll out new features, the most interesting being a Nannybot in Pet Society. The Nannybot looks remarkably like Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons and allows the player to have the robot clean (via shower attachment), feed (popping toast via a toaster into your pet’s mouth), and play (tickling your pet with a giant feather) while they are not online.

To date, the majority of items in Pet Society have been vanity items, allowing the end-user to express themselves by dressing up their avatar or decorating their house. But there is a natural limit to the number of vanity items a user can use at one time – there’s typically only one avatar and only so many rooms in your house. Playfish has tried to address that, adding hangers and shelves so you can show off more of your clothing collection (launched September 12th) and launching the ability to add even more rooms to your Pet’s house (October 25th).

Another way to break through those limits is to focus on what I call game-enhancing items, designed to help the player achieve something or mitigate the grind in the game. While Playfish has had some game-enhancing items in the past (like fruit trees that grow food so you don’t have to constantly spend coins to buy items to beed your pet), it has recently been rolling out a steady stream of these items in its cash shop:

• Special fishing hat (September 28th), glove (October 5th) and vest (October 12th) that help you catch more rare fish, and
• Pro shoes (November 2nd) to help you avoid slipping on the ubiquitous banana peels in Stadium races
• Pro vest (November 9th) to help you better jump the hurdles in Stadium races

The Nannybot is the most recent addition and works very similar to the tractors and other farm equipment in FarmVille – the equipment or nannybot is nominally expensive, but you have to pay real cash for additional fuel for the farm equipment or batteries for the Nannybot. The Nannybot batteries last three days, long enough for someone to escape for a long holiday weekend and not worry about their pet.

Clearly Playfish is focusing on figuring out how to extract more value from their strong relationships with users. To illustrate that point, John Earner, the company’s vice president of product, recently noted that 50% of the users that have installed the Pet Society application since launch are still active in a given month. And while so far the EA acquisition hasn’t jump-started an acquisition campaign — Playfish has repeatedly stated their strategy is to run a marathon while competitors are focusing on sprinting for market share — the focus on virtual items that enhance the user experience could have an equally positive impact on the bottom line.

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.

[In the latest post from guest author and social gaming consultant Eric von Coelln, he compares the growth patterns of new games from big developers to try to spot where Facebook advertising has been having a significant impact.]

With the launch of Zynga’s FishVille, I’ve been watching to see if the developer could again eclipse records for user growth. The last Zynga hit, Café World launched a little over a month ago, gaining 1.1 million new users on day two and an additional 1.4 million users on day three, eventually passing rival Playfish’s Restaurant City and reaching more than 5 million daily actives in just a week after launch. In its first week, the numbers for FishVille are strong: 1.6 million daily actives after five days, whereas top rival fish game, CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium took more than two weeks to hit that level. But the growth is not quite as meteoric as Café World.

With all of Zynga’s promotional muscle and ability to cross-promote games across an even larger installed base of players than a month ago, what happened? Are users already mega-engaged with existing titles? Unlike Café World, FishVille is competing with three games and trying to tackle a much more established base: Happy Aquarium, TwoFishes Interactive’s My Fishbowl and TallTree Games’ Fish World collectively have 11.3 million daily active users and over 39.1 million monthly users. In aggregate, these games only trail Zynga’s FarmVille.

In addition, the launch was marred a bit. One of Zynga’s offer providers was running scammy offers, so Facebook took it offline for about 36 hours. With that caveat in mind, I decided to look at the launch trajectories of recent titles by Playfish and Zynga to see if we could discern any trends to benchmark the performance of FishVille:

While there are some definite rocket trajectories here, they are not happening across the board. Instead, one of the major take-aways from this graph is that it appears to identify the impact of advertising on launch velocity. To be very clear, I have no data available to identify when and how much either developer has spent advertising to grow their user base, but I believe you can look at gradual growth trends and see massive disruptions in that trend that point to advertising. Roller Coaster Kingdom (the light purple line above) is the best example of this.

• Launched August 1st, it gradually grew to just under 1 million DAUs within the first month. This is similar to Playfish’s Country Story, which launched at the same time and had a slightly higher trajectory in the first couple days, followed by gradually flattening growth.
• Zynga did a lot of work during September to improve the overall churn of the game, including a pretty major change in the game mechanic to include a more “appointment gaming” style.
• Then, on October 4th, you can see a dramatic increase in traffic from 821,000 DAUs to over 1.67 million DAUs in a single day. After this huge growth spurt, things again start to grow somewhat gradually. The huge increase really looks like an ad-fueled growth spurt. It would also suggest that while the cross-promotional toolbar is a big component for growing a new title, it pales in comparison to the impact of ads.

Now, look at the huge launch velocity of Café World. Note the initial huge spike in daily active users from 250,000 to nearly 1.4 million also began on October 4th as it did with Roller Coaster Tycoon. This suggests that Zynga pumped advertising in during the first four days (October 4th to 7th) to help it bypass rival Restaurant City during the first week.

Likewise, you can infer other instances of potentially ad-fueled spurts by looking at daily active users:

FarmVille shows dramatically vertical growth that pushed it past 10 million. Only after Café World launched do you see the trajectory drop a bit, but it’s hard to pin that solely on a shift in ad dollars to these new titles – it could also have been cannibalization of its FarmVille base as some moved on to Café World (a trend we’ve seen in the past when Restaurant City ate into the DAUs for Pet Society).

Country Story looks like it also had an ad-induced spurt in late August, growing from 676,000 DAU on August 26th to 1.23 million DAU on August 29th – after that the DAU numbers grew gradually, similar to the pace prior to the ad buy

Regarding the launch of FishVille, the temporary suspension have temporarily reduced its initial growth. But I imagine Zynga will continue to use its launch playbook of heavy advertising to help grow the game to a critical mass, much like it did for Cafe World and FarmVille. There are still questions as to whether Zynga can muscle its way through and beat out the most crowded field yet in a specific genre — if it can’t, we’ll see a less steep launch trajectory.

Big picture here, developers and investors can begin to look at launch trajectories and pinpoint when another developer is spending advertising money to push up its market share. While the blatant spending at launch is fairly apparent, what is less clear is how much ad money is being spent on a continual basis to prop up growth.

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.

[The following is a guest post by Eric von Coelln, a social game consultant who occasionally contributes articles for Inside Social Games. Last week, he looked at how the number of daily active users correlate with the amount of money that a social game can make. This week, he looks at some ways that big social games try to keep their daily active user rates up.]

One of the more interesting applications of the social game “sticky factor” that I introduced last week is the ability to look at the life cycle of some of the most popular games and identify some of the key feature roll-outs that greatly increased engagement. The sticky factor is simply the daily active users (DAUs) of an application divided by monthly active users (MAUs).

Let’s take a look at two of the largest games on Facebook, by DAUs, that have been around over three months and also have a pretty accessible view of product feature launches: FarmVille and Mafia Wars, both from Zynga.

First, it’s critical when looking at the data to not really pay too much attention to the first thirty days of data, especially when trying to compare different games: By definition the MAU requires a month’s worth of data. Also note that because of the growth in Facebook, an application launched in September of 2009 is going to be exposed to a lot more users more quickly than an application launched a year, or even six months earlier. So you can see after launch that the sticky factor had dropped down to around 32% one month after launch (July 21st). Over the following month, you can also see that FarmVille increased its sticky factor to somewhere between 37-38%. Let’s take a look at some of the main features launched in the game that might have impacted engagement:

• On July 24th, Zynga launched its 2nd expansion of the farm (the amount of land you can plow, harvest and decorate) but this seemed to have little impact.
• On August 7th, Zynga launched in-game achievements, with the ability to send a notice to your friends once you had earned the white, red, blue or yellow ribbon.
• On August 18th, The sticky factor was at 37% and Zynga then launched tractors to help make game play a little less tedious on those larger farms

Of these three game feature releases, it would seem that achievements had the biggest impact. And of course achievements generally increase how viral a game is, helping to bring in new users into the fold.

For Mafia Wars, I don’t have reliable launch data prior to March of 2009, so I can’t pinpoint what helped increase the sticky factor from late December 2008’s low point, but we can pinpoint a couple other key feature launches:

• March 26th: Gifting of items is launched, allowing users to send useful in-game items to their “mafia” of friends, greatly increasing re-engagement and driving new users. FarmVille launched with gifting from the beginning, so we couldn’t see it in that comparison
• April 30th: Achievements are launched, again seeing an increase much like we did with the earlier FarmVille example
• The broad releases of the Cuba expansion (June 11), new Cuba achievements (June 18) and a daily lottery ticket (June 25) may have helped contribute a bit to the increase in the sticky factor to nearly 30% over the Fourth of July weekend, but that also may be due to the fact that during that weekend Zynga launched special loot that could only be earned by engaging with the game over that holiday weekend. This looks like it was a huge boost to re-engaging users and has been repeated nearly monthly (the next red dot was Labor Day weekend’s Loot event)
• The launch of the Moscow expansion pack (September 25th) doesn’t appear to have had as much impact, and that may be because these expansion packs are focused as drains on some of the highest level users who are already extremely active.

There is no question that achievements and “gifting” have been enormous engines driving viral growth and re-engagement – the sticky factor analysis lets you visualize the actual impact on engagement those tactics bring and can be used as a benchmark for measuring the impact of future initiatives.

Does a More Viral Game Mask the True Sticky Factor?

One criticism of the sticky factor is that it can be greatly influenced based on how viral a game is – that the influx of new users skew the DAU number. That’s definitely true during the first 30 days (as mentioned in the FarmVille example above) or where there is a large promotion (huge ad buy or a cross promotion from another large game that drives a spike in new users), but after that I think this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that with a rolling 30 day MAU you are not going to see huge swings.

Ultimately, the sticky factor is an approximation of churn – the secret sauce that helps you understand your customer lifetime value and maximize revenues. As a developer, you’d have access to much more granular churn rates with an understanding of the differences of newbies you are acquiring virally and those that have been with you a number of months. Plus DAU really looks at JUST daily usage, where you may find quite a profitable experience with users that play every other day – to that point Playfish’s vice president of product, John Earner, mentioned at the Virtual Goods Conference on Friday that 50% of the users who ever played Pet Society are active each month, and that’s 65% for Restaurant City.

Still, I wanted to look at the impact of a game’s viral rate to drive new users, to see how much that can impact the sticky factor.

As an example, last week I mentioned that it looked like a 15% sticky factor was the breaking point for a game’s success. I took a pretty straight forward model assuming steady viral growth rates (e.g. of the users you have on the service x% will post something or invite a friend that induces another user to join the game) and a steady churn rate (you lose y% of your total users every day through attrition). These are the sticky factor curves based on a core churn rate and a viral rate.

When you have a churn rate of 10%, you easily reach that break-away velocity (the 15% sticky factor), regardless of the viral ability of the game. But as your churn rate increases, you need increasingly more viral pull to reach that 15% sticky factor:

• With a 12% churn, you need a 5.9% viral rate (1 in every 17 users bringing in someone new)
• With a 15% churn, you need a 13.4% viral rate (1 in every 7.5 users)
• With a 20% churn, you need a 23.9% viral rate (1 in every 4.2 users)

Generally, for every 1% increase in churn above 10%, you need a 2.3% increase in the game’s viral rate.

Again, this is a very simplistic analysis but I think it shows that while a game that is more viral can help mitigate churn, when that churn rate gets above 12%, it will take a great deal more viral growth to make it sticky enough to sustain that level of Stickiness.

Is the Facebook News Feed Change Impacting the Sticky Factor and Exposing Churn?

As I noted above, some of the big gains in the sticky factor for Mafia Wars came from gifting and achievements – two tactics that post to a user’s wall and would get replicated across their friend’s news feed prior to the recent changes to the Facebook news feed. Now that the changes have been in force for two weeks (and developers are exploring tactics to get these valuable cross-promotion and re-engagement tools back), what are we seeing?

It’s only been ten days since the change and there is a lot of noise in the data, but roughly:

• FarmVille and Mafia Wars actually look like they are up since the change, but there were a great deal of Halloween promotions (specifically limited item drops and Halloween design contests in Mafia Wars and FarmVille respectively) during the last week that may have temporarily re-engaged users.
• Newer games (Café World and Roller Coaster Kingdom) are still coming off their launch highs and hadn’t found a stable sticky factor prior to the news feed change, so it’s hard to attribute the declines solely to the news feed at this point.
• YoVille had been on a decline in its sticky factor prior to the news feed change and appears to have stayed on a similar trend since the change, so again, hard to attribute it solely to the news feed changes.
• Texas Hold ‘Em had a fairly consistent sticky factor prior to the change and appears to definitely be feeling the impact of the change, trailing off in the last week.

At this point, the sample size is too small to really tell if the news feed changes have had an impact. Because viral tactics do support re-engagement, I would expect that higher churning games will see their sticky factors decline at a slightly faster rate over the weeks ahead. Until then, we can continue to look at the sticky factor as a strong indicator of user engagement and as a metric to measure the impact of initiatives on moving the engagement rate.

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.