Offerpal, a company best known for providing advertising offers within social games, is making its service a little bit more comprehensive today. It’s introducing an analytics tool that lets game developers track a variety of information about users themselves, and what they do inside of a game.
This could potentially make developers more money. The tool can track demographic information, offer clicks and completions, click-through rates and a variety of other revenue data. Offerpal’s interest here is getting developers to make better (by which I mean more lucrative) use of its offers service. For those not familiar, these offers are essentially advertisements in the form of coupons for Netflix, ringtones, and other goods and services — game developers embed offers within games, pairing them with virtual currencies so users can take offers, earn some point, then use these points to buy virtual goods.
A game might see that teenage males in the US who join aren’t playing well enough to move up to levels that contain money-making features like taking offers for a virtual good. The developer could make the game a little bit easier, or change the offer integration to occur earlier and more prominently within the game. In one app, Make a Baby (which has been beta testing the new service), Offerpal analytics might reveal why more 20-something men in the U.S. aren’t making virtual babies on the app.
There are already a variety of analytics services that in some form can help developers make more money, including advanced tracking services from Kontagent and money-focused data reporting from TwoFish. Offerpal’s analytics service isn’t aiming to be comprehensive like other ones, chief executive Anu Shukla tells me, its just focused on the dynamics of making money within a game.
Offerpal ,the largest among competitors including Super Rewards and Gambit, has been rumored to be making more than $100 million in revenue this year — some say a lot more. A large chunk of its business is on gaming applications in Facebook, MySpace and other social networks but it also works with other social gaming, virtual world and mobile companies to integrate offers. This analytics tool is another reason for developers on any of these platforms to try Offerpal rather than its rivals.