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BERI LEE: Hello.
Thanks for joining me today as I talk
about supercharging discoverability with Stadia.
My name is Beri Lee, product manager on Stadia.
And I'll be co-presenting with Shishir Birmiwal, engineer lead
at Stadia.
Supercharged discoverability.
So I want to start with a quick definition of what
I think discoverability is.
Discoverability is the degree to which
content can be found in an information system
by people who would get value from it.
So what happens when you can't measure discoverability?
Let's take an example where you have three users that you're
trying to reach.
And let's say the top user, the red user,
is the one that would actually get value from your content.
So let's say you have two messages--
an airplane-based one, a roadside-based one--
and you want to understand which of these two messages
is actually the one that's going to resonate with that red user.
You also don't even know if either message is necessary.
Maybe that red user would have found your content regardless.
So it quickly becomes apparent that without the ability
to measure the efficacy of your discoverability efforts,
it's really hard to know what to do next.
And that's what this talk is about.
It's about enabling developers and publishers
to maximize discoverability.
This talk will be split into two parts.
I'll give a quick overview and background, the what
and whys of discoverability and how Stadia helps.
And then the second part, Shishir
will go over a deep-dive into how this actually
looks working with Stadia.
So let's start with background.
Earlier, we said that discoverability
is the degree to which content can be found in an information
system by people who would get value from it.
Some of those information systems are listed here.
For example, search, or digital print, digital conversations--
these are all places where users can learn about content.
With all of these options to get your message out there,
discoverability should really be easy.
Turns out, there are challenges, and the challenge
is in three parts.
The first is really just knowing which
channels work to get to the users that you want.
So where are those users?
Are they on YouTube?
Are they looking things up on Search?
And the second is, once you get the content
into your ecosystems, how do you even
know how they arrive there to start with?
How do you know which channels contain the most
users that you actually want to experience your content?
And then the last challenge is, even
you could answer those first two questions,
being able to do so in a timely fashion
so that you can optimize and figure out
which discoverabilities really work
for your immediate efforts, that's also really challenging.
So I'm going to switch over to going over some quick research
as we're digging into this area.
We asked, where are gamers going to learn about games,
and we also asked, what specifically
are they looking for?
So I want to share some of those results.
We found that 44% of gamers are using video and reviews
to discover new AAA games.
We also found that when researching games,
YouTube is the single-most popular platform
with gamers spending 22% of their time researching
for content.
As for where gamers go when they want to learn about gameplay,
95% of gamers surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed
that YouTube was a good place to discover new content.
The goal, of course, isn't to overindex on YouTube.
It just happens to be the video channel
that we have the most access to, in terms of research.
What we really want is for publishers and developers
to find out which channels are best
for discovery of their content for themselves.
And it's not just something we want.
In a separate study, we actually asked a lot of our partners
what feature we should be building to help them
with their discoverability efforts,
and we heard-- really clearly-- two things.
The first is they all want the ability
to experiment with messages and which messages work best.
And the second thing is they really
want the ability to understand, once users end up
engaging with their content, how they got there.
So going back to the three-part challenge, with Stadia,
we're really trying to deliver a full cycle, tying discovery
to actions that matter, and to do it in days instead of weeks.
So let's go through an actual concrete scenario.
Let's say you built a game and you
want to make sure gamers who enjoy
it get a chance to engage.
So you have a hypothesis here.
And maybe it says people who search "thriller," "rpg,"
and "game" are more likely to be interested in
and engage with your content than otherwise.
And so maybe you have campaign A,
which is targeting users who've searched for these terms.
And maybe you have campaign B, which
is targeting users who are on a social media site who
might be exposed to banner ads.
So you want to be able to test your hypothesis.
As a developer or publisher on Stadia, we think we can help.
There are three key parts to this.
First, as Phil Harrison promised earlier this year,
we're going to be pulling down barriers
to accessing the platform, and this is the first ingredient.
The second ingredient is you'll want
a hypothesis and an ad channel of your choice
to run your test on.
And the third is you'll need Stadia's new attribution
reports, which are coming soon.
Once we have these three ingredients,
first, gamers see your campaign messaging anywhere
on the internet.
That message has a special call to action.
This is a link that will land the user to a tailored gamer
experience.
So let's say the gamer hasn't purchased the game yet.
The tailored experience that this gamer would experience
is that they'll get landed onto a store page, where they
can actually purchase the game.
And then after purchasing, the user can play anywhere.
Because the messaging happens with Stadia links,
and because gamers always end up on Stadia, the platform,
you'll always be able to fully understand which messages work
and how gamers got to your game.
So in short, to maximize discoverability,
Stadia will enable you to experiment with your messages
and also really understand the actions that users are taking
and improve your further outreach methods.
With that, I will hand it over to the Shishir to dive
into the actual mechanics of how this
would work for you as a Stadia developer or publisher.
SHISHIR BIRMIWAL: Thank you, Beri.
My name is Shishir Birmiwal, and I'm an engineering lead
in the Stadia team.
So as Beri said, this section is going
to do a deep-dive into how this would work for you.
The most important prerequisite right
now is that you have to be a Stadia developer or publisher.
Once you become a Stadia developer or publisher,
an organization is created for you in Stadia.
You will be able to log into the partner portal
and download the Stadia SDK, which
will enable you to develop on your local machine and test
on Stadia instances.
When you're ready to publish, you
will want to think through your discoverability strategy.
Since you will have awesome discoverability,
you will have happy and engaged users.
Let's take a deep dive into the mechanics of supercharging
discoverability.
At a high level, you will want to go through these steps.
Step one, it's always a good idea
to ponder over and plan out the question
before seeking answers.
Your questions could be about what
you should be doing next, what audiences work better,
what messaging to use, or what call-to-action to take.
Step two, you need to set up your ad campaigns accordingly.
You will need a link for each campaign you're setting up.
Step three, set up your ad campaign
with the corresponding campaign links.
This system is not necessarily for apps.
You could also just set up links from different parts
of your website or blog to Stadia
and see how they perform.
It's just a link.
You need to make it visible somewhere.
People click on it and come to your store on Stadia.
The internet's your store.
You get the picture.
Step four, run the campaign.
Make those links visible.
Let there be clicks.
Step five, analyze the results.
You're now getting results in days.
Step six, optimize discovery.
We walk through an example to illustrate these steps next.
So plan the question.
This example is a bit more involved,
and it wants to show how experimentation can impact both
what to message as publishers and what
to design as developers.
Let's say you have a list of users of your game, JumpGame,
and your goal is to boost re-engagement.
You've done two things.
You've created a new event, and a new set of armor.
You can ask two questions.
The first is, where is the best place for existing users
to discover new content?
The second is, what kind of content
is most effective at getting users to re-engage?
We can set up a two-by-two experiment,
like the one shown here, varying the content type--
new armor versus new event--
and the messaging channel--
YouTube and game news sites--
at the same time.
Now that you have a plan for what questions you want to ask
and how to answer them, let's go to what the setup looks like.
You will want to get the campaign links from the Stadia
Partner portal.
The Stadia Partner portal is a website where Stadia developers
and publishers manage the content
they're developing for Stadia.
You can create four links and label them as needed.
In this example, we can label them
as News Plus Armor, News Plus Event, YouTube Plus Armor,
and YouTube Plus Event.
You go to your ad platform and set up your ads.
When you set up your ads, you will
use the corresponding link that was generated on Stadia Partner
portal.
In this example, we're trying to set up a campaign on YouTube
for new armor, so we're using that link.
You'll go through similar setup for each of the three campaigns
that you want to run, and leverage
each of the remaining three Stadia links.
Next, we want to run the campaigns we have set up.
So you go to your ad platform, run the campaign,
and wait for users to click on the ads, go to Stadia,
and engage with your content.
So now comes the interesting part.
We can start analyzing the results.
So you go to Stadia and get daily attribution reports
for the time range you care about.
On the Stadia Partner portal, you
can download different types of reports.
One of these is an attribution report.
The report will tell you how many
purchases you have for each of the four campaigns you ran.
In this example, we see that the reports are
aggregated on a daily basis.
We see a count of purchases and the campaign names
they're attributed to.
Next, you aggregate and join with information
you get from other sources, your ad site, in this case.
And seeing this example, you'd get a count of impressions
from your ad platform.
You can use the buys and impressions to figure out
the conversion rate.
You can now analyze this, and get insights
into what you care about.
If you care more about buys per dollar,
you can compute that too.
In this example, we see that YouTube
is a more compelling channel to re-engage your users.
New events are more compelling to users.
We can also see that users on YouTube
are markedly more compelled to new events
than game news sites.
Now you can optimize.
You can use this information to optimize what you do next
in your game development, as well as your next messaging
strategy.
For starters, you can use the findings
to generate new questions.
Maybe you want to run a few more experiments
to confirm that events are really much better at getting
re-engagements than armor.
If you find it's actually a really strong,
repeatable signal, maybe you will
end up shifting your development strategy and do more of events
than armor.
Similarly, on the messaging side,
maybe you confirm that YouTube is actually
a more effective place to help users to discover your content,
or maybe you'll find the opposite.
The power is in your hands to find out
and to change your messaging accordingly.
To summarize, Stadia can help you experiment anywhere
on the web and understand the value of different discoverable
techniques.
Stadia will enable you to explore a bunch of things
and track the source of traffic to identify which ones bring
you more value from your website,
your blog, your social network pages, your ad
campaigns, [INAUDIBLE].
All of this is going to be on Stadia in the coming quarter.
Do you want to take part in shaping the future of Stadia?
Sign up to work with the product team to develop a roadmap.
Follow the link in the presentation.
Thank you so much for your time, and I wish you all the best.
Happy gaming.
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