One of the difficulties we often face with our data is that we struggle to provide audience segmentation as a demographic and other related data isn't exposed to us by our data sources. To combat this and provide new insights, we built our Audience Type Segmentation feature.
In short, what this does is look to classify the different members of your community into 7 different segments. These segments relate to how active the community member is and once placed into a segment, we can then look to provide aggregate insights into the types of members inside your community. The segments are:
- One-Time Members - Members that have only posted once in your community channels
- New Members - Members that have only recently started to comment in the community
- Long-Term Members - Members that have been active since the launch of your game
- Lapsed Members - Members that have commented in the past but haven't recently
- Intermittent Members - Members that comment now and again in the community
- Regular Members - Members that are active and comment often in the community
- Hardcore Members - Members that comment above the average and consistently over time
- Top Fans - The top 10% of most active members of your community
Our hope with this feature is that you will be able to better understand the types of users talking about your game and how these relate to in-game activity. The new feature also allows you to easily see what each segment cares about and cross-compare Category and Topic performance across the different segments. This article will demonstrate how to do this.
Finding the Audience Type Segmentation Feature:
Currently, the Audience Type Segmentation feature can be found in either the Online Community or the Social channel pages. These can be accessed from the main navigation or the Data Overview page.
How to navigate through the Segments:
Once you've found the feature, you may want to start navigating through the different segments available. To do this, use the left and right arrows near the top of the feature. This will change the segment and loop around so you can scroll through the different segments and see the data beneath updating.
One of the challenges we've had when building this feature has been the volume of community members that make up each segment. To combat this, we've added a button that you'll need to click to see the exact numbers from the data. To do this, click the dark blue button that can be found over the top of the Interactions, Community Size & Average Interactions Per Member metrics.
Finding Insights:
Once you've selected a Segment to look into, the next stage is to start to look through the results returned. The first of which is the Over Time chart which gives you the ability to see how sentiment and activity have changed over your selected date range.
The above shows the Sentiment & Volume Over Time chart, as you can see for this segment, we've seen a sizeable drop in sentiment in a specific week. The next step for anyone looking to investigate this further would be to either look at other Segments to see if the trend is shared or to look into what the Segment is unhappy about by drilling into the date range even further.
The toggle to the right of the title on this element allows you to toggle the first Y-axis from Interaction Volume to Contributors (# of community members) to see if you've had any spikes in the number of members commenting within the community.
Additional Insights:
We have two additional visualisations to help dig into your Segment data, the first is a radar graph that shows the average sentiment of the 7 Most Discussed Categories in the community. This gives you a quick glance to see if one specific Category has been performing poorly.
Alongside this is an adjusted Talking Points element that allows you to perform the same filters and toggles as other parts of the website with a slightly adjusted set of features due to the nature of the data.
Should you wish to view what is being discussed within any specific Topic, hover over the Topic and you should see a line appear underneath the Topic. Clicking this opens a Word Cloud view of the terms discussed within that Topic. This can be great for answering "Why are people unhappy with [x] Topic?".
Comparing Segments:
Whilst being able to dig into a specific segment can be very useful, we've also added an easy way to compare the Segments against each other. To do this, select the Grid toggle in the top right of the feature:
Once clicked, you should see a table appear that looks similar to the Game Comparison table, however, this one shows the community response to each Segment compared against each other. This can be extremely valuable for identifying specific pain points or differences in opinion across the community.
Watch out for Bots:
A brief note, as this feature is tied directly to your communities activity and identifying the most active members, sometimes a bot will display as the most active community member in the data. As with everything on the dashboard, we do not display the username of the community member but the best way to see a bot is to look at your "Top Fans" Segment and to see if it only consists of one member. If it does, chances are, this is a bot within a source such as Reddit. If you do see this, please do let us know through your account manager as we can then remove the Bot through our admin control panel.
We hope you find the value in this feature and we're excited to see where else we can integrate these Segments across the dashboard to display new and interesting insights.