I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night for the second time and spent much of my drive into work this morning trying to come up with a way to relate that movie to gamification or customer loyalty. If you have been reading here long, you might remember my Hunger Games post from earlier this year and my love of connecting gamification with things in my daily life. Unfortunately, my pre-coffee brain was unable to come up with anything coherent enough to be worthy of a post here on mygamification.com. Instead, I turned my attention to something with much more value to the readers: another gamification tip! The Batman post will rise (ok, that wasn’t funny).

Gamification Tip #4: Analytics Matter!

Gamification in its best form allows publishers to increase engagement and loyalty, while creating benefit and reward systems for their users. The ongoing maintenance and success of a customer loyalty program should rely heavily on analytics allowing publishers to see what works and what doesn’t. Just as you should know your users before implementing gamification, good analytics should help you grow your program and understand its strengths and weaknesses. Not to mention analytics are key to justifying the expense/effort of implementation and program management.

I don’t feel anyone would argue that analytics don’t matter in the context of brand success, but check out any good gamification example and you will see that all of them provide either the user or the brand with analytics. Gamification of fitness sees its biggest success when users are given simple ways to understand their fitness data and progress. Enterprise gamification succeeds when employers and employees can measure their progress and understand failings, trends and set goals. Consumer focused gamification often relies heavily on understanding user actions and channeling those actions into successful advertising and content.

How your company measures the success of its program will vary greatly depending on the end goal, which means that analytics must be flexible enough to be valuable to all types of publishers. BigDoor’s analytics provide both at a glance and drilled down measurements measuring your user’s engagement with your program, loyalty to your program and virality. Our platform features RAMP technology which creates a no-exposure control group used to compare data between users seeing and participating in the program to those who haven’t been exposed.

Whether your company is seeking more user registrations, looking to track employee progress or any number of other valuable actions, analytics is the backbone of gamification strategy and success.