Powering Gamification With User Behavior Tracking

Gamification is one of the foremost strategies used by apps like Duolingo and Strava to boost engagement and retention. These apps track user behavior and use it to power features like achievements, streaks and leaderboards to encourage users to keep coming back.

Under the hood, these apps are modelling user behavior using a combination of metrics tied to real user interactions, like taking lessons and completing exercises. They use this data to power compelling features that encourage users to keep active.

Context-Aware User Behavior Tracking

You’re probably already familiar with product analytics tools like PostHog. These are flexible tools for tracking just about any interaction a user makes with a product, but one drawback is that they aren’t context-aware. They don’t have any knowledge of what each user interaction actually means with respect to your product, and are very un-opinionated about the kinds of workflows or features you might want to drive from them. Using a product analytics tool to power gamification experiences is generally tedious, since these tools are unopinionated and lack the necessary context.

Trophy is a developer-friendly platform for building engaging gamification experiences into any mobile or web application. It uses metrics to help track user behavior and can be configured to drive features like achievements, streaks, and gamified email campaigns. Metrics in Trophy can be configured to track any user interaction but have the added benefit of being built for a gamification context, which implies you’re tracking these behaviors in order to drive gamified product experiences.

This means Trophy metrics are by far the best tools for tracking user behavior in a gamification context.

Powering Gamification Features With Metrics

Achievements

Instead of bolting together a product analytics tool with a few Zaps to build out a custom achievements feature, Trophy has built in multi-stage and one-off achievement campaigns driven by real user behavior.

Trophy can also host achievement badges for you on a global CDN, and serves src URLs back to you in any API calls making it super easy to build out any UI elements.

Streaks

Trophy’s metrics can also be configured to drive daily, weekly and monthly streaks without any custom code. Trophy automatically calculates streaks across all time zones based on the user interactions you set up, and provides APIs that deliver streak data to your applications in your users local time zone.

Plus, Trophy keeps track of all daily, weekly and monthly streaks across your user base from day zero which helps you in switching or testing out different streak frequencies in efforts to boost engagement.

Recap Emails

Without any custom email-sending code, Trophy can automatically send usage reports to your users to facilitate features like weekly progress recaps and end of year ‘wrapped’ style reports.

Trophy takes care of all email sending from your own custom domain, using the proper inbox-friendly structure (<table> not <div>) and tracks all open and click rates out-of-the-box to help you measure and optimize your engagement.

Reactivation Emails

Again, without any custom code on your part, you can configure Trophy to send automated win-back email campaigns to users that look like they are about to churn over, 3, 7, and 14 days. Plus you can use Trophy’s built-in email builder to customize your subject line and copies to best fit your brand.

This saves so much complex email scheduling code and is only possible because Trophy’s metrics have been built from the ground up to support user behavior tracking in the context of gamification.

Deciding on a behavior tracking strategy

Part of implementing any user behavior tracking strategy is about understanding the different product features and workflows you hope to drive using it, and working backwards to decide on which user behaviors align most closely to those outcomes.

For example, if you want to implement user behavior tracking to drive gamification features that aim to increase engagement and retention, then you’ll want to focus on user behaviors that are most tightly coupled to the core reason people are using your product.

These could be button clicks, visits to a particular screen, or completion of a certain user journey. Just about any interaction users make with your product could be vital to them coming back next time around so it’s important to identify these behaviors based on your knowledge of your users and why they use your product.

Best practices for context-aware user behavior tracking

Opt-in

You should only track behaviors that users have given you permission to track. If your product has a sign-up function, then part of that process should be requiring users to acknowledge that your platform tracks usage data and giving a brief description of why you're tracking it. Additionally, if you track purchase data or any related financial information you’ll have to disclose this information according to the regulations of the country in which you and your users interact.

User-centric

When tracking user behavior, consider tracking primary interactions like ‘save button clicked’ instead of second-hand effects such as ‘profile saved’. This will help you keep your dataset more relevant and centered around the user themselves rather than any custom actions you attach to those interactions, which may change over time.

Timezone agnostic

Ensure that all each interaction you track is associated with a timestamp so over time you build a chronological view of a user’s behavior. Additionally ensure you track the local time zone of the user when they make each interaction to engage users most effectively in any product features or workflows that you build.

Rich user attribution

Ensure that your user behavior tracking strategy involves tracking any user attributes such as name and email to make them available in any product features or workflows, such as re-engagement campaigns, that you choose to build.

Trophy delivers user behavior tracking at scale

Trophy provides scalable user behavior tracking infrastructure built from the ground up with features designed to best aid building gamification experiences like achievements, streaks and re-engagement emails with no custom code.

Create a free account and start tracking user behavior using our developer-first APIs in just a few lines of code.