— GENERAL — 

What is Second Stage TRACKS?

Second Stage TRACKS is a marketing intelligence platform specifically designed for the gaming industry. It offers media analytics and includes full-funnel attribution tracking, providing a holistic view of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), media performance, creative performance, brand health, and more for PC and console games—all within a single environment.

What kind of data does Second Stage TRACKS track and report on?

Second Stage TRACKS tracks and reports on a wide array of data, including media, web analytics, attribution metrics, GAAS metrics (like retention, in-game purchases, or post-install game events), and more. This comprehensive approach ensures that you have clear insights into your conversion campaigns, awareness, creative performance, and brand health.

TRACKS integrates data across 65+ platforms. This allows for comprehensive tracking and reporting across all stages of a game’s lifecycle. The platform updates data four times per day, ensuring that insights are always current.

What distinguishes Second Stage TRACKS from other analytics and attribution vendors?

With Second Stage TRACKS, you’ll have access to a comprehensive media analytics and attribution tracking solution that typically requires a number of specialized roles and expertise.

To optimize the use of an attribution solution and improve insight generation, media optimization and analysis, a well-rounded mix of expertise is essential:

Digital Media Specialist / Technical Marketer: This specialist has the technical skills needed to set up tracking tags, integrate attribution into media platforms, and manage tracking link templates, parameters, events, conversions, postbacks, and campaign setups. Their expertise ensures accurate implementation and functionality.

Ad Ops Specialist: Responsible for creating a campaign naming taxonomy framework, this role ensures consistent naming conventions across campaigns, ad groups and ad creatives. This synchronization across media platforms and trackers is critical for streamlined reporting, data cleansing and consolidation during automation.

Data Engineer and Data Analyst: The Data Engineer designs and develops the data ingestion pipeline that combines media analytics, web analytics, and attribution data into a consolidated data warehouse for automated reporting. Meanwhile, the data analyst builds reporting dashboards, as attribution vendor interfaces alone may not provide a comprehensive view. Combining attribution data with media analytics delivers valuable insights to stakeholders.

TRACKS integrates these areas into a powerful marketing intelligence platform, allowing you to track and monitor media campaign performance with unprecedented detail.

How does TRACKS handle attribution tracking?

TRACKS Attribution is an in-house solution for full-funnel attribution tracking for PC and console games, effectively measuring metrics like Cost-per-Install (CPI) and ROAS. Additionally, TRACKS can integrate with third-party attribution solutions, offering flexibility depending on your existing setup.

What makes TRACKS attribution tracking different?

TRACKS provides a deeply integrated first-party attribution tracking solution with several key benefits:

• Seamless Implementation: Lightweight backend integration without requiring SDKs or in-game code.
• High Tracking Accuracy: Auto-tagging and connections to web analytics and Steam, ensuring full visibility across the user journey.
• Error-Free: Reduces the likelihood of errors through best-practice backend implementation.
• Better Privacy: Enhances privacy through a secure hybrid cloud setup that minimizes data exposure.

How does TRACKS evaluate creative performance?

The Creative Performance feature in TRACKS provides detailed performance data for individual creatives. This helps optimize campaigns by identifying the best-performing creatives and mitigating ad fatigue, ensuring that your creative assets are used effectively.

What audience insights does TRACKS provide?

TRACKS delivers granular insights into your game’s audience based on day-to-day campaign performance. This includes detailed socio-demographic information, allowing you to better understand and target your user base.

How does TRACKS track awareness?

TRACKS‘ Awareness Tracker offers detailed reporting on top-of-funnel activations, breaking down metrics such as impressions, views, engagement rates, and viewability. This feature helps measure and optimize awareness campaigns effectively.

Can TRACKS monitor brand health?

Yes, the Brand Health Tracker within TRACKS provides insights into top-of-funnel awareness generated from social media, media campaigns, and user-generated content (UGC). This data-driven approach aids in making key strategic decisions regarding brand direction and timing.

How does utilising TRACKS compare with traditional media campaign setups?

TRACKS offers a more advanced and integrated approach to media campaign management compared to traditional setups. Key differences include:

Enhanced Data Collection: Through extensive link tagging and improved analytics integration.

Advanced Targeting: Utilizing installer lookalikes and retargeting churned players.

Custom Reporting: Tailored reports for creative performance, audience insights, awareness, and influencer conversions.

Optional Campaign Execution: Second Stage can also provide optional campaign management services.

Is there any benefit to using TRACKS UTM links in Influencer or Brand Awareness campaigns?

In addition to biddable channels, using TRACKS UTM links allows you to track the performance of influencers and other branding activities, such as installs and retention, providing insight into acquired players. This helps you compare branding channels against each other using key side metrics. However, tracking lower-funnel media activation remains more effective and essential.

I have a unique set of requirements for my reporting; can Second Stage TRACKS accommodate them?

Absolutely. Every campaign is unique and we tailor our approach accordingly. We create custom dashboards for each game and even different campaign phases to ensure that the most relevant insights are highlighted at all times.

Can TRACKS provide benchmarks to help me develop a more effective marketing strategy and media plan?

The Second Stage team can advise on your marketing strategy and assist with media planning. If you have specific benchmark questions, such as „What is the average wish-list to purchase rate in the US for an early access strategy game?“, the Second Stage team can provide answers from our Benchmark Dashboard. As the dashboard is currently in beta, it is not available for self-service access by TRACKS customers.

Is it better to send traffic directly to the storefront or the product website, and why?

Whether the goal is awareness or conversion, we recommend first directing prospects to a website with a dedicated marketing landing page. This approach has several benefits:

• It serves as an excellent content platform, featuring game trailers, images, animations, and more.
• The site can support multiple languages, allowing for a more personalized connection with a global audience.
• Most importantly, users who visit the site can be retargeted on advertising platforms, allowing for advanced visitor segmentation and audience targeting with lookalike models.
• SEO efforts naturally increase the brand’s digital visibility.
• The website facilitates newsletter signups and direct community engagement.
• It also allows for the creation of an account creation mechanism.
• The site can provide an additional direct storefront for fans, e.g. retailers of physical SKUs or to purchase Collector’s Editions directly.
• Finally, it provides a better showcase for outbound social links such as YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.
• If the primary goal is conversion, or if you are targeting a remarketing audience, we recommend directing traffic to Steam as it shortens the user flow.

How can I get started with Second Stage TRACKS?

To get a taste of Tracks through our demo dashboards, you can create a free account at tracks.secondstage.io or contact the Second Stage team at hello@secondstage.io for a guided demo. 

— ATTRIBUTION TRACKING — 

What is the key benefit of using attribution tracking in media campaigns?

At Second Stage, our Ad Ops and BI teams leverage TRACKS for two primary purposes: tracking and targeting.

Tracking is fundamental for making data-driven business decisions, particularly focusing on maximizing ROAS for lower marketing funnel activities and biddable campaigns. TRACKS ensures that data insights are effectively utilized to optimize these campaigns.

Targeting involves using TRACKS to enhance media platform optimization with a particular focus on games marketing. In this sector, pixel tagging is challenging due to the digital PC and console storefronts being central to the user journey. As a solution, TRACKS captures ad impressions and clicks in its database. When a user opens a game and a matching fingerprint request is made, TRACKS identifies the user acquisition source and completes the attribution process. This approach allows for distinct identification of organic and paid media acquisition, providing valuable data to optimize media algorithms and maintain positive ROAS. By analyzing the best performing combinations of market, audience, asset, and medium, TRACKS helps reduce media budgets and costs in lower-funnel paid media efforts.

Additionally, TRACKS enhances targeting by creating user cohorts and valuable player segments. It allows for the grouping of the most active players to target similar audiences with lookalike models while excluding already installed players to minimize unnecessary ad spend.

Another benefit is the reduction in asset production costs, achieved by analyzing which ad variants perform best with specific audience segments.

What is the difference between TRACKS Attribution and other attribution partners?

Other attribution partners typically offer self-service implementation solutions with extensive documentation, allowing game developers to integrate as they wish. However, in PC/console environments, there is often only one correct way to implement an attribution solution, which involves multiple complex steps. Many studios require significant assistance with these tasks. 

Second Stage sets itself apart as a managed service provider. Our full-funnel attribution tracking is already connected with our marketing intelligence platform TRACKS and we guide you through the entire integration process on your end, ensuring that the solution is implemented correctly and works in the best possible way. This hands-on approach helps avoid the common pitfalls that lead to incorrect or insufficient implementations with stand-alone attribution solutions.

What sets attribution tracking through Second Stage TRACKS apart?

Many reporting suites provided by other attribution partners lack essential features, sections, and insightful charts. In contrast, Second Stage TRACKS offers a comprehensive reporting suite with multiple dimensions—strategy, objective, campaign, ad group, creative, ad format, ad type, country, date, audience, and all media, web analytics, and attribution metrics. This suite provides clear insights not only for conversion campaigns but also for awareness, creative performance, and brand health, supporting games marketing across the whole campaign lifecycle.

What platforms does TRACKS full-funnel attribution tracking support?

Our proprietary full-funnel tracking solution that ships with TRACKS supports PC and console games across all platforms, including Steam, PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and Nintendo eShop.

How can TRACKS Attribution be utilized effectively for console games and their associated user and data flows?

The short answer is: It’s similar to tracking through Steam on PC, but with an extra parameter. The core principle remains the same: When a user clicks on an ad, TRACKS collects a pseudonymized (encrypted) IP address. Whether the player opens the game on a PC or a console, a TRACKS API request runs through the game server—regardless of the port—sending the player’s pseudonymized IP information to the servers. However, with consoles, there’s an additional detail: the environment is specified, such as „Game Open“ from „PlayStation,“ for example. The platform or environment simply becomes a parameter that developers need to define in the integration code. TRACKS is compatible with Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4 / 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch.

How accurate is the attribution provided by Second Stage TRACKS?

If there are 100 ad clicks leading to 100 game opens (installs), Second Stage TRACKS targets at least 65% accuracy in attribution. This means that 65 game opens are correctly attributed to the source, while 35 are reported as organic. Additionally, we offer a modeling solution that redistributes non-tracked game opens to attribution sources using a Markov chain model, similar to Google’s conversion modeling solution available in Google Analytics 4.

TRACKS seems to surpass other attribution solutions for PC and console. How do you aim to achieve that level?

Effective attribution relies on various factors, including game setup, campaign strategy, ad placement, targeting, geographic region, and platform. Often, the challenge lies not in the attribution method itself but in its proper implementation, which can be complex. This is why TRACKS was developed: to seamlessly integrate marketing analytics with attribution tracking. As a managed service, we provide comprehensive support at every step, ensuring the client’s needs are fully addressed.

2S Attribution utilizes fingerprint tracking, also known as probabilistic attribution measurement. Research indicates a 98% accuracy rate within a 24-hour window, meaning the ad click and game launch occur on the same device. However, this accuracy decreases exponentially after 24 hours. With a typical attribution window of seven days from click to purchase for PC and console, accuracy drops to 85%. Additionally, cross-device measurement must be considered, where standard accuracy results hover around 80%. This can be taken into account in addition to our own experience using this method to attribute PC / console game opens.

How does Second Stage ensure correct implementation of TRACKS Attribution?

To ensure the Tracks attribution solution is implemented correctly, Second Stage TRACKS:

• integrates with Google Analytics (website analytics) and Steamworks Analytics.
• implements the TRACKS Attribution API logger server-side, avoiding the need for SDKs on your game server. Instead, TRACKS Attribution is integrated through a webhook, like an HTTP proxy, in your backend server where telemetric logs are pipelined.
• provides Tracks JavaScript code for your landing page. If you don’t have a landing page, we’ll provide tracking links that redirect to Steam store pages.
• offers a taxonomy guideline for naming conventions in your media campaigns (e.g., campaign, ad group, creative). If you already have a naming taxonomy, TRACKS will be mapped to your conventions.
• adds additional data touchpoints to increase the trackable player universe, such as user account creation flows or in-game QR codes to incentivize signups.
• tracks additional GAAS metrics like retention, in-game purchases, or post-install game events.
• sets up an API postback system to send in-game events back to media platforms for optimization and targeting.

Can TRACKS attribute Wishlists as well?

The TRACKS Measurement API cannot track Wishlist data since it is stored on third-party platforms like Steam and Epic. However, TRACKS can integrate with Steamworks to reflect Steam UTM Analytics data in the reporting suite. To enable this, TRACKS needs access to the „View Marketing Traffic Data“ feature on Steamworks. Unfortunately, this integration is not available for other stores like PlayStation or Xbox.

When provided as raw CSV data by the client, we can integrate Wishlist information and connect it with our media campaign insights. This allows us to gain meaningful insights into how media campaigns impact Wishlist performance for your game.

Can I use Second Stage TRACKS with my existing attribution setup?

Yes, the Second Stage TRACKS marketing intelligence platform is designed to integrate with any chosen attribution vendor, not just our solution. For us, attribution data is simply another data source, meaning you can use TRACKS with your existing setup without needing to change your current attribution vendor if you’re satisfied with it.

Does Second Stage offer any additional services regarding attribution tracking?

Yes, Second Stage also offers agency services to audit and fix any attribution setup or address bottlenecks in your data science unit through our Business Intelligence (BI) services. This ensures that your overall data infrastructure is optimized and functioning correctly.

— DATA & PRIVACY — 

How compliant is TRACKS with GDPR and privacy regulations? Are you collecting any PII (Personally Identifiable Information)?

Second Stage TRACKS is fully compliant with GDPR regulations (link). There are two integration options available:

1. Data Sent to the customers’ server: In this method, all data is sent directly to the customer’s server at their location. TRACKS does not collect any data on its side. This means it is the customer’s responsibility to ensure that proper opt-in and opt-out mechanisms are in place. This method typically comes with a higher pricing label compared to the second option, which is common among other attribution vendors.

2. Data Sent to the TRACKS Server: Here, the data is sent to TRACKS servers, which can be located in either the US or the EU. If the data is sent to the US, the client must update its privacy policy to reflect this and obtain user consent when the game is launched for the first time. 

Data Transfer Compliance: Transferring data from an EU client to the US requires a strict EULA agreement and user consent. TRACKS’ default cloud servers are located in the EU (Google Cloud Frankfurt).

PII Compliance: TRACKS handles PII in a standard manner, similar to other telemetric data collection vendors. While data is collected at the user level, it is processed in a pseudonymized and aggregated form. The primary PII concern is the client IP, which is collected as a parameter through the API. This information is not stored openly but is instead hashed using a non-reversible method, with a 30-day data retention period. The reporting suite only provides aggregated data, not user-level data, ensuring that no PII is stored or accessible.

General information about Second Stage TRACKS and End User Privacy

Under both the GDPR and the CCPA, players have the right to request the deletion of their personal information from data controllers at any time. To facilitate this, we provide two opt-out mechanisms that enable our clients to effectively handle player requests.

If your users consent to tracking, it is your responsibility to protect that data. As the game publisher and data owner, you need to ensure proper opt-in, opt-out and right to be forgotten mechanisms. Second Stage helps you meet these obligations.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) will clearly state what data will be tracked and why. If you need assistance, we can provide examples of EULAs or privacy agreements.

For those with existing data management systems, TRACKS‘ GDPR APIs can be integrated to centralize your GDPR compliance.

For marketing campaigns involving a website, TRACKS distinguishes between marketing, analytics and necessary cookies and configures the required tags according to the cookie consent mechanism.

TRACKS offers both EU-based and US-based cloud servers. A self-hosted (hybrid) version is also available for customers.