5 Gamification techniques ‘Google’ uses that you can steal 🎯.
💗 Want to make customers fall in love with your product? Continue using it, and passionately share the product with friends? Here’s how.
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⏰ I understand that time is of an essence. If you want to quickly learn the 5 techniques this is the TL;DR
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🏁 TL;DR
Building a successful worldwide product by focusing on the motivation and core drivers of their users is one of the key success factors of Google. Here is the summary of all 5 Gamification techniques ‘Google’ uses that you can steal and apply it to your product.
- Make users feel smart: Search Box + Auto-fill
- Recommendation engine: People also ask + Related search
- Leaderboards: SEM SEO
- Unpredictable experiences: Google Doodle
- Monitor attachment tool: Google Analytics
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👾 To get most out of this article, choose only ONE of the below options to do right now.
⭐️Easy: Read & Recite the 5 techniques that ‘Google’ uses without looking at the article.
⭐️⭐️Medium: Read & Take 5 minutes to write down how you can apply those techniques to your own product
⭐️⭐️⭐️Hard: Read & Try having a 30 minutes conversation with a Google expert about your gamification strategy and have them feedback on your work.
Go to the bottom of the article to discover Google managers and consultants who are willing to help!
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*Narrator’s voice starts*
You are an entrepreneur aspiring to make a dent in the universe. You get out there, talk with potential customers, get insights, and start building your MVP. You’re excited you’ve successfully launched your own product!
6 months goes by… WHY? Why there is no traction? I have a great product, great technologies and functionalities WHY?!?!?!
This is a problem most entrepreneurs face because they focus on “functional” purposes not the motivation and core drivers of their users. The harsh reality is even if it has many “functions” people don’t really have a reason to go out of their way to use the product.
🎮 To gain traction you have to think like a game designer. We don’t need to play games to survive or to be successful but we play games anyway. Games are designed using a person’s motivation and core drivers. Read more about motivation and core drivers here.
📚 To best learn how to gamify your product, we should learn from the best, the product everyone uses every day: ‘Google Search’
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👨🏼🔧 Google’s 5 Product Gamification techniques
1. Search Box + Auto-fill
A very important type of emotional accomplishment of a person is to “feel smart”. A product that makes users feel stupid, no matter how great the technology, is often a failing product.
Rule of thumb: If a user spends more than 4 seconds on an interface and don’t know what to do next, they will feel stupid and will start disengaging emotionally.
🤔 When you go to the Google Search Engine you usually see only 2 things: Google’s logo and a search box. There is almost no chance for you to feel confused on what to do next. Even if you’re not sure what to search, the auto-fill function jumps right in to give you suggestions.
Core Drive — Development & Accomplishment
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2. People also ask + Related search
The fact is you are highly influenced by people who are similar to you. A study on trust and reputation in peer-to-peer network shows that the average consumer prefers and trust reviews by peers over professional critics. By personalizing the experience with a recommendation engine and making it relatable to the user you can most likely drive traction and conversion.
Rule of thumb: A recommendation engine can get boring if the recommended contents is the same every time a user lands on the page. So switch it up a bit shuffle the contents in the recommendation engine and make it interesting!
👱🏻♀️ When you search on Google first you will see those website links then the 2nd thing that your eyes will be drawn to is the ‘People also ask’ section then at the bottom of the page you will find the ‘related search’ section. Because at the end of the day the fact is , we value the thoughts of people who we can relate to. Google utilizes that fact and dedicated 2 full sections recommending people what to search on their website.
Core Drive — Social Influence & Relatedness
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3. SEM SEO
Most businesses agree that Search Engine Marketing(SEM) and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is an effective way for improving sales and traffic to your website and is a must have. A search engine is just a large leaderboard, and the industry of SEO is simply the game to climb to the top of the leaderboard.
Rule of thumb: A leaderboard only works if climbing to the top has a tangible reward or meaning. In Google’s case climbing to the top results in 1. You can target the right people who are searching for the solution. 2. You can target them at the right time they are searching.
🏎️ Google understands that every business’s goal is to target the right people at the right time and they gamify the experiences by building a leaderboard. And the reward of the winner is quite clear. According to Forbes, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks. That’s a lot.
Core Drive — Development & Accomplishment
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4. Google Doodles
Our brain is inherently lazy, if the tasks at hand do not demand immediate attention, the neocortex delegates the mental legwork to our subconscious mind, or system 1 according to Daniel Kahneman in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. What it means is the intellectual consciousness is only used when it encounters new information it hasn’t processed before.
Rule of thumb: Creating a fun, unpredictable and a spontaneous experience can result in more engagement from users when there is the possibility of winning something.
🐓 Going into the same search page everyday can be boring. Doodles are drawings or designs that is made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists. Doodles make the experience of searching more fun and builds curiosity as users can click to learn more about important holidays and famous people which in turn make them feel smarter.
Core Drive — Unpredictability & Curiosity
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5. Google Analytics
When we own something we want to improve, protect, and obtain more of it. This connected to our investment of time or resource into customizing something into our own liking. When a user starts to own something, they immediately place more value on that item relative to others who don’t own it.
Rule of thumb: Before making users feel the product is their own, first make sure that you align you target user’s values, identity, and character as people only really hold on to things that are close to our values.
🧐 Google uses the fact that we want to improve, protect, and obtain more of something we own and built a monitor attachment tool which show users stats, charts, and graphics of things they care about. As the early days of building a website can be lonely and discouraging. You spend long hours building the site, bringing value to the world. Google analytics keeps an entrepreneur going as it enables them to track and monitor and eventually find ways to improve the numbers.
Core Drive — Ownership & Possession
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✅ Continue to the next challenge of your journey
You’ve reach the next challenge! Thank you for reading through the article, I hope it has been insightful and easy to read for you.
As for those who chose the ⭐️⭐️⭐️Hard option and want to have a 30 minutes video meeting with a Google expert that is willing to help your gamification strategy.
Here’s where you can schedule a meeting with them. Athena Mentor
🎩 Pro tip: Be prepared. Most of them are managers or executives. Therefore, both of your time is quite scarce. Do your best to make most out of this opportunity!
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Schedule a talk with me on Athena Mentor
-I’m happy to chat & share!-
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Athena Mentor: https://mentor.athenaglobal.co
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