If you’re building your product for Google:

• Customer Acquisition - Google adwords, a highly competitive market largely saturated
• Activation (getting a unique user) - Google accounts or opensocial, both of which have done relatively poorly in our tests.
• Viral/Organic - Search engine optimization, an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for potential organic customer growth. Difficult but possible.
• Retention - Nothing particular to Google. Search engine optimization?
• Revenue - Optionally opt for Google checkout, which has been a mediocre product so far.

If you’re building your product for Facebook:

• Acquisition - Facebook ads, a less expensive, less competitive market with better targeting by demographics. Although for strict “intent” like ecommerce purchasing it can underperform. For games like ours it’s a no brainer.
• Activation - Facebook connect or authorization flow of fb apps. We saw activation jump by 4x via typical email/password.
• Viral/Organic - Feed & invite optimization (viral, viral, viral!), an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for acquisition. Very much analogous to SEO, but with more control in the hands of product builders. Although more difficult than two years ago, a much better market to be in than SEO.
• Retention - Internal bookmarking, games/app dashboard. Thin but they’ve got something.
• Revenue - Optionally opt for Facebook payments. Early, but we’ve seen good results in their alpha and their team has been very responsive.

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