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Mobile games generated more than $92 billion in revenue in 2022. However, a few very profitable games account for a large share of revenue, while many apps never become profitable. The effective use of mobile game analytics is one of the traits that sets highly successful game developers apart from the rest of the industry.
Key Takeaways:
Mobile game analytics refers to collecting, processing, and interpreting player data to gain insight into the behavior and preferences of users. Examples of player data you may want to analyze include:
Analyzing this data provides insight into how players interact with your game, what players like and don’t like about your game, how you can improve your game to better meet player expectations, and changes you can make to achieve your financial and other goals.
To optimize the performance of your game, you must understand how your game is currently performing. Analytics provides a way to track your game’s performance and analyze it to determine how to meet your goals.
The technical performance of your game is important for retaining users. If your game glitches, crashes frequently, or takes too long to load, players will quit playing.
It is difficult to test a game on every possible device and under all conditions. However, you can analyze the data from your players to spot compatibility issues on different devices or specific conditions that cause problems. You can also track how your game performs in different geographic regions and adjust server loads to prevent crashes and other issues.
The total revenue your game generates gives you a rough idea of how successful your monetization strategy is, but it doesn’t tell you much about which parts of your strategy work and which could use improvement. By using mobile game analytics, you can identify which gameplay features, marketing campaigns, events, and monetization strategies drive engagement and which don’t.
You can then take what you have learned about player engagement and retention and use that information to better forecast the lifetime value of specific players or player segments. This data is useful for determining how much you should spend on player acquisition.
The games that keep players playing for the longest time tend to be the most profitable. Analytics helps you determine what you need to adjust in your game to improve engagement and retention and keep players interested in your game long-term.
Players generate a lot of data every day, but it isn’t practical to analyze all of it, and not all of it is useful. Your specific goals will dictate which metrics are the most useful for you to analyze. There are dozens of different possible metrics. These are a few examples of the most useful.
Because mobile games rely on accumulating many small transactions to generate revenue, the number of users who install your game is important. Tracking how this number changes in response to your player acquisition efforts can help you judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Retention rate measures the percentage of users who keep playing your game after their first session. Players who install a game and then abandon it shortly after usually don’t generate much revenue. The higher you can get your retention rate, the more likely your game is to generate profits.
Retention rates at different points in time provide insights into different aspects of your game. For example, your day-one retention rate assesses what kind of first impression your game makes. If your day-one retention is low, you may need to make adjustments to your onboarding process, load times, or tutorials.
Retention on day seven is a good indicator of how well players like your game after they have played it for a while. Players who are still playing after seven days are likely to keep playing. If too many users are churning before day seven, your game probably isn’t engaging enough.
Users who are still playing after 30 days are loyal. These are the users who are the most likely to watch ads and make in-game purchases. The more loyal users you can attract, the more money you will make.
Daily and monthly active users are the number of users who played your game on a specific day or during a specific month. Tracking these metrics as part of your mobile game analytics will help you identify trends and patterns in user behavior and are useful for assessing how engaging your game is and the impact various changes you make have on engagement.
Conversion rate measures how well any aspect of your game you want to track performs at getting the user to take the desired action. For example, you could track how often a push notification convinces players to log in to the game.
Whether you are just getting started with mobile game analytics or want to get more use out of the data you have, the team at Sonamine can help. Our team of experts can teach you the strategies that will give you a leg up on less data-oriented competitors. Additionally, we offer engagement, retention, and monetization services that you can use to get the most out of the insights you gain from your analysis. Contact us today to get started.
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For a limited time until June 2024, Sonamine is offering a 60 day money back guarantee to Braze customers. Come experience the ease and simplicity of the First Time Spender Nudge package and watch your conversions soar.
