Creating an app or cellular recreation is one factor, however staying on high of its efficiency is one thing else totally. Builders are capable of create a clearer image of their titles by analysing key metrics and making adjustments that enhance the expertise.
With gamers demanding higher high quality video games and an abundance of titles to select from, competitors is fierce. Due to this fact, realizing what to maintain an in depth eye on and the way finest to take action is more and more necessary.
In a latest joint meetup between Azur Video games and Google Adverts, the event and monetising of hypercasual video games was analysed. As a part of this meetup, Azur Video games CRO Maksim Kozhnov shared some perception relating to metrics and how one can enhance your analytics.
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At present, there’s lots of discuss how video games have gotten extra advanced and the way participant calls for for high quality and amount of content material are rising. Consequently, the analytical strategy can also be enhancing. I need to clarify how one can enhance your analytics and transfer past easy metrics to extra advanced ones that may profit your mission.
Let’s begin by briefly discussing common metrics that everybody is aware of and makes use of. These could be divided into three teams.
Firstly, there are product metrics reminiscent of retention, playtime, and different. There’s nothing new to say about these.
The second group is monetisation metrics. These embrace in-app purchases, advert monetisation, and subscriptions. The principle metric right here is LTV. Different metrics we take a look at embrace impressions, each day impressions, cumulative impressions as much as a sure day, and so forth.
The third group is person acquisition metrics, together with CPI, CTR, conversion price, set up price, ROI, and natural share. These metrics are additionally pretty normal.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to keep in mind that your most important metric is all the time return on funding (ROI). If it is greater than 100%, your mission is worthwhile. There are numerous methods to attain this.
For example, you could have a comparatively low retention price, however your natural share may nonetheless be very excessive, which is superb to your product. Alternatively, you could have a excessive CPI, however your LTV is even greater, which may additionally lead to an excellent ROI. Due to this fact, it is not unusual for sure metrics to fall beneath benchmark values, but your product can nonetheless generate a considerable revenue. For instance, our Hair Tattoo and Bike Hope initiatives have R1 charges of round 30%, however they will nonetheless obtain glorious income by the tip of their life cycle.
Now let’s transfer on to extra advanced subjects. I am going to divide them into 4 themes: funnels, advert monetisation metrics, technical metrics, and probably the most fascinating half — how one can work with heatmaps.
Working with funnels
Let’s begin with funnels. They are a widely-used software in analytics that assist observe person churn charges at completely different levels.
On the suitable aspect, you may see an instance of a easy degree development funnel in one in all our video games, however it would not present a lot data to attract conclusions from.
To realize extra insights, we add extra metrics to our funnel, as proven within the desk on the left. Initially, we divide our funnel into the beginning and the tip of the degrees. This enables us to know at which stage individuals are truly leaving the sport — throughout a degree or between them — for fully completely different causes.
Moreover, we add the win price and common time spent on a degree to our funnel, so we will exactly decide why a person left, whether or not it was as a consequence of a troublesome degree or a degree that took too lengthy to finish.
Let’s take a more in-depth take a look at why it is necessary to think about step size when working with churn price. This is an instance funnel for a city-building recreation, or an idle recreation.
At first look, step 4 might appear to be the worst with a 20% churn price, however it’s truly extra advanced than that. If we add the time elapsed since set up to this funnel, issues turn out to be clearer.
At step 4, the churn price is 20%, whereas it is solely 10% for different steps. Nevertheless, step 4 takes longer to finish, so it is affordable to anticipate extra folks to depart the sport over an extended time frame.
To make clear the state of affairs, let’s plot all the information factors on a graph the place the y-axis represents the share of gamers from the time of set up, and the x-axis represents the time elapsed since set up. Now, we will see that step 4 truly falls on the identical line as all the opposite steps besides step three. It’s because a ten% churn price is important for under 30 seconds of gameplay. So, try to be searching for points there as a substitute of specializing in step 4.
Let’s discuss promoting networks
We’ve a number of promoting networks in our video games, however in some circumstances, promoting from sure networks might elicit a unfavourable response from customers. For example, they may have points with software program growth kits (SDK) or issues with closing the advert window, or the commercials may merely be too aggressive. To watch this situation, we take a look at the session closure price. An instance of this metric could be seen within the following desk.
That is actual information from one in all our video games. To calculate this metric, we divide the variety of impressions that led to session closure by the whole variety of impressions within the community. As you may see, it is evident that some networks carry out worse than others.
Due to this fact, we fully disabled Advert Community 5 and 6. This led to a ten% enhance in retention and LTV. Often, it is not a good suggestion to show off complete promoting networks as a result of your eCPM might drop. Nevertheless, in some circumstances, rising retention by disabling some networks can compensate for the eCPM drop, leading to revenue. It is even higher to disable particular adverts inflicting points, however you want lots of information for this. In our case, because it was a comparatively small mission, we did not have sufficient information, so we fully disabled two promoting networks, but we nonetheless bought good revenue.
When analysing adverts, it is necessary to additionally look at the distribution of impressions amongst customers.
It’s because there are situations when you’ve gotten an equal variety of impressions per person, however the LTV differs between teams. This occurs as a consequence of eCPM fatigue with each subsequent view for every person. For instance, in group B on this graph, many customers did not watch any adverts, whereas many others watched lots of adverts. On this case, the LTV in group B can be decrease than in group A.
Shifting on to technical metrics
It’s evident that your mission’s technical situation considerably impacts retention and, consequently, monetisation. Regardless of this reality, few folks take note of it.
What will we imply by technical metrics? Firstly, we consult with FPS, common and median values, to know how easily the sport runs. We additionally observe the variety of FPS drops, durations when the FPS drops beneath sure ranges. Reminiscence utilization can also be tracked in the same method. Moreover, sending information about crashes to analytics is useful to know which particular occasions within the recreation triggered the crashes. It’s endorsed to ship this information to particular crash instruments like Google’s Crashlytics.
Lastly, we utilise technical funnels to determine issues in loading sequences.
The steps on this funnel characterize necessary levels throughout the loading course of, reminiscent of accepting permissions, loading recreation sources, loading SDKs, buying a profile from the server, and related actions. This can assist you find issues successfully.
In the event you observe a excessive churn price between the set up and begin of the tutorial, you need to examine the technical funnel. Moreover, it’s advisable to trace the time between steps on this funnel, as some steps might take longer than anticipated.
Right here is an instance of how technical metrics are utilized in a real-life state of affairs in a multiplayer shooter recreation, World Warfare Heroes.
Following the discharge of a brand new model of our recreation, we seen a rise within the variety of crashes. Our builders decided that almost all of those crashes have been associated to reminiscence utilization, and our analysts found that they primarily occurred throughout battles. To handle the difficulty, we examined the connection between reminiscence utilization and battle numbers and located reminiscence leaks. We collected further analytics on this downside, figuring out the maps and recreation modes the place it occurred, which helped us to seek out and repair the difficulty.
Heatmaps
A heatmap is a graphical illustration of information that makes use of color coding to characterize completely different values. This is a couple of examples:
They are often very useful in degree design, permitting you to check participant motion routes, sniper positions, gathering spots for gamers, areas the place gamers get caught, or the place they exit the sport. Heatmaps may also be used to check person interface (UI) components in UI-dependent video games and apps, reminiscent of figuring out which components are extra incessantly used and the place customers faucet on the display.
Whereas we primarily use heatmaps on our midcore initiatives, they are often helpful in hypercasual video games as effectively, particularly if the sport has advanced maps.
Right here’s how we used heatmaps for an off-road simulator:
This recreation requires you to manoeuvre a truck via difficult terrain by utilising gear shifting and different intriguing truck driving techniques. We seen a big drop-off in gamers between tutorial levels, however could not discern why as a result of map being too open-ended, leading to a number of hypotheses.
To handle this situation, we started sending participant coordinates to analytics each few seconds. These coordinates have been then positioned onto a map screenshot, the place a coordinate grid was marked, and the variety of participant occasions in every cell was tallied. The brighter the cell, the extra occasions came about in that specific spot. This is an instance:
The extreme crimson areas on the left map point out the place gamers bought caught probably the most. By figuring out these spots, we have been capable of modify the map and incorporate further tutorial tricks to help gamers in comprehending what they wanted to do.
We additionally colour-coded the tutorial into advanced segments and found that some gamers merely disregarded tutorial ideas and proceeded straight to the goal purpose, which led to being caught. This is a screenshot from the sport:
The blue line represents the tutorial path from one checkpoint to a different, whereas the crimson arrow signifies the ultimate goal. Some gamers noticed the target straight away and tried to achieve it straight, leading to being caught on rocks. Due to the warmth map, we have been capable of determine and handle these points, leading to a 15% enhance in retention and tutorial development.
Edited by Paige Cook dinner
