Understanding How Analytics Help Game Developers
For social game developers, analyzing the data is a crucial process for optimizing the performance of their games. Analytics is a series of if-then scenarios that often determines how far down the road towards success a game will travel. Analytics help game developers enhance their game by demonstrating which features and mechanics their users like best.
Here’s a quick look at the analytics that you need to look at and understand how they can improve your game.
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Increase your advertising campaigns
Acquiring users are of utmost importance. Without users there will be no revenue. So identify the top performing referral source, track the life time value back to the source. Targeting the right users based on demographics and regions come next. There’s CPC, CPI, CPM pricing models, and hundreds of different ad networks, and various AdWords, Facebook Ads and cross-promotions.
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Keeping your users captivated
It is important to drive deeper engagement and longer retention. You need to understand the engagement metrics. It is also important to understand how to make your users come back, what makes them want to keep playing your games, and how to extend the time that they spend playing it. The key engagement actions for this is to understand what levels users are getting stuck at, where they’re dropping off, at what point do they become loyal users.
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Enhance your viral coefficient
While paid acquisition is necessary to initiate your growth, vitality is very important to sustain that growth. Analytics can help you measure, test and optimize your viral effectiveness, and the viral strategies change depending on the platform which the game is on, the type of game it is and many other factors. It is therefore essential to understand which gifts, messages and in-game content are the most viral. It is also important to comprehend their acceptance rate by demographic, game level, player type and other factors as well.
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Build better features and enhance your game mechanics
It is the game mechanics that are the engine that drives the complete user experience. With the gaming mechanics your game can be made unique and it can help encourage your users to play more and invite more friends. For this, it is essential to understand which features/mechanics your audience likes the most and what might be confusing to users. It is also important to understand when to ask for an invite as a wrong timing can annoy the user.
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Increase your revenues
Your game’s revenues are a byproduct of how much users love your game and whether you’ve attracted the right audience to come play it. Drive the promotion of virtual goods by understanding what goods are selling, at what price, by what method, to what audience. Balance your sources and sinks of virtual currency.
With the help of a good social gaming analytics solution you can deliver real-time data and provide a flexible platform to help customers in the social gaming market. The right solution will help leverage a powerful and advanced analytic capability that is specific to your game.
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