‍

By Munira Rangwala

‍

With game designers and data analysts trying to learn about the players’ behaviours, it’s essential to track the right events and collect the right data that is meaningful. By tracking the right events, studios can better optimise the user experience, increase stickiness within their app, measure performance, or find trends in user behaviour.

‍

Before we dive into the metrics that make event tracking reliable, let’s start by decoding what event tracking is.

‍

Any specific action that occurs while an app is being used is termed as an ‘event’. Let’s simplify this further - Whether you tap a button, claim a reward or make an in-app purchase, you trigger an in-app event. Any actions within the app can trigger an event.

‍

However, for event tracking to actually work, events need to be designed properly. We’ve put together a few rules that will make your event tracking journey a fruitful one.

‍

Set a goal for your game - The Pirate Metrics “AARRR”

Use a GQM (Goal Question Metric) framework to set a goal for your game. Your goals can be as broad or as direct as you want them to be. Most apps face a similar problem when they are launching - retaining users and getting them to spend money on in-app purchases. According to Dave McClure, entrepreneur and angel investor, mobile game and app studios should follow these 5 goals to drive high growth rate for your app. 

• Acquisition - Get users to play your game
• Activation - Get users interested in your game
• Retention -  Get users to come back to your game
• Referral - Get users to talk about your game 
• Revenue - Get users to spend money in your game

Tracking the above 5 goals will help you understand where you’ve gone wrong and what you can improve.

‍

As per a report in SensorTower, Roblox used event tracking to gain metrics on the unique ways they implemented to acquire new users. On November 29, 2022, Roblox introduced a Live Event titled ‘FIFA World Cup’. In this event, a virtual world cup festival was held which allowed players to celebrate sports events together. The revenue for this event saw a slight decrease at the beginning, but a significant recovery was made at the end of its first 7 days.

‍

No, you don’t have to track everything

When tracking an event, the goal should be to get specific data that will help designers and developers understand the point where most players bounce off. If you harvest all the data at your disposal, you’ll spend a considerable amount of time sorting through and making sense of the data at hand.

For instance, start by making a list of the features that you want to track. Every tracking element should be useful in your analysis.

If a player makes an in-app purchase in the shop, you could analyse how fast the user bought this item after seeing it for the first time with these parameters:

• shopVisitTotal: Total visit of the shop in the player’s lifetime
• shopVisitSession: Total visits of the shop in this session
• offerImpressionSession: Total impressions of the offer this session
• offerImpressionTotal: Total impressions of the offer in the player’s lifetime

‍

Some of additional recommended custom events include:

‍Giving structure to your event tracking

Google Sheets is a great tool for storing and maintaining event structures. Create a new tab for every version of the app and colour the events added in each of them. In this case you will always be able to track changes in the event structure.

In order to avoid confusion in the event names, it is handy to name them based on the “Object + action” convention.

For example, the start of a new game level can be called “Level started,” and a purchase in the store will look like “Premium purchased.”

This will make it easy for anyone to map actions to events. It will also help you categorise and browse through your events, because all actions with a specific object will be shown next to each other in the interface.

‍

‍Visualise your event performance

‍

Funnel your in-app event data into a BI tool that can help to spot trends and patterns immediately. Identify top performing events based on UA metrics such as LTV, RR or ROAS and analyse further performance breakdown based on the custom events to spot profitability. 

You can use Cost Center’s Event Picker and Level Analytics to map game play data into charts and graphs. Level Analytics graphs are broken down into user game play, ad impressions, Ad revenue and IAP revenue. Some of the charts include:

• Abandonment rate by level
• Completion rate by level
• Failure rate by level
• Interstitial impression per user by level
• Rewarded ad impression per user by level
• Ad LTV by level
• IAP Revenue per user by level

‍

Use the data to tell a story

Once you have sliced and diced the data and made sense of it, the next step is to use that data to make improvements to your mobile game that your users will love and appreciate. Charts available in Cost Center’s Level Analytics allows you to compare events performances of different date ranges across all the levels to identify change in player behaviour.  For example, what is the cause for a drop in levelstart for Level 29, was that due to too many interstitial ad impressions per user? Or how does ad impression impacts Ad LTV?

‍‍

Segment your users based on performance

When you have identified some patterns/trends, start segregating your data, it is important to bunch it into segments for personalisation. One of the easiest ways to create a segment is using performance benchmarks. For example, all those who have LTV D1 at $0.10 will be in one segment and players who have LTV D1 at $1 will be in another segment. With such segmentation, you can roll out personalised game play experience through A/B Testing using Firebase Remote Config. Optimise your app better to improve on the engagement and ultimately, the users’ LTV.

‍

Don’t ignore event parameters

Sometimes it is not enough to know that a certain event has occurred. We need to factor in the circumstances surrounding that event. Use Firebase to add parameters to your events - these will work as special variables and make the transfer of data more relevant. 

For example, when a player completes a challengelevel, they trigger the ‘challenge’ parameter.

Some other events become irrelevant if they don’t have the right parameters attached to them. For example, when a user views a certain category, that data is irrelevant if we don’t know the category they viewed.

Here’s the thing about adding parameters - if you add the right ones, you remove the need to set up separate events. For example, the “earned score” parameter eliminates the need for completing a level with 0, 1, etc. points.

Read more about setting up events for Cost Center’s Level Analytics here. 

__________________________________________________

An in-app event markup should follow 3 simple steps:

1. Formulating concrete questions -  How many users installed the app? Do users make in-app purchases?
2. Aligning with the app’s logic - The app’s logic should allow for technical capabilities like tracking purchases and level completion.
3. Matching each question with a relevant event - Only track events that will provide answers to your questions.

‍

To sum up, event tracking will help you think about your game from an analyst’s point of view. Often, people blindly implement tracking and don’t know what to do with all the data they are inundated with. But if you think like an analyst and plan your KPI of attack, you’ll witness a rise in your numbers over time. Want to learn more about event tracking? Feel free to reach out to us!

‍