A List Of Essential Outside Parameters For Mobile Game Developers

When we touch the base upon mobile game performance analytics, a majority of game developers get confused with a variety of basic and advanced parameters they need to track. These days, there are so many metrics that should be monitored, for instance, an overall number of downloads, quantity of active users per day, market segmentation, conversion, average revenue, and much more. But the question is what can these numbers actually report to a game developer? How can he or she interpret the metrics to figure out how successful the game is? In this article we introduce a list of useful parameters that mobile devs should pay attention to when analyzing the game they designed.

#1 Daily Active Users (DAU)

This basic parameter introduces an overall number of players who initiate at least one session on a daily basis. On the other hand, this stats cannot provide you with many insights of an app's performance. Nevertheless, noticing this information is a great beginning of your analysis.

We offer you to take a look at some examples to understand this metric more clearly. For an illustration let's consider the popular game that generates 9,000 of daily engaged players who actively make in-app purchase and contrast it with a business app that shows more than a million of involved users each day, but has no way to monetize. DAU parameter is basically a snapshot in time and it is important to take the context into consideration since different applications have different goals.

#2 DAU/MAU

The relation of daily to monthly active users explains how good a game keeps users and how often players initiate new sessions. Take for an instance 10,000 MAU and 3,000 DAU. Then the DAU/MAU relation will be 0,3 percent which means that a user logs in to your game in approximately 0,3 % of days a month. The majority of popular games report a ratio close to 20%.

#3 Sessions

Each time when any user opens the game at his or her device you can consider that a session. The total amount of sessions should respect a context in order to be an advantageous number likewise a DAU indicators. Mobile game development experts need to be focused on an average amount of sessions each day since it can show them how much users are interested in the game. The type of the game does not affect the number of sessions. Besides, you should count not only unique users but also an amount of players that return a few times throughout the day.

#4 Retention Rate

This metric is considered to be more important for games with no monetization strategy. Beneficial free-to-play games are aimed to built longstanding relationships based on a mutual trust. To estimate the retention rate game developers need to divide users into groups depends on a day they’ve downloaded an application. The calculation occurs the following way:

The day of the download is taken as starting point. If the user starts a session of your game on the next day, they are featured as retained, if no, they don't count at all. The estimation calculates on the next day after the downloading procedure.

#5 Conversion Rate

Perhaps the most important metric for the majority of game developers is a conversion rate. All the rest parameters measure how sufficiently you are able to build a relationship with your target audience. However, this metric can show you how much money your mobile game can make. The conversion rate assesses the absolute number of gamers that have made a purchase inside the game. Moreover, in free-to-play games, the conversion rate can also be calculated.

#6 Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU)

This metric measures the daily performance of the app. ARPDAU is often tracked during player attraction campaign. Before starting to draw users' attention to your game, make sure you are aware of ARPDAU number and how it typically changes. During user acquisition campaign separate the players into groups by a source they came from and then analyze what group show the best results.

#7 Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)

This metric regards the segment of users who made a purchase in a game. ARPPU can vary depending on a game type. Serious games show higher parameters related to monetization, especially ARPPU, however, they lose some points to casual games in terms of a number of active players.

#8 Churn

This parameter is the opposite to retention and measures a number of users that have your game on their device but don't use it anymore. However, there are some slight differences that are related to the interpretation of this number in free-to-play games.

For games that allow monetization churn is clearly understandable. Users either play a game or not. In free games, a few users may log in once a week, while others play it a couple of times on a daily basis. For that reason in free-to-play games, developers separate the groups of the ones who play and the ones who don't by measuring churn by users who haven't used an app for more than 28 days.

Conclusion

Game analytics is not always difficult when it comes to assessing available metrics. The only thing you should know is what numbers to look at. The most important part of the analytical campaign is to understand how your target users and active players behave and then develop a profitable user attraction strategy.

Victor Terekhovskyi, Marketing Specialist at Program-Ace