As a game developer or a gaming company, it is very important to track some basic gaming events to understand if your consumers like a game, how far have they progressed, have they made a purchase or will they be willing to make one in the near future.
Here’s a one-stop-shop listing out a few back metrics that developers must track (especially in a freemium game) to know the health of their game:
- Retention: It measures how often people come back to your game on Day X. (Eg: Day 1, Day 3, Day 7, Day 30). Good graphics, fast loading times and well paced content are some of the ways to improve retention within a game.
- DAU, MAU: DAU (Daily Active Users) is used to show the number of people who engage with your game on daily basis. This data help you understand the audience size your ad impressions can reach, the number of players who could potentially make an in-app purchase and the number of players your server needs to support daily.MAU (Monthly Active Users) is used to show the number of people who engaged with your game for the month.
- Virality: It indicates how many of your users are promoting and evangelising your game. This can be done through word of mouth, inviting friends from within the game. Better the vitality, lower the effective acquisition cost.
- ARPU: Average Revenue Per User: This lets you now how much revenue your game makes per player. This figure is derived by dividing the total revenue of the game by the total number of players.
- ARPDAU: Average Revenue Per Daily Active User is the amount of revenue that your game makes per active user.
- ARPPU: Average Revenue Per Paying User is the average amount of revenue that your game makes for each paying player. Since it calculates the amount spent by paying users only, this figure will be higher than ARPU
- Conversion Rate: This indicates what percentage of payers make a purchase.
- LTV: Lifetime Value: It is the average amount of money that a user will generate in a game from the time of download till churn.
- Daily Sessions: The number of play sessions a user engages each day. Sessions tell you how frequently a player plays your game (three times a day, six times a month etc) and by measuring the duration of sessions we can work out the average time that they spend playing the game in any given period.
- CPA: Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Install gives you an idea of the price you pay to acquire a single user, whether organically, or more likely, through advertising. If CPA remains higher than LTV for too long, a game will likely fail.
