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Mobile game developers face intense competition for players’ time and money. Not only are there thousands of other games on the market, but games must compete with television, film, music, social media, and other entertainment options.
One way gaming companies can get a leg up on the competition is to take advantage of the more than 50 terabytes of data gamers generate every day by embracing analytics for mobile games.
Key Takeaways:
Mobile game analytics is the process of collecting and interpreting player data to generate meaningful insights into player behavior and preferences. Analytics help developers make their games better and more profitable in a variety of ways.
Creating balance is one of the keys to building a successful game. If players advance too quickly or not quickly enough or resources are too easy or too difficult to come by, players may leave your game.
Analytics allows you to map how players progress through your game and identify frustrating levels or game mechanics that may lead to churn. It also makes it possible to track how players are acquiring and using in-game resources so that you can identify any bottlenecks where resource sinks and sources lack balance.
For multiplayer online games, analytics helps developers analyze how well games perform in different regions and make adjustments to server loads to ensure the game runs smoothly for all users. You can also use analytics to determine how effective any updates you make to your game are by conducting A/B testing.
Developers have traditionally tried to improve the player experience by using surveys, player forums, and bug reports to solicit feedback from players. Analytics complements rather than replaces traditional user feedback. You can use analytics to gain a deeper insight into issues pointed out by players and to discover motivations players may be unaware of or unable to fully articulate.
Challenge is important in video games. When games are too easy, players get bored and quit. However, levels or game mechanics that are too challenging or challenges that are not rewarding enough create frustration that can lead to churn. Analyzing your player’s behavior helps you spot pain points that lead to churn and fix them.
Analysis isn’t just about finding what makes your players unhappy. It also helps you discover what players like the most about your game and incorporate more of it through tweaks, updates, and new features.
Additionally, the data you gather about your players makes it possible to create a personalized gaming experience that makes your game more engaging. When players feel like they are getting a unique experience based on how they play, they are more likely to keep coming back to your game rather than trying out a competitor.
Improving your game and the player experience should lead to better engagement and retention which should generate more profit. However, there are other ways you can use analytics to increase profitability.
Making a profitable game starts with attracting players to your game. The main way gaming companies accomplish this is through marketing. Acquiring new players is expensive. Without analytics, you can easily end up throwing money at players who are unlikely to ever want to play your game.
Targeted marketing ensures you get more return for your player acquisition dollar by using analytics to tailor marketing messages to the preferences of the people who are the most likely to want to play your game. This reduces player acquisition costs and the chance that you will lose existing players by annoying them with irrelevant marketing messages.
Once you have attracted players to your game, you must keep them playing to make money. Players expect games to be highly engaging and personalized. Because there is so much competition for players’ time and entertainment dollars, if they don’t get the experience they expect, they will often churn on day one. The ability to create highly tailored experiences opens up the opportunity to better monetize your game’s most loyal players.
Tracking your return on investment indicates how profitable your game is. You can increase your ROI by using analytics to improve your monetization strategies.
Analytics for mobile games helps you determine what players want to buy and when they want to buy it. Analytics also help you strategically introduce bottlenecks and surpluses to incentivize purchases and reward play.
Analyzing player spending patterns by tracking KPIs such as average revenue per paid user and conversion rates provides insight into how effective your monetization strategies are. Low conversion rates may indicate that players do not have enough incentive to make purchases or engage with monetization systems.
Analytics allows you to track which aspects of your game lead to monetization and how this changes over time. You can then proactively tweak your game to account for underperforming monetization strategies or get ahead of projected drop-offs.
Sonamine offers a variety of retention, engagement, and monetization services built around analytics in mobile games. We provide creative services, A/B testing, reporting, and ongoing tweaks to help you get the most out of the insights you gain through your analysis. Contact us today to get started. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in
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For a limited time until Mar 2025, Sonamine is offering a 60 day money back guarantee to Braze customers. Come experience the ease and simplicity of the First Time Spender Nudge package and watch your conversions soar.
