Analytics Tools: Evaluating the Results of Game Advertising Campaigns

Data analysis for gaming brands is one of the key factors for understanding not only the efficiency of marketing tools used in promotion but also the success of a game in the market as a whole. It is analytics that allows you to answer key questions about the quality and fun of a game, user engagement and monetization, etc.

What is data analysis for?

• To optimize a game: expand engaging content, add paid extensions, improve the design and the user experience, promptly fix bugs, etc.
• To better understand the audience and its behavior to maximize income and conduct more targeted marketing campaigns.
• To optimize the marketing strategy: exclude non-conversion tools and focus only on those channels that sell (here you should focus on such key indicators as DAU, MAU, ARPU, LTV, etc.).

Analytical systems for games

To track analytics for games, there are a lot of different analytical systems in the market today:

• Google Analytics. Suitable for collecting analytics for browser, social and mobile games.
• Yandex Metrica. Like the previous analytics service, it is suitable for tracking events in the browser, social and mobile games.
• Steamworks. UTM analytics on Steam to track the number of visits and purchases of a game, except for in-game purchases.
• Mixpanel, Localytics, Flurry, devtodev, deltaDNA, GameAnalytics, etc. — all these are for mobile and social gaming analytics.

To name a few. The choice of analytics systems and indicators depends on a game platform, on what hypotheses need to be formulated and tested, and on the actual marketing budget (since not all systems are free).

It is important not only to choose an analytics tool but also to configure it properly. To achieve this, you need to determine the dependence of each traffic channel on the user's life path, breaking this path into stages: from the beginning of installation to full power leveling and payments. The chain of custom events not only creates a convenient funnel for each traffic channel (and allows you to count the conversion), but also makes it possible to determine the exact place of loss at each stage.

Game analytics and marketing

In the process of promoting a game on the market, depending on the budget, dozens of different channels can be involved. But not all of them are equally effective. Therefore, to understand which channel attracts the most converting and paying traffic, you need to constantly monitor the key indicators and their ratio.

Analytics in game marketing allows to:

• identify the most conversion channels,
• efficiently allocate budget and resources to operating channels,
• optimize the promotion strategy.

Determining KPI

For different games, the key conversion rates of the channel will be different. Accordingly, it is important to set up purpose tracking in the analytics system. For example, for paid games, this is CPI; for free games with in-game purchases, two indicators will be important — CPI and LTV. If in the first case, you can choose the most effective promotion channel relatively quickly, based on sales and ROI, then in the second case it will take more time and analytical data. In this case, focusing only on one of the indicators (game installations or the amount of in-game payments) to determine the efficiency of the marketing channel will not be quite correct. You need to look at the final LTV/CPI metric, again in relation to ROI.

Marking traffic sources

To track the source of traffic, it is important to properly configure UTM tags — with their help, you can easily track which advertisement, banner, post or article on the Internet brought the target user.

Another way to identify the traffic source is promotional codes. They are most often used in collaboration with streamers and bloggers.

In either case, it is important to remember that each traffic source should have its own unique identifier (label or promo code).

Optimizing your marketing strategy

Be prepared that, depending on the data obtained during the analysis, you will need to constantly make adjustments to the overall marketing strategy: change creatives, reallocate the budget, look for new promotion channels, etc. Thus, game developers often do not have enough time and knowledge to make changes to the marketing campaign as efficiently and quickly as possible on the basis of the data obtained during the analysis. RMAA Games experts help game developers design and implement effective data-driven marketing strategies.

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