Analyzing the Outcomes of Game Advertising Campaigns: Analytics Tools

Data analysis plays a crucial role in understanding the effectiveness of marketing tools used in game promotion and assessing overall market success. Analytics provides answers to key questions about game quality, user engagement, monetization, and more.

Why is Data Analysis Important?

1. Game Optimization: Data analysis helps optimize games by expanding engaging content, introducing paid extensions, improving design and user experience, and promptly addressing bugs.
2. Audience Understanding: By analyzing data, brands gain insights into audience behavior, enabling them to maximize revenue and conduct more targeted marketing campaigns.
3. Marketing Strategy Optimization: Data analysis allows brands to exclude non-converting channels and focus solely on those that generate sales. Key indicators like DAU (Daily Active Users), MAU (Monthly Active Users), ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), LTV (Lifetime Value), and more inform strategic decision-making.

Analytics Systems for Games

Various analytical systems are available in the market for tracking game analytics. Some popular ones include:

• Google Analytics: Suitable for collecting analytics for browser, social, and mobile games.
• Yandex Metrica: Similar to Google Analytics, it tracks events in browser, social, and mobile games.
• Steamworks: Provides UTM analytics on Steam to track game visits and purchases (excluding in-game purchases).
• Mixpanel, Localytics, Flurry, devtodev, deltaDNA, GameAnalytics, and others: These systems specialize in mobile and social gaming analytics.

The choice of analytics systems and indicators depends on the game platform, specific hypotheses to be formulated and tested, and the available marketing budget (as not all systems are free).

Configuring Analytics Systems

Choosing the right analytics tool is only part of the equation; proper configuration is equally important. To achieve this, brands should determine the user’s journey across each traffic channel, breaking it down into stages from installation to full power leveling and payments. Creating a chain of custom events allows for the construction of convenient funnels for each traffic channel, enabling conversion tracking and identification of specific stages where user loss occurs.

Game Analytics and Marketing: Maximizing Efficiency

During the game promotion process, numerous channels can be utilized depending on the budget. However, not all channels yield the same level of effectiveness. Therefore, continuous monitoring of key indicators and their ratios is crucial to understand which channels attract the most converting and paying traffic.

Benefits of Game Analytics in Marketing:

1. Identifying High-Converting Channels: Analytics enables the identification of channels that generate the highest conversion rates, allowing for focused efforts on the most effective ones.
2. Efficient Resource Allocation: By analyzing data, marketers can allocate budgets and resources effectively among the operating channels, maximizing return on investment.
3. Optimization of Promotion Strategy: Game analytics empowers marketers to optimize their promotion strategy by identifying the most successful channels and making data-driven decisions.

Determining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

Different games have different key conversion rates for each channel. Thus, it is essential to set up purpose tracking in the analytics system. For example, for paid games, Cost per Install (CPI) may be a significant indicator, while free games with in-game purchases require attention to both CPI and Lifetime Value (LTV). In the former case, it is relatively quick to identify the most effective promotion channel based on sales and ROI. However, in the latter case, a longer time frame and more analytical data are necessary. Relying solely on one indicator, such as game installations or in-game payments, to assess the efficiency of a marketing channel would not be entirely accurate. It is vital to consider the final LTV/CPI metric, in conjunction with ROI, for a comprehensive evaluation.

Tracking and Optimizing Traffic Sources

To effectively track the source of traffic, it is crucial to properly configure UTM tags. These tags allow for easy tracking of the specific advertisement, banner, post, or article on the internet that brought in the target users.

Promotional codes serve as another method for identifying the source of traffic, especially when collaborating with streamers and bloggers.

In both cases, it is essential to assign a unique identifier, such as a label or promo code, to each traffic source.

Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

It’s important to be prepared for continuous adjustments to the overall marketing strategy based on the data obtained through analysis. This may involve changing creatives, reallocating budgets, exploring new promotion channels, and more. However, game developers often lack the time and expertise required to efficiently and swiftly make these changes based on data analysis.

At QB Agency, our experts specialize in helping game developers design and implement effective, data-driven marketing strategies. With our support, developers can leverage the insights gained from analysis to make informed decisions and optimize their marketing campaigns.