Online platform owners should check website status regularly to discover problems in time. Responsible developers of mobile games also carry out the same procedure. Some metrics may be crucial in one situation but may only matter a little in another. Nonetheless, certain metrics are typically found on monitoring dashboards for mobile games nowadays.
A standard set of metrics consists of core KPIs that measure performance in five critical areas: Overall Growth, Engagement, User Experience, Infrastructure, and Monetization. We will discuss each of these in detail.
Overall Growth
Overall Growth KPIs provide insights into the app’s overall performance, including the size of the player base, user growth, popularity, and potential opportunities. For example, you can check Dead By Daylight status, the number of downloads, installs, sign-ups/registrations completed by users, upgrades to premium or paid versions, and user growth rate, which measures how much the user base has grown or decreased over a specific period.
Metrics such as downloads, installs, and sign-ups are useful for analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) in various areas. They provide insights into user activity at each stage of the user acquisition funnel, from downloading to installing and converting.
Engagement
Engagement metrics help you measure user behavior and activity level in an unbiased way. While Overall Growth KPIs track how effectively your game attracts and increases your user base, engagement KPIs indicate how well your app retains its current users.
It’s best to use multiple engagement KPIs together to measure engagement better. For instance, comparing sessions to DAU provides a more precise measure of engagement than just looking at the session numbers alone. Sessions per DAU indicate the average number of times a unique user plays a game per day, which is a significant factor to consider in a free-to-play mobile game.
User Experience
Tracking these KPIs is crucial as they provide information on the quality of the gaming experience offered by your app, making them one of the most important data points to watch.
Load times refer to when players must wait before using the app or moving to another screen, while crashes measure how often the app freezes or unexpectedly exits. The user error rate is the percentage of user actions that are either slips or mistakes, reflecting the game UI’s usability. These metrics can be used to predict or determine engagement and monetization in your game because they offer direct insight into how users enjoy it.
Infrastructure
KPIs for infrastructure assess the state and dependability of the system supporting your mobile application.
This category of metrics is crucial as it directly impacts the user experience, affecting other KPIs’ behavior. The metrics to consider are throughput, which is the number of requests received by your server per second, latency, which is the total time it takes for data to travel between the mobile app and the server, uptime, which shows how often your server or other services are available, and hardware utilization, which includes CPU, memory, and disk usage. Additionally, you should consider infrastructure cost, which is the cost of running your mobile game infrastructure.
The KPIs you choose for monitoring your mobile game’s infrastructure depend on complexity. The metrics we listed earlier are standard infrastructure KPIs for mobile game monitoring. You can use them as a starting point and customize them according to your requirements.
Monetization
To assess if your mobile game can reach its revenue and profitability goals, you can use monetization KPIs. These include Average Revenue per User (ARPU), which is the average revenue earned from each user, Lifetime Value (LTV), which is the total revenue generated by an active user through your app, Average Transaction Value (ATV), which is the app’s average earnings.