Alternative analytics solutions

Corona Marketplace GameAnalytics
#1

Curious to know what analytics the other developers here are using besides google? I quite liked the simplicity of the legacy google analytics with their universal properties and particularly their realtime view but the plugin has now been broken for some time and we are getting a few hundred crash reports on it daily so there’s no option but to move to another service (@vlads Could you please confirm if this will be looked at or if the legacy plugin is no longer being supported?)

GameAnalytics might make sense if we break down our events into progression, monetisation and other categories but I don’t think they’re quite as reliable as they once were-- can’t manage to get their solar2d documentation to even open since some days.

So far, I quite like mixpanel but the only downside there is that unlike other services that automatically fetch basic information on the geography and other user demographics, this all needs to be done manually here and we must query the user’s IP address on tools like dns-o-matic to first retrieve basic data and then send that data to mixpanel for every event that we log.

Would be interesting to see what suggestions anyone might have on analytics.

#2

Have you looked at Flurry?

#3

Mixpanel should be collecting geo information automatically - we use it and we definitely don’t record geo data manually (we don’t even know where the user is in our own code). Are you definitely using their Android/iOS specific SDKS, rather than their generic Java one?

We also use Amplitude, which in my opinion is the best analytics tool we’ve ever used - their visualisation tools are very easy to use and give a whole bunch of different ways to view the data you’ve sent to them. It is pretty expensive for the plan which enables all options though, hence why we’ve given Mixpanel a try.

#4

Are you using the plugin by YogerGames for Mixpanel? I’m not aware of one that’s officially supported by either Mixpanel or Solar2d.

We started using this plugin mainly for our PC games some years back and contacted yogergames and they confirmed that geography is not added to the data passed to mixpanel by default. Are you sure what you’re seeing is not simply the locale/language setting of the devices because it will be different to the actual location for many users.

I’ll try Amplitude-- thanks for the suggestion! Also looking again at flurry as suggested by Colin-- hadn’t visited this one in a while.

#5

We made our own Mixpanel plugins for iOS and Android, and they are 100% sending geo-data as the user properties include the country, region and city that the users are in. If you are using a PC plugin then perhaps that works differently, but the iOS/Android SDKs definitely send that info automatically.

#6

Do you plan to make this plugin available for an annual subscription on one of the third party stores or through solar2d?

#7

I believe @alanFlickGames plugin is available (at least an older version) from github. Are you using the newest game analytics plugin? It is available from the solar2d store. Never have a problem with their plugin.

#8

GameAnalytics does work but I’m not too keen on how they force you to break down the events into different categories and am mainly looking for a simpler solution where real time events are shown effectively and we can check past events with various secondary parameters as and when we want.

After trying trying flurry, GA and MixPanel, I found mixpanel to be the most intuitive and complete.

Would be nice to check out your plugin @alanFlickGames if it is, in fact, hosted on your github. Could you link me up?

#9

I don’t think we have put it on github or the marketplace. I’ll check and see if it’s ok for me to do that, but probably won’t be until next week.

#10

Alan, on a side note, I looked over to my daughter’s phone (she is 21), and she was playing your game. She loves it, and I asked her where she got it, and she said just browsing the store. Funny, when I helped you test it, I gave it to my wife but not my daughter cause I figured she was too young. My wife didn’t like the flicking (it made her dizzy), but my daughter loves it.

1 Like
#11

Will wait for your update. Thanks

#12

Just a quick update that I should be able to provide a version of our Mixpanel plugin for everyone, I need to tweak it slightly first as I hardcoded some IDs etc for our project. However I’m currently in the middle of some other big tasks, so I might not get a chance to do it for a few weeks.
Will post here once it’s available.

#13

cheers… looking forward

#14

hello… just checking back if you are still planning to make a mixpanel plugin accessible for the community. Thanks

#15

I made this pure Lua lib available for Mixpanel available.

2 Likes
#16

Thanks a lot, Scott! I’ll try this out.

From your testing, is this library able to track data on user parameters like location, language, device type etc automatically or did you have to set that manually in the user profile?

We currently use Yoger game’s plugin for Mixpanel but the problem with that one is that it doesn’t track any user information so we have to rely on System info to log data on the users’ locale, which is often misleading

#17

You have manually track this since it is pure lua. I think I have native version of the mixpanel plugin as well somewhere

#18

I use Unity Analytics. It is free for up to 25m events a month. You can use network.request to ping their end points. You can also easily use SQL to query the data much easier than firebase. It’s a no-brainer if you currently use Unity Ads.

#19

Apologies for not getting round to this, I’ve had a million-and-one things on my plate these last few months. Thanks Scott for making your own version to knock one job off my list!