How to visualize my events parameters in GA?

[saladgamer]

Hi,

I’m trying to use Game Analytics in my Corona game, but I’m really confused about how to visualize my data on my Game Analytics dashboard.

What I want to do is to log when the player finishes a level in my game, to keep the score and be able to see which level is too hard.

Since the lastest SDK is not supported in Corona, I can’t use the “Progress” event. So I use almost only the “design” event. For example, I log an event with the level name and player’s score.

Then in the GA website, I’m confused. In the dashboard section, I can see a page for Monetization, one for Resources… But nothing for “Design”.

In the “explore” section, I can see my “Design” events names listed if I click on the “Look up metric” button, but each time I got a page “Uh-oh! There’s no data for the selected metric(s)”, whatever the time period I choose. How is it even possible since they are listed in this menu?

How can I see my events and event’s parameters on the GA website?

Is it possible to export the data so I could do something with it on my own?

Thanks

Yannick

[cristian.bercu]

Hello Yanick,

There is no “Design” dashboard in the tool since we cannot predict what kind of deisgn events you will be sending. You are able to create your own custom dashboard; I just made an example one for you which you can access at the following link (authentication required):  
https://go.gameanalytics.com/game/22987/dashboards/show/6391

You can modify this dashboard as you wish or you can create a new one by clicking the “Create new dashboard” icon in the upper right corner of your game.

You are being prompted with the  “Uh-oh! There’s no data for the selected metric(s)” message because the Mean (or Sum) grouping option is selected while your events do not contain any values attached. Please group your events by Count or start attaching values.

For exporting the data please go to the “Settings” of your game (press the gear icon) and go to the “Export data” tab. Select the desired date range and click “Export”.

Also, feel free to send us a support ticket if you would like to get in touch directly with us.
http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thanks,
Cristian
 

[saladgamer]

Thank you very much Cristian, I have completely missed all this custom dashboards part. However, I still don’t see my event’s parameters: In addition to the “event_id”, I log many more information through each events “param” table like the score, the time the player took to finish it…

In the Corona documentation, the example shows that they log parameters like “value”, “area”, “x”, “y”, “z” in addition to a Design event (https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameanalytics/newEvent.html)

Is there a list of allowed parameter’s names, or can I put anything I want, like my “score” and “time”. And how can I see them in a dashboard? I didn’t find any answer in your documentation: http://www.gameanalytics.com/docs/ga-data

Thanks

Yannick

[cristian.bercu]

You are welcome. 

Unfortunately, we dropped support for location coordinates last year. Please follow this documentation for sending design events: http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/sections/200213806-Corona-SDK

Thanks,
Cristian

[saladgamer]

Thanks again Cristian.

So if I understand properly, I can only send the following parameters in a custom event: “event_id”, “area” and “value”. Every other fields will be ignored.

If I may suggest you something, it’s seem confusing to me. I may have missed something, but I can’t see any place mentionning this. I can even see some things like "params ( table ): params is a generic object, on which you define the parameters you wish to send to the GameAnalytics server", which I understand like the opposite, in the linked page you mentioned in your last answer.

It’s event more confusing to me because the Flurry API (also supported by Corona) lets us send any parameters we want through an event. 

I think I would be able to deal with my parameters by sending an event per param like this:

{event_id=“level_finish:score”, value=3000}, {event_id=“level_finish:time”, value=20}…

But it’s seems to be more cumbersome.

Thanks

Yannick

[cristian.bercu]

That is correct. Only “event_id” and “value” are accepted . You will need to create a structure similar to a tree for mapping your events. In design events you can have up to 5 levels in the tree - A:B:C:D:E. The values in the string event_id separated by colons will function like parameters.

The updated docs are the ones I linked you above. We will take care of the docs in the corona website soon.

Thanks,
Cristian

[saladgamer]

I just figured out that I got a lot of errors while logging events to GA:

Event rejected: The 'value' field only allows float values.

Does the field “value” only accept numbers?? No strings?

[cristian.bercu]

The ‘event_id’ needs to be a string and the ‘value’ needs to be a float. Clearly, you are sending something else than float in the value field.

[saladgamer]

Indeed. I thought ‘value’ could be something else, at least a string.

This is extremely limiting.  Having to format the ‘event_id’ and send 1 event per parameter is already not handy, being able to send only float values is really an issue.

How am I suppose to send info like the user’s language? There are a lot of information I can’t convert to a number, like enum values.

Thank you very much for your support Cristian. I don’t know if the issue is due to your SDK implementation in Corona, but I honestly don’t see how I can use GA efficiently.

[cristian.bercu]

You need to understand how the event_id works in the GA system. If you have 3 parameters like level_X, region_Y and mission_Z, you should format the event_id as “level_X:region_Y:mission_Z”. We will build a hierarchy in the web tool based on the three of them using the colon as a separator between parameters (we build a tree like structure). Then we also allow a value to be attached to the event (which will help build the sum and mean of the metric).

All the information which are not numbers should be sent to our servers using the method above. Instead of level_X it could be language_X.

I strongly recommend you to have a look at this article to understand more about the space of possibilities in GA.
http://www.gameanalytics.com/docs/custom-events

Also, feel free to send a support ticket whenever you would like to directly get in touch with us.
http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[cristian.bercu]

Hello Yanick,

There is no “Design” dashboard in the tool since we cannot predict what kind of deisgn events you will be sending. You are able to create your own custom dashboard; I just made an example one for you which you can access at the following link (authentication required):  
https://go.gameanalytics.com/game/22987/dashboards/show/6391

You can modify this dashboard as you wish or you can create a new one by clicking the “Create new dashboard” icon in the upper right corner of your game.

You are being prompted with the  “Uh-oh! There’s no data for the selected metric(s)” message because the Mean (or Sum) grouping option is selected while your events do not contain any values attached. Please group your events by Count or start attaching values.

For exporting the data please go to the “Settings” of your game (press the gear icon) and go to the “Export data” tab. Select the desired date range and click “Export”.

Also, feel free to send us a support ticket if you would like to get in touch directly with us.
http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thanks,
Cristian
 

[saladgamer]

Thank you very much Cristian, I have completely missed all this custom dashboards part. However, I still don’t see my event’s parameters: In addition to the “event_id”, I log many more information through each events “param” table like the score, the time the player took to finish it…

In the Corona documentation, the example shows that they log parameters like “value”, “area”, “x”, “y”, “z” in addition to a Design event (https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameanalytics/newEvent.html)

Is there a list of allowed parameter’s names, or can I put anything I want, like my “score” and “time”. And how can I see them in a dashboard? I didn’t find any answer in your documentation: http://www.gameanalytics.com/docs/ga-data

Thanks

Yannick

[cristian.bercu]

You are welcome. 

Unfortunately, we dropped support for location coordinates last year. Please follow this documentation for sending design events: http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/sections/200213806-Corona-SDK

Thanks,
Cristian

[saladgamer]

Thanks again Cristian.

So if I understand properly, I can only send the following parameters in a custom event: “event_id”, “area” and “value”. Every other fields will be ignored.

If I may suggest you something, it’s seem confusing to me. I may have missed something, but I can’t see any place mentionning this. I can even see some things like "params ( table ): params is a generic object, on which you define the parameters you wish to send to the GameAnalytics server", which I understand like the opposite, in the linked page you mentioned in your last answer.

It’s event more confusing to me because the Flurry API (also supported by Corona) lets us send any parameters we want through an event. 

I think I would be able to deal with my parameters by sending an event per param like this:

{event_id=“level_finish:score”, value=3000}, {event_id=“level_finish:time”, value=20}…

But it’s seems to be more cumbersome.

Thanks

Yannick

[cristian.bercu]

That is correct. Only “event_id” and “value” are accepted . You will need to create a structure similar to a tree for mapping your events. In design events you can have up to 5 levels in the tree - A:B:C:D:E. The values in the string event_id separated by colons will function like parameters.

The updated docs are the ones I linked you above. We will take care of the docs in the corona website soon.

Thanks,
Cristian

[saladgamer]

I just figured out that I got a lot of errors while logging events to GA:

Event rejected: The 'value' field only allows float values.

Does the field “value” only accept numbers?? No strings?

[cristian.bercu]

The ‘event_id’ needs to be a string and the ‘value’ needs to be a float. Clearly, you are sending something else than float in the value field.

[saladgamer]

Indeed. I thought ‘value’ could be something else, at least a string.

This is extremely limiting.  Having to format the ‘event_id’ and send 1 event per parameter is already not handy, being able to send only float values is really an issue.

How am I suppose to send info like the user’s language? There are a lot of information I can’t convert to a number, like enum values.

Thank you very much for your support Cristian. I don’t know if the issue is due to your SDK implementation in Corona, but I honestly don’t see how I can use GA efficiently.

[cristian.bercu]

You need to understand how the event_id works in the GA system. If you have 3 parameters like level_X, region_Y and mission_Z, you should format the event_id as “level_X:region_Y:mission_Z”. We will build a hierarchy in the web tool based on the three of them using the colon as a separator between parameters (we build a tree like structure). Then we also allow a value to be attached to the event (which will help build the sum and mean of the metric).

All the information which are not numbers should be sent to our servers using the method above. Instead of level_X it could be language_X.

I strongly recommend you to have a look at this article to understand more about the space of possibilities in GA.
http://www.gameanalytics.com/docs/custom-events

Also, feel free to send a support ticket whenever you would like to directly get in touch with us.
http://support.gameanalytics.com/hc/en-us/requests/new