I’m hoping some of you can share the ways in which you implement analytics. I don’t mean what service do you use, but what exactly are you logging in terms of events. I’ve read how analytics are great in analyzing user retention, user engagement, ROI, etc etc etc. But what exactly are you looking at? Which metrics are important? At what point throughout your apps lifecycle are you logging events?
I plan on implementing Google Analytics and would love suggestions are which events to log. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
just fwiw, i’m no expert, but with GA you get all the “session things” for free - like counts, new users, retention and average time, etc. for actual events, GA is primarily for things that can be measured as “hits”, where a total is about all that matters (it can also derive the average for you (aka total/#events), but no min, max, etc) there are no hard and fast rules, you have to sort of figure it out for yourself what’s important for you to “know” about the flow of your user interaction pattern.
a total count all by itself might not be enough to tell you anything. so, often, to get “actionable” numbers you need at least two such stats, for example: how many times did players visit a certain screen, versus how many times they clicked a certain button (like “buy” or “remove ads” or “more games” or whatever) present on that screen. now you have a ratio you could experiment with, maybe by somehow altering your ui or flow.
you could also use it to tune level difficulty (if your app is a game, and has levels) by logging both begin and complete events per level, trying to spot ones that have very low completion rate. (or if scored, emit the score as the value for the complete event, checking for ones with below-expected averages)
hth
Interesting, thanks for the info. I like the insight on using multiple metrics together to get something actionable. Are there any others that you (or anyone reading) know of? Are there any good blog posts regarding these?
just fwiw, i’m no expert, but with GA you get all the “session things” for free - like counts, new users, retention and average time, etc. for actual events, GA is primarily for things that can be measured as “hits”, where a total is about all that matters (it can also derive the average for you (aka total/#events), but no min, max, etc) there are no hard and fast rules, you have to sort of figure it out for yourself what’s important for you to “know” about the flow of your user interaction pattern.
a total count all by itself might not be enough to tell you anything. so, often, to get “actionable” numbers you need at least two such stats, for example: how many times did players visit a certain screen, versus how many times they clicked a certain button (like “buy” or “remove ads” or “more games” or whatever) present on that screen. now you have a ratio you could experiment with, maybe by somehow altering your ui or flow.
you could also use it to tune level difficulty (if your app is a game, and has levels) by logging both begin and complete events per level, trying to spot ones that have very low completion rate. (or if scored, emit the score as the value for the complete event, checking for ones with below-expected averages)
hth
Interesting, thanks for the info. I like the insight on using multiple metrics together to get something actionable. Are there any others that you (or anyone reading) know of? Are there any good blog posts regarding these?