When logging into GameAnalytics, we are presented with the games we are tracking. Tap on your game to see all the data we've collected. Before we continue, it should be noted that it may take a day or two to start analyzing meaningful data, since it takes a while for the data to be collected. So we will be taking a look at real-time data to go over some key concepts.
Recommendation: The "Demo game" profile also seen above is provided with new GameAnalytics accounts, and is a great place to experiment with all that you can do with GameAnalytics. It is a "fake game" with loads of "fake data" to help you get familiar with configuring profiles. After reading this article, you should check it out and experiment!
Reports
This side bar presents a bunch of different reports that GameAnalytics creates, as well as some settings. The one we are going to take a look at is Realtime reports. So go ahead and hit Realtime.
Real-Time Overview
This screen tells us how many people are currently playing our game (Active Users), how many recent incoming events, returning users, error reports, and more.
Since data takes some time to be collected, do not worry if these data sets appear empty at the start. These will soon populate as your analytic profile gathers and processes more data.
If you want to make sure that your analytics profile is gathering data to begin with, hit Live Feed at the top of the Realtime dashboard.
The live feed shows us the raw data being sent to our analytic profile. We can witness live events such as sessions starting, sessions ending, level progression, new users, and even our "Tapped coin" design event!
If you can see events being shown on your live feed, then your analytic profile is successfully gathering data. (If you do not see events being shown, try going through all the previous steps and ensure you're not missing anything.)
Analyzing Events
Note: Before continuing, as a reminder, data being sent to your analytic profile takes some time to process. If you see that data is coming into your live feed it will soon be processed and the data-sets detailed below may show up blank until then.
Now let's start analyzing our custom events. On the left menu, go to the Explore page.
The Explore page lets us analyze any tracking data we tell it to. We can tell it to analyze our "Tapped coin" event by changing the Metric and Filters.
1. Hit the Metric (Y axis) field above the graph and set it to Design.
Now the graph is set to analyze all Design events (Design events are custom events, such as our "Tapped coin" event).
2. Hit the Aggregation field above the graph and set it to Count. Now we can see exactly how many custom events have been processed!
This is fine if our game only has one custom event (like it does now), but what if we have many different custom events? In order to narrow it down to one or a selection of custom events, we have to set a filter.
3. Hit Filters at the top of the page. This will open the Create Filters window. Ensure that Events is selected on the left and select Design. You should see "Tapped coin" in there. If we selected that, it would narrow us down to all "Tapped coin" events, but we want to know the data for specifically the "First coin" event. Hit the arrow beside it and it will open the sub-categories in it. There we can see the "First coin" event, select it and hit Apply.
That's it! We can now see players collecting the First Coin!
Now, obviously in the real world we would to see more data from more players to determine if our game is too difficult. But we’ve gained a solid foundation of setting up analytics tracking for our games!
You can take this time to get familiar with the Explore page and experiment with different settings. You could also use that knowledge to create a custom dashboard where you can create and save your own widgets for easier access to your custom data.
We’ve only scratched the surface with GameAnalytics, so don’t be afraid to explore the many features that it provides. There are lots of online resources and tips of making full use of GameAnalytics and looking into those may be a good idea.
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