Top Tips

1. Digging in to the Data

• Your data is now flowing and you can view many useful charts. View Game Analysis.
• The Slice & Dice tool lets you get deeper into the data that drives the dashboard. You can start to build custom charts and get a better understanding of what the players are doing
• The Data Mining tool gives you direct access to the underlying events through our powerful analytics data warehouse. You can query millions of events in seconds to isolate specific player behaviours and find out why players are doing what they are doing
• The Funnel tool gives you the ability to set up complex funnels and track how players drop out. This gives you lots of insight into where the leaks are in your game.

2. Looking at the data from a player perspective

• The Segmentation interface gives you a player centric view of your data
• By using the advanced 3D visualisation tool you can analyze your player data, getting under the skin of the players and finding out what makes them tick. The tool lets you pick three user metrics to visualise the players. You can use this to find out how players progress through levels, use resources or repeat play.

3. Campaigns

• Engage is the system that delivers Player Relationship Management (PRM). It is there to set up offers, incentives and changes to the game in a managed environment so they can be run and monitored
• Our in-game campaigns allow you to perform A/B Testing. If you configure a campaign to use it, once a user is allocated to one of your divisions (cohorts) they will stick in that cohort for the period of the test. This is designed to provide a consistent testing environment and works because the test is not expected to run for a long period of time
• With engage, users are free to move between segments, allowing the game to evolve and users to enter into a messaging campaign. This is based on the idea that these campaigns will run for a period of time, catching new players as they become valid and allowing the game to adapt to players’ states.
• A simple campaign is to embed a difficulty change into your game. Once you have identified through A/B testing that a difficulty change for a set of users improves retention, you can take that change and embed it into the game going forward with targeting. The system will allow you to run the change alongside any other messaging and dynamically add and remove players as they meet the segment requirements.

4. Setting up an A/B Test

• An A/B test is a very powerful way of testing changes to the game to see if the changes improve the game. The system is very flexible but the key is to instrument the game. Making your game data driven is a good thing to do during development so changes to mission difficulty, mission order, rewards and achievements are easy with simple data changes
• By keeping this datadriven flexibility in the game and exposing it to the engage interface you can then drive changes and tests through the interface running hundreds of tests
• Try and run only one A/B test as any one time, although the interface does allow multiple A/B tests to run at the same time, you will compromise the tests and reduce the effectiveness. By running them in a linear fashion and only on new players, you are sure that you have as clean a test as possible.