To effectively manage modern mobile games, measuring and tracking various metrics is important. These metrics provide valuable information about the game’s performance in different areas, such as user experience, infrastructure, and monetization. Similarly, you can check website status online if you need. The mechanism of work of such services is comparable and very easy to understand.

However, not all metrics hold the same level of significance. By focusing on the most valuable key performance indicators (KPIs), you can make informed business and technical decisions about your game.

KPIs are metrics used to analyze the performance of a product or activity, such as a mobile game, based on specific objectives. For mobile games, monitoring the right KPIs allows you to analyze user behavior, assess the quality of the user experience, check the condition of your infrastructure, and estimate the app’s potential revenue.

How to ensure effective monitoring

To effectively monitor and manage mobile games, choosing the right set of metrics to track and measure is crucial. Just as website visitors ask questions like “Is T-mobile.com down?” game users often look for answers too. These needs need to be taken into account.

As a developer, you know the vast amount of data points your game can collect during the player journey and across different components of your app and stack. However, only a few of these metrics are significant.

Which KPIs should you monitor for mobile games? There is no universal answer, but crucial KPIs usually have similarities. Furthermore, the mobile game system will determine which KPIs to select and which to avoid.

What makes a KPI “important”?

A KPI is considered good if it objectively evaluates progress towards a specific target result, measures a factor that impacts decision-making, tracks performance change over time, and measures efficiency, effectiveness, quality, timeliness, behavior, economics, or resource usage. Additionally, it can either show past performance or predict future success.

To illustrate how these qualities aid in identifying essential mobile game KPIs, let’s take a simple example. Suppose you aim to boost your app’s user retention rate by 25% by the end of this quarter. One possible set of metrics to monitor could consist of the following:

1. Past retention rate values can act as lagging indicators, reflecting past performance.
2. Leading indicators, such as user experience metrics (e.g., load times, user error rates, and crashes) and infrastructure metrics (e.g., latency and uptime), may correlate with retention rate.

Now that you have these data points, you can use them as reference points (historical values) to set and analyze goals. You can determine the level of performance you want to achieve for each leading indicator (such as UX and infrastructure metrics). By setting these targets, you can assess and predict how successful you will be in increasing user retention rates.

What other factors affect it?

In the example provided, we carefully selected a set of metrics that effectively measure user retention rates. However, in real-world situations, selecting KPIs is more complex. Choosing the right KPIs involves considering multiple factors:

1. To determine which engagement and user experience metrics to prioritize, you should consider your game’s player base, genre/category, and monetization model. This information will help tailor your approach to best suit your game and its players.
2. When monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) for a mobile game, the metrics to focus on will vary significantly depending on whether the game is in its early stages of development or is already an established app.
3. As the game’s infrastructure and deployment setup becomes more complex, the selection of KPIs needs to adapt to the changes.
4. To determine the metric’s effectiveness, you must regularly assess which KPIs benefit your decision-making process because their usefulness can shift during your app’s life cycle.
5. The KPIs you track should be based on the available resources, including time, effort, and money allocated for metrics.