Building Performance Metrics Dashboards for Mobile Freemium Games

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the largest title of a post of this blog to date. Building Performance Metrics Dashboards for Mobile Freemium Games is a mouthful and is exactly what we’ll discuss today.

Let’s dive right in.

Why I never liked the term ‘whales’

If you follow this blog you probably know what a whale is in the context of freemium games. If you follow this blog you might have (or not) noticed that I have not used the term whale. Or freeloader… or minnow… or dolphin!

I have very strong feelings regarding this. Here’s why. 

So I bought a new (virtual) car… or why Real Racing 3 is so awesome.

Today’s post was going to be different. Initially it was going to be about rednecks. Then (and because I’m severely delayed with blog posts) I decide to write about Witcher 3, which I will by the way.

But then something awesome happened. And that something was an awesome Shelby ’66 Cobra 427. The one in the photo. So I bought a new (virtual) car… what’s the fuss about it? 

Why the freemium model is a good thing

There’s way too much noise about mobile games freemium model. I can understand why. I’ve read stuff on prefrontal cortex and children that make me appreciate the fact that there’s tighter control on in-app purchases, that the button name changed and there are warnings about in-app purchases.

Yes, some people went too far and focus way too much energy in seeing their ARPDAU grow $0.0001 through methods that go way beyond marketing and data analysis.

My personal opinion is that they are pursuing the wrong things. First a great game, then monetisation. I believe monetisation can be built around a great game. I don’t believe that a great game can be built around monetisation. I also believe the freemium model is a good thing for games and players if we build a great game. I have two perspectives on why this is. One passionate, one cerebral… no surprises I guess. 

The User State

The user state is the unsung hero of game analytics. People spend countless hours looking at dashboards from reporting tables, analysing datasets built from purchases and session events but the user state is only remembered when some vital piece of information about the user wasn’t added to it.

Still the users state is central to a well built analytics system, especially if we are building your own in house.

So what is it? And why does it matter?

Mastering The Player Lifecycle

It’s been almost two months since I started the blog and began writing about The Player Lifecycle. Next I will write about how to set up your game analytics stack and The Player Lifecycle has a central role, moving from a theoretical context to a practical one.

The Holy Trinity of Monetisation

The term The Holy Trinity of Monetisation struck me when I was writing Monetisation 101. I had never read it and I’ll admit I even googled it just in case someone had coined it before. All performance dashboards that I maintain have a line graph with the three parts of this trinity:

• ARPU aka Average Revenue per User
• ARPPU aka Average Revenue per Paying User
• Conversion Rate

These are the three most important KPIs of monetisation of freemium games because… they are free.