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Introducing Funnels & SQL Data Explorer: Meaningful insights to grow your game

March 8, 2022 in Games | 9 min. read
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Laptop showing data and trends
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Check out two new Analytics features, and learn how they can help you dig deeper into data to better understand your player base. 

Data is the foundation of a compelling game strategy. It should be the driving force behind your strategic decisions, optimizations, and investment areas within your game. Today, Analytics does a great job providing out-of-the-box, intuitive tools that help you get a quick overview of your game and to perform basic analysis. 

With these two new features, Funnels and SQL Data Explorer, Unity is delivering more advanced functionality that drastically expands the depth of analysis and customization available for your game. Now, you’ll have more flexibility to aggregate, query, and visualize data in the most impactful way for your studio.

What is Unity Analytics?

Unity Analytics is one of the new beta products that launched within the Unity Gaming Services platform and it can be used as a stand alone tool or alongside other services for more power. Analytics enables developers to easily understand game performance and player behaviors and captures insights quickly using prebuilt dashboards and visualizations powered by reliable, real-time data.

Get access to Analytics and the rest of the beta products here.

Getting to know Funnels

Funnels allow you to easily visualize the user flow and progression through your game. You can define ordered steps to analyze how many users go from the beginning to the end of those steps, along with the time it takes to get from step 1 to step 2.

Funnels dash, with event steps and completion rate

You’ll have an assortment of tools at your disposal, including:

  • Bar charts to help you readily visualize the dropoff through any of the defined ordered steps
  • Tables outlining metrics like number of users, dropoff percentage, and the average time spent on each defined step 
  • The ability to freely export both your chart and table at any time

Improving your game’s success with Funnels

We often see customers set up Funnels when they’re optimizing a part of the player experience like onboarding or conversion from non-payer to payer. We also see it used as a way to diagnose an issue like level difficulty or player churn.

Progression Funnels

The tutorial phase of the game is a great place to start using Funnels. It’s the first interaction with gameplay that a player will have when starting a game for the first time. 

Players will tackle the tutorial and come out answering one question: Is this kind of gameplay right for me? Using this type of Funnel will help you identify instances in the tutorial that are unclear, too difficult, or are taking longer than expected to complete. Insights from this Funnel can be leveraged to boost player retention and mitigate churn. 

Naturally, all players will find ways to play a game their own way, even if the path laid out for them is defined. Level progression varies depending on factors like the in-game abilities used, gear equipped, or achievements unlocked. Players may even forget to use the features presented to them during the tutorial to complete a level. Learnings like this can help you to validate or deny your assumptions during development.

Widget showing level complete funnel

Monetization Funnels

Using Monetization Funnels helps you to better understand your players and their interactions with the game, enabling you to provide better experiences of your gaming economy. Knowing how your players spend money in-game gives you insights on how to alter your game economy or when to start implementing in-app purchases. 

While we commonly see people segment their players into payer and non-payer, this Funnel allows you to take it to the next level to see subsequent purchases and their journey as a player. It also allows you to find out whether players felt they got enough value from their first purchase and if they find further value in making future purchases. This sequence is usually a transaction event where the ‘realCurrency’ parameter is greater than 0, but it can also be applied to ads consumption. 

Monetization funnel widget

There are numerous Funnels designed to help you better understand player monetization habits but here are two critical ones:

Audience Conversion Funnel: This Funnel helps to provide insights on how different in-game offers are being received by players. You can then decide on how to tune your offers and adjust pricing and rewards to achieve your target conversion rate.

Offer Impression Funnel: Popups will be a second avenue for you to display in game offers. Deciding on the timing of these offers, the type of offer, and who will see them can help drive success in your monetization strategy. Using this Funnel allows you to visualize how much and how frequently an offer is displayed to your players.

More power and flexibility with SQL Data Explorer

Check out SQL Data Explorer – now available within Analytics. We took the powerful SQL Data Mining feature from deltaDNA and rebuilt it in Analytics. This feature allows you to build and execute queries, plot results into different types of visualizations, and export your data to programs like Microsoft Excel, Tableau, or OpenOffice.

Better yet, you’ll be able to access the beta for free through general availability. Afterwards, you’ll have access to 2000 sec/month for free, followed by a pay-as-you-scale rate of $0.0058/sec.

It delivers the power and flexibility you need to more deeply understand your gameplay, combine your data with other important data sets, and create custom views for your studio.

Widgets showing SQL Data Explorer, Query, Chart Setup

Using SQL Data Explorer requires some knowledge of basic SQL, a programming language used for database communication. Using the product, you can write queries to get information on daily and weekly active users, stickiness, or top countries by date to further analyze your data.

After running a set of queries, you can then form charts supporting up to two Y axes and one X axis. Axis labels can be renamed to your convenience using the as expression in your SQL query. 

A list of parameters can be found using the glossary panel. Here, you can choose from a list of terms pulled from the column names and custom parameters parsed from the event JSON. These columns can be defined as custom columns based on the events you send. Some parameters are fields, which can change the syntax in the SQL. Use Event Manager to create custom events to use in queries as columns.

SQL Data Explorer supports new features like Reports and Environment Selector. Reports will provide a list of all queries so you can reload and use them at your leisure, while the Environment Selector allows you to switch between different Environments so you can seamlessly transition from testing to production.

We’d love to hear from you

Please reach out with any feedback about bugs or feature requests and do join the discussion on the Forum, or reach out to our support team by submitting a ticket from the Support link via Analytics > About and Support page.

March 8, 2022 in Games | 9 min. read

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