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如何使用参数优化游戏的转换率

发布时间:2013-07-02 15:59:02 Tags:,,,,

作者:Alfonso Villar

所有开发者都应该估算自己的游戏参数去优化转换漏斗。当你在一个单一市场上发行一款游戏时,你可以专注于分析不同参数组块。例如年龄,类型,鲸鱼用户等等。但是当这些组块包含了不同国家,游戏和平台时,分析就会变得更加复杂。

基于不同用户测量实时多人游戏的参数并不是件易事。在PlaySpace我们便遇到了许多问题和挑战,也从中吸取一些经验和教训,并想出了解决问题的办法。

game metrics(from mygamehud)

game metrics(from mygamehud)

问题和挑战:

多面游戏参数:手动添加到一张电子数据表中的每一份数据都可以在数据库中查询到。因此,如果你必须基于每个国家的12个参数以及每个平台上的9款不同游戏去分析23至40个国家,那么你便需要手动分析并更新超过3000个游戏参数,怎么想这都是不可能的事。

时间是关键:分析各种重要数据并有效地做出决定真的非常重要,所以你不能每个月都重复犯同样的错误。为了完善转换率,你就需要尽快地做出分析。

系统饱和:将所有的信息储存在一个数据库服务器中意味着任何计算游戏参数的查询都可能使系统出现饱和。虽然一开始我们还能应对这种情况,但是只要游戏变得更受欢迎,并且24小时都拥有玩家,那时我们便会意识到不能在系统中进行查询了。

没有关于投资回报的信息:我们拥有关于用户花了多少时间在玩游戏,花了多少钱以及他们在游戏过程中还做些什么等信息。但是当你想要评估某一特定玩家是否有利可图或者这需要花费你多少钱时,问题便会出现。用户获取团队具有所有的这些信息,并延伸到不同的市场营销渠道中。因此,另一个挑战便是将用户获取成本与用户盈利整合到游戏中,去估算每用户的投资回报率。

解决方法:

面对这些挑战,我们拥有2种选择:使用外部游戏参数服务工具,或者开发我们自己的内部参数系统。因为我们的平台上已经拥有所有的这些信息了,所以我们决定开发自己的系统,从而去回应随着时间发展所产生的各种需求:

当我们需要即时且可以从任何地方获得的信息时,我们便会选择使用带有响应式设计的网页开发框架。这一框架是与我们的系统以及不同图像API(如Google Charts)直接整合在一起。从而让我们能够在不同设备或基于不同网页浏览器观看到即时的游戏参数。

同时,因为这一工具是直接与我们的系统整合在一起,所以我们需要为了查询和分析而复制数据库。任何查询行为都不会对用户体验造成影响。

在开发我们自己的参数系统前,我们需要分析并修改数据结构。来自不同平台,社交网站等的所有查询都是基于标准化,而添加信查询也无需进行额外的开发工作。

为了评估投资回报率我们需要开发一个追踪系统去明确每个用户是来自哪种市场营销渠道。同时,我们也需要将用户获取成本与系统整合在一起。为了做到这点,我们必须整合Facebook API或在系统上手动添加获取成本,以防市场营销渠道并不支持API整合。

我们创造了自己的游戏参数控制面板(游戏邦注:在某些情况下每款游戏有3个以上的控制面板),在此我们可以根据游戏,市场营销渠道,语言和国家等元素去划分数据。

这一解决方法意味着我们能够在进行新市场营销活动或推出新游戏功能前做出决定。因为这一系统,我们发现“并不是所有会发光的东西都是金子。”举个例子来说,我们发现一些国家的用户获取成本较低,但是这里的盈利却非常糟糕。同样的,我们也发现根据不同国家或用户情况,不同游戏功能具有不同的用户粘性。

总之,我会建议你们不要被那些单独评估的参数所骗了。如果你能够有效利用多面游戏参数并完全理解它们,这些参数便会成为非常强大的工具,不仅能够帮助你完善游戏,同时也能够帮助你完善转换渠道。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Think tracking metrics is hard? Well, it gets harder

By Alfonso Villar

All developers calculate, or should calculate, their game metrics to optimize the conversion funnel. When you launch a game in a single market, you can concentrate on analyzing different metric cohorts. For example, age, genre, whales, etc. However, the analysis becomes more complicated when this involves different countries, games and platforms.

Measuring real-time multiplayer game metrics across different audiences is not an easy task. At PlaySpace we have come across several problems and challenges that we have had to learn from and resolve as we go.

Problems and Challenges:

Multidimensional game metrics: Every piece of data that is manually added to a spreadsheet is a query into the database. Therefore, if we have to analyze 23 to 40 countries by 12 metrics per country and 9 different games per platform, we are faced with over 3.000 game metrics that have to be analyzed and updated by hand; an impossible figure to manage.

Timing is crucial: It is really important to be able to analyze any piece of critical data to make important decisions efficiently, so that we don’t repeat the same errors on a monthly basis. To improve the conversion rates you need to be able to make a quick analysis.

System saturation: Having all of the information solely in one database server, means that any queries to calculate game metrics could saturate the system. At the beginning we could manage this situation, however as soon as our games became more popular and we had a 24-hour user audience, we realized that we were not able to make queries to the system.

No information about return of investment: We have all the information about how much time users spend playing, how much they spend, and what they do while playing, etc. The problem occurs when you want to calculate if a specific player has been profitable or not as you need to know how much they have cost you. The acquisition team has  all of this information which is spread across different marketing channels. Therefore, another big challenge is to integrate the cost of user acquisition with the user monetization into the game to calculate the return of investment per user.

Solution:

To face these challenges, we had two options: hiring an external game metrics services tool, or developing our in-house metric system. Due to the fact we already had all this information on our platform we decided to develop our own system that could respond to any needs that arose as time went on:

As we needed the information on demand and accessible from any location, we opted to use a Web development framework with responsive design. This framework was directly integrated with our system and with different Graphic APIs such as Google Charts. This allows us to view real-time game metrics from any device and with any web browser.

At the same time, as this tool was directly integrated with our system, we had to make a copy of the database exclusively for queries and analysis. Any heavy query that is done does not affect the user experience.

Before developing our own metrics system, it was necessary to analyze and modify the data structure. All queries from different platforms, social networks, etc. were standardized and adding new queries would not take any additional development.

To calculate the return of investment we needed to develop a tracking system to identify which marketing channel each user had come from. Also we needed to integrate the cost of user acquisition to the system. To do that, it was necessary to integrate the Facebook API or even be able to add the acquisition costs manually on the system in case the marketing channel does not support an API integration.

We created our own game metrics dashboard (more than three dashboards per game in some cases), where we can breakdown the data by game, marketing channel, language, country, etc.

This solution means that we are able to make decisions the day before we launch a new marketing campaign or a new game feature. Because of this system we have seen that  “not all that glitters is gold”. For example, we found that some countries or audiences where cost of user acquisition was really good but the monetization was extremely bad. In the same way, we also detected that different game features have different user engagement, depending on the country or the audience.

As a conclusion, I would recommend not to be tricked by metrics that are evaluated individually. If you are able to make the most of the multidimensional game metrics and understand them in their entirety; these metrics will be a powerful tool that will not only improve your game but also improve your conversion funnel.(source:gamesbrief)


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