Hi developers,
As many of you know, we’ve been gradually building up a new analytics dashboard with standard key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you iterate on your experience and measure the results from changes you made to your content strategy.
Until today, the dashboard has been tested by more than 5000 experiences in a private beta mode. We’re excited to announce that the standard dashboard is rolling out today to any experience with 600+ DAU (daily active users) and 600 play hours in the past 7 days!
What Are Analytics?
Experience analytics means using quantitative measures, metrics, and tools to track events that occur over the course of an experience. The captured data will be used for statistical analysis.
For example, you can instrument events in your experience to record when a player died at a certain location and send the data back to the analytics platform, so that you will know whether some of the levels may be too difficult (i.e., with an excessively high number of players dying) and thus need redesign.
The aim of using an analytics solution is to generate insights to inform you about player behaviors and use those insights to make business decisions.
Why Should I Use Analytics?
Leveraging analytics has been proved to be an incredibly powerful strategy in the gaming industry. Building an experience without analytics is like driving a car to an unknown place without navigation. Not only will you likely take a much slower path, but also you may even get lost in the middle. With analytics, you can constantly calibrate your path to quickly get to your destination.
We have a vision to empower you to make data-driven decisions at every single step of your experience’s lifecycle. This means you should have the best-in-class tools and services to understand your player base, identify gaps, and quickly iterate your experience by experimenting with new ideas.
The standard dashboard is the first step towards that vision. It provides dozens of KPIs out-of-the-box as soon as your experience is activated, such as daily active users (DAUs), total playtime, etc. These KPIs can serve as your north star metrics, depending on the stage of your experience.
For example, if your experience just launched, you may want to focus on onboarding and retention instead of acquiring a large number of new players. By looking at the percentage of new players who come back to your experience in the first few days (i.e. Day 1 and Day 7 retention) and comparing with benchmarks, you will get a sense of whether your experience is engaging enough for new users before spending money on promoting it.
Analytic Dashboard Features
The standard dashboard covers KPIs in two key areas now: engagement and retention.
- Engagement KPIs include: DAU, New Players, # of Sessions, and Total Playtime.
- Retention KPIs include: D1/7/30 Retention, and D1/7/30 Stickiness.
- Retention means any new players who came back on the 1/7/30 day after their first session.
- Stickiness means all players, both new and existing, who came back on the 1/7/30 day.
Check out our documentation to learn more about the KPI definitions. More categories such as Monetization will be added in the future but let us know below if there’s a category you would like to see added!
Slicing and Dicing
All the KPIs can be sliced based on the time range. The data will start populating once you enroll your experience (see the process below).
To help you understand how your experience performs in certain sub-categories, all the engagement KPIs can also be segmented by various dimensions including age group, country, language, platform, and OS.
We will gradually add segmentation for other KPIs and support filtering in the future.
Benchmarking
All retention and engagement KPIs have benchmarks based on tiers. For the benchmarks to be more relevant to your experience, the system divides all the experiences into six tiers and calculates benchmarks in each one. You’ll see the benchmarks in a dashed line along with the KPIs. The benchmarks shown are for the tier above your experience (unless it is already in the highest tier). This helps you to determine what are the gaps and set reasonable goals to improve your experience to the next level. Again, check out our documentation to learn more.
Please note we want to keep the benchmarks stable and thus only update them on a quarterly basis.
Oh wait, there’s more – you can also export the data you see on the chart as CSV by clicking the export icon on the top right corner! This way, you can run even more data analysis offline.
How Can I Activate the Dashboard?
Our system will automatically enroll experiences that meet the criteria on a daily basis. Right now, the dashboard is available to any experience with 600+ DAU (daily active users) and 600 play hours in the past 7 days.
Once enrolled, you will be able to see an “Activate Analytics” button on the overview of your experience on the Creator Dashboard.
After you click the button and agree with the Terms, your experience will start automatically sending out events for calculating the KPIs and you’ll see data being populated starting the next day.
We hope you can take advantage of the analytics dashboard and improve your experiences more efficiently! Please let us know if you have any feedback. To learn more, check out our full Tutorial here.
Happy building,
The Roblox Creator Services Team
FAQ
Do you have plans to further scale the analytics dashboard to more experiences?
- Yes, the current threshold is set based on our system’s capacity. We are actively working on further scaling it to as many experiences as possible. You can expect the threshold to be lowered over time.
Do I need to do anything if I was already in the beta program before?
- No, all the features will continue to work for your experiences as before. No actions are needed. If you have other popular experiences, they may be automatically enrolled and you can activate them by following the instructions above.
Can I access PlayFab after my experience being enrolled?
- PlayFab console allows you to query raw events for ad-hoc analysis. If you already have access to PlayFab through the beta program, you can continue to use it. However, there’s no PlayFab access enabled for the auto-enrolled experiences. We will consider opening it up in the future depending on the feedback.
Who can activate and view the dashboard?
- Only owner of the game or the group will see the activation button. Please reach out to your group owner if you believe your game is eligible. To view the dashboard, you must have game edit permissions. We’re working on a separate permission to have granular control. Stay tune!
. So if they do this it’ll be very helpful