· 6 min read

Ad Metrics in A/B Testing & Metrics API and Custom Control Group

We've been busy bees. From new metrics, to key updates to our A/B Testing and Metrics API, here's what's new in our tool.

Despite the challenges that 2020 brought, the gaming industry has thrived. And if you’ve been following our many updates throughout the year, you’ll know that we’ve been keeping ourselves pretty busy.

We released a ton of new features, like A/B Testing and Ads Dashboard. We launched our new product line, DataSuite. And we made a bunch of updates to Benchmarks+, our mobile intelligence platform (the biggest update is there are now 50+ sub-genres, ICYMI). All to give you the best tools to analyze and grow your games.

And there’s so much more to come. In 2021, we’re continuing to develop our tools and services, and we couldn’t be more excited. So, keep your eyes peeled for our next blog post, where we’ll discuss what we’ve planned for you this year.

But for now, let’s go ahead and look at the latest improvements in GameAnalytics:

Keep reading or jump to a specific section to learn the details.

What’s new in GameAnalytics

Experiment with ad goal metrics in A/B Testing

We’ve just rolled out ad goal metrics into our A/B Testing feature (a tool that lets you test multiple versions of your game). Which means you can now better optimize your ad monetization strategy. You’ll be able to evaluate how the changes you make in your games are impacting ad revenue. And see how your players react.

New goal metrics added:

  • Ad impressions – from ad events,
  • Ad clicks – from ad events,
  • Ad revenue – from impression events,
  • Ad revenue per impression – from impression events.

Our impression events metrics include ad revenue data from MoPub, and soon: Fyber and IronSource. If you haven’t integrated impression events yet, then head to our SDK documentation to learn how to get started. (If there are other ad network providers that you’d like us to bring onboard, let us know here.)

Why is it important for you?

Our A/B Testing makes optimizing advertising campaigns easy. With these new metrics, you can quickly analyze your ads performance and your users’ behavior. Then, find the most optimal advertising strategy to maximize your revenue on the go.

So, how does it work?

Let’s say you want to analyze how changing ad frequency in a game affects overall clicks.

1. First, log in to your GameAnalytics account and select the game to test on. Note: your game needs to be set up to run A/B tests (learn how to integrate here).

2. Then, set up an A/B test and create variants of the parameter you want to work with. In our case, we created a variant of the config key called ‘speed’ with the value ‘10’.

Step 1: Create config and variants

3. Next, select the goal metric relevant to your objective. We picked ‘Ad clicks’.

Step 3: Define Scheduling

4. Then, sit back and let our tool do the work. Once the experiment has enough users, our statistical model will run to find a winning variant based on the selected goal metric.

Step 4: run experiment

5. Finally, you can choose to apply the change to all players via Remote Configs, or by modifying your game. (Check out our docs to learn how to do this.)

Analyze your ad metrics via our Metrics API

You can now query ad metrics from all your games using our Metrics API (one of our DataSuite we launched last year). Get up-to-date numbers about your ads and plug them into your internal tools.

Ad metrics added:

  • From ad events:
    • Ad impressions count,
    • Ad impressions per user,
    • Ad impressions per session.
  • From Impression-Level Revenue Data (ILRD) events:
    • ILRD revenue,
    • ILRD revenue per session,
    • ILRD per user,
    • ILRD per session,
    • ILRD Average Revenue Per User (ARPU),
    • ILRD ID unique.

Head over to our API documentation to see the full list of metrics we now support.

What’s in it for you?

By fetching key ad metrics across games, you can effectively measure and evaluate ads performance of your entire portfolio. This will give you precious insights on how to increase your ads monetization.

You’ll be able to answer questions like: What was my total ad revenue last week? How does this number look per user, and per session? Or: What type of ads generated the most revenue in selected countries? Getting this information can be crucial when deciding on the right ads strategy for your studio.

Contact us if you’d like to learn more. We’d love to have a quick chat.

Create custom Control Group for your A/B test

We’ve got more news about A/B Testing. We’ve made some updates to the Control Group (a group of players in the experiment that don’t see any change), and how it works. Now, it’s possible to define a Control Group’s value while setting up an A/B experiment. The value remains static during the length of the test and doesn’t change for the players if you modify parameters using Remote Configs.

Why did we build this?

After chatting with some of our users, we learned that studios would like to send separate game configuration using Remote Config without impacting players in any experiment that already uses the config key. Now, once defined, the value of the Control Group remains unchanged, so any new Remote Config created will not override it for users in the experiment.

How can you use it?

When creating an A/B test in your GameAnalytics account, specify the value for the Control Group that should stay static for users in the group.

For example, we’d like the default value of config key ‘ad_frequency’ to be ‘10’ for users in the Control Group throughout the entire experiment.

Control Group Example

Experiment results will display information of each variant, including their respective values. Simple as that!

Coming soon

  • We’re working on adding the Ad revenue metrics from Fyber and IronSource to Ads Dashboard. We’ve already updated our most popular SDKs. Head to our docs to learn how to switch on data collection now. So when the metrics are live, you can instantly start analyzing your data.
  • Keep your ears open, some new exciting updates are coming to DataSuite!

Tell us what you think

Let us know what you would like us to prioritize next on our feature requests board. We’re always happy to know your thoughts and ideas on how we can improve GameAnalytics for you.

So with all of that out of the way, head to your GameAnalytics account and start experimenting. Be it the A/B test or deep dive into all the data about your games: let’s play!