<cross-posted from our blog>
Today, the PlayFab feature team is pleased to announce the latest addition to our analytics offering: the Trends Explorer. This tool allows you to evaluate daily historical performance across eight industry-standard KPIs, including daily & monthly active users, session length & frequency, classic retention, stickiness, new users, and revenue.
Use the new graphs to make effortless comparisons between time periods as short as one week or turn back the clock a full six months. No matter the time scale, you’ll see both the current and previous periods plotted, giving you true apples-to-apples comparisons so you can see how your player base is evolving and measure the impact of your efforts.
Further break down your KPIs by platform and region to identify top performers, so you can focus your efforts on the markets and devices that matter most to your business – or discover weak areas that need attention.
To make this level of reporting effortless, we’ve streamlined the session events based on your feedback from last month’s preview, resulting in fewer configuration steps. Now, when Unity customers next update the SDK, your game will automatically start sending the client_session_start and client_focus_change events, providing visibility into how long players spend with your game.
Further, by popular request, we’re pleased to add device-level data to the information we collect on your behalf. Our player_device_info event now collects more than a dozen standard properties available via Unity which describe the user’s phone/PC/console, including platform, model, memory, OS version, processor, and more. Like client_session_start, this event fires once after player_log_in. Both of these improvements are available today for Unity customers and will be added to our other SDKs in the future.
As part of our release, both the session and device collection options will be enabled by default beginning Tuesday, 9/11. If your title uses an SDK version that supports the session events or the device info events, you’ll begin seeing them flow immediately. If at any time you wish to disable either, each can be toggled off from Game Manager by unchecking the boxes under Settings > Data Collection.
Remember that, as the data controller, you own the relationship with your customer. We encourage you to review the language in your Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to ensure you are clearly communicating the scope of data you are gathering in light of these changes.
We’re confident the Trends Explorer will unlock new insights and save you time, allowing you to spend your energy digging one level deeper. And we want to hear from you! As you try this new feature out, please share your thoughts, hopes, and wishes so we can prioritize them. You can reach us by posting a feature request to the forums or any time on Slack.
