Tracking Player Progress using Google Analytics
I've been trying to find an easy way to track the progress of players in my Fisher Girl game. Up till now I've been using Mochibot to track the number of people playing the game, but there is no information about how many players actually made it to the first rod or how many players come back and play again. Google Analytics is great for giving tons of details about your users for websites and can be used in a flash game to give the same information even if the game is hosted on multiple portals.
The latest version of the Fisher Girl game was created for mindjolt and includes the analytics tracking code. In the Fisher Girl game the fishing rod is the leveling mechanic. The better your rod level is the farther you can cast and the better fish you can catch. To win the game you must purchase all the rods and save the Fisher Boy. I setup a Goal in Google Analytics for tracking how many people go through all the steps to finish the game. The goal steps are:
Click the image to see full size.
So you can see how many people dropped out at each rod level. The worst area seems to be between level one and level two where only 34% of the players keep playing. The percentage of players progressing between each level is staying very consistent with only a few percentage points of difference each day. That should make it obvious if any changes increase player retention or not. For my next game update I'll focus on making that second part of the game more interesting and minimizing the frustration of losing lures to turtles.
Update (7/21/2009): After just moving the turtles near the second buoy down, so they wouldn't eat the lure as soon as it hit the water and removing one turtle, the average progress rate between level one a level two went up from 34% to 42% , which increased the game finish average from 6% to 10%.
The latest version of the Fisher Girl game was created for mindjolt and includes the analytics tracking code. In the Fisher Girl game the fishing rod is the leveling mechanic. The better your rod level is the farther you can cast and the better fish you can catch. To win the game you must purchase all the rods and save the Fisher Boy. I setup a Goal in Google Analytics for tracking how many people go through all the steps to finish the game. The goal steps are:
- Game start
- Purchased silver rod
- Purchased gold rod
- Purchased legendary rod
- Game Finished saved fisher boy.
Click the image to see full size.
So you can see how many people dropped out at each rod level. The worst area seems to be between level one and level two where only 34% of the players keep playing. The percentage of players progressing between each level is staying very consistent with only a few percentage points of difference each day. That should make it obvious if any changes increase player retention or not. For my next game update I'll focus on making that second part of the game more interesting and minimizing the frustration of losing lures to turtles.
Update (7/21/2009): After just moving the turtles near the second buoy down, so they wouldn't eat the lure as soon as it hit the water and removing one turtle, the average progress rate between level one a level two went up from 34% to 42% , which increased the game finish average from 6% to 10%.
Great write up on using Google Analytics to track game play and improve the experience. We've been using similar techniques at pbskids.org to track usability for our preschool games and sites and it's definitely improved some of our content as well.
Very interesting one about the ways to boost gamin sites. Kids love to play such games. One should be very creative to design such interesting games. They must have done their game designing courses from reputed institutes.