What analytics told me about my .io game

I had players, I could see them. I even played a few games with them.

But we had no chat and no data, I had so many questions about these players. We had just built the game, we were so focused on game-play we didn't really think about measuring anything. So naive, haha.

How many players did we actually have? Where were they from, how did they find the site? So many questions.

I rushed to put analytics in.

Google Analytics answered a lot of my questions. We were getting about 200-600 players a day mostly from this one Russian website we had submitted to.

I started looking into the analytics more and nearly straight away saw a massive red flag.

Average session duration: 2m 07s.

This was really low considering our whole business model is based around players playing for a long time and seeing a lot of ads.

We needed to increase our average session duration. We also needed more data.

I'll explain how we got average session duration to 5x that number in the next post.