Thousands of companies large and small use Flurry Analytics to understand how consumers interact with their mobile applications. You can measure audience reach, engagement, retention, conversions, revenue and lot more with this completely free service that they provide. To get started using Flurry, you should first create a user account here. Once this has been done, you will then be taken directly to the create applictaion page, which is covered in the sections below.
Please note that Flurry will send you an activation email to the account you used when filling out the sign-up form. You can click the link supplied or, the next time you log in, paste the code that is also included in the email into the appropriate section of the form that you will be shown. If you do not verify your account you will not be able to use Flurry again after the initial sign up.
Create An Application Profile
The first thing you will be presented with when creating a new account with Flurry, is the Create a new application screens. you can choose to continue here, creating your first game profile, or you can investigate the Flurry interface a bit first (although there is not much to see to start with!). If you don't create a game profile straight away, you can get back to this screen by clicking on the Applications tab and then selecting Add a New Application from the right of the page.
Selecting a platform
As you can see from the image above, you must first select a platform to set up analytics for, and you will need to do this for each of the target platforms that you wish to track your app on. However there are a couple of important things to note here-
- For iOS games, if the game is universal (ie: iPad and iPhone) then you can use either of the given profiles, but if your game is one or the other, then you should use the one that is appropriate and set up GameMaker:Studio accordingly.
- The HTML5 button may not be available to you straight away as this is a beta feature. To get it activated you will need to send a request to Flurry stating so.
No matter what platform you select, you will then be prompted to give the App Name and select a Category for the game, before being given your unique Application Key.
The Application Key
When you create the profile for you game on whatever platform you have chosen, you will be given an Application Key.
This key is what you should be using when setting up GameMaker:Studio (see Using Analytics) and you will have to create one for each of the target platforms that you wish to track (unlike Google Analytics, which permits you to use the same ID over all platforms). if you are not yet ready to add this key into GameMaker:Studio, it can easily be found again by going to the Applications tab, then selecting your game from the list. Then from the overview page, click the Manage item and in the App Info section you can find the key again.
Tracking
Now that you have set up your game profile, and you have included your Application Key in the GameMaker:Studio Global Game Settings, you can start to track game through the Flurry Dashboard. To get to the dashboard, you should click theApplications tab and then select your game from the list to take you to the default "overview" dashboard.
NOTE: Analytics can take some time to start coming through the system. You should expect to wait up to 48 hours before getting any results.
The dashboard is the main starting point to view how your game is doing, and is highly customisable, however it basically shows things like geographical distribution, page views, time used etc... Note that the options and views may differ depending on which platform the game is being tracked on, although the same basic info is always available. The sheer number of possible options for the different views as well as the massive amount of information that is shown, is outside of the scope of this tutorial, and it is strongly recommended that you visit the Flurry Support forums to get the most from their analytics.
Custom Events
There is one further thing that you should be aware of when using Flurry, and that is Custom Events. Custom events are user interactions with content in your game that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. Things like downloads, ad clicks, achievements, game time etc... are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events.
GameMaker:Studio has a couple of extra functions available for analytics (their use is explained here) which enables you to send off these custom events, which can be generic (an event with a simple text), or extended (where you send a string, a parameter and a value). The extended events can be used to send up to 10 parameter/values in one call (unlike Google which permits only one), and these are incredibly useful as they can be used to to find out (for example) how long a player takes to finish a game, or the final score and time taken of a player at the end of each level.
To see these custom events, simply click on the Events link on the left of your dashboard. If none have been received, you will get a simple message saying that you can enable events, but if you have been sending any they will now be shown here in a variety of different formats showing the different data received.