Unity analytics liveops

Unity analytics & liveops

The levers that turn a playable casual game into a retentive and monetizable one are mostly measurement and iteration, not more features. A game ships, you watch D1/D7/D30 retention and ARPDAU, and you tune the difficulty curve, onboarding, and ad cadence against real numbers. This skill covers how to instrument that loop in a Unity casual iOS game and how to act on it.

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Retention is largely set before user acquisition — by whether players find the fun, get guided to it, and hit low onboarding friction (Solsten — D1/D7/D30 retention). Instrument the first session first.

Doctrine

1. Instrument before you tune. Don't guess at difficulty or ad frequency — wire analytics, ship a soft launch, read the funnel, then change one thing.
2. Gate tunables behind remote config. Difficulty constants, ad cadence, onboarding variants, and paywall copy should be server-driven so you can change them without an App Store resubmission (review takes days; a config flip is instant).
3. Change one variable at a time (A/B). Attribute a retention/ARPDAU move to a single change or you learn nothing.
4. Measure ad frequency against retention + ARPDAU. Over-serving ads hurts BOTH retention and eCPM, so "more ads ≠ more revenue" (Tap-Nation — hybrid-casual KPIs). Tune cadence empirically; do not hardcode a "correct" number.
5. Privacy is a build gate on iOS. Every analytics/attribution SDK adds data-collection that must be declared in the privacy manifest and respect ATT. Wire this with unity-qa-release, not as an afterthought.

What to measure (the casual KPI set)

Wire these events/metrics from day one. Benchmarks are targets to converge toward, not guarantees.

Metric	Why it matters	Hybrid-casual reference
D1 / D7 / D30 retention	The core health signal; set pre-acquisition	D7 ~20%, D30 ~10% (hypercasual D30 ≈ 0) (Gamigion 2025)
Onboarding / first-session funnel	Where new players drop before "the fun"	Instrument each step; find-the-fun is the #1 D1 lever
Session length & sessions/day	Engagement depth	Track trend, not an absolute
ARPDAU (total)	Revenue health per active user	Compare across A/B arms
Ad ARPDAU + impressions/DAU	Ad-revenue intensity vs. fatigue	Watch retention as you raise frequency
IAP conversion %	Share of payers	Only ~1.8% of F2P players ever buy IAP (Game Growth Advisor) — so hybrid (ads + IAP) is the default model
Rewarded engagement (opt-in rate, completions/DAU)	Rewarded video is the core casual format	Highest-eCPM format; design natural rewarded placements (TopOn H1 2025)

Treat published eCPM dollar figures and "X ads per session" rules as unreliable — they vary by quarter, geo, network, and report scope. Measure your own.

Pick your stack (one each, don't double-count)

For a Unity casual iOS game, choose one analytics + one crash + one remote-config/A-B provider and avoid wiring two analytics SDKs that double-count sessions.

• Analytics: Unity Gaming Services Analytics (native to Unity), GameAnalytics (free, casual-games-focused, built-in funnels), or Firebase Analytics (broad ecosystem).
• Crash/diagnostics: Firebase Crashlytics or Unity Cloud Diagnostics.
• Remote config + A/B: Unity Remote Config (+ Game Overrides/A-B) or Firebase Remote Config + A/B Testing.
• Attribution (only if running paid UA): AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, or Tenjin — these own the SKAdNetwork/AdAttributionKit postback handling.

See references/sdk-integration.md for Unity import, asmdef/EDM4U, and iOS wiring notes.

Remote config + A/B workflow

1. Externalize tunables. Move difficulty constants, ad-cadence parameters (the values consumed by unity-monetization's cadence policy), onboarding flags, and paywall strings out of code into remote config keys with safe in-code defaults (so the game works offline / before first fetch).
2. Fetch early, apply safely. Fetch on launch; fall back to the bundled defaults if the fetch fails. Never block the first session on a network call.
3. Run one experiment at a time. Define a hypothesis ("variant B's gentler early difficulty raises D1"), split users server-side, and read the one KPI it should move. Keep a holdout.
4. Promote or kill. Roll the winning arm to 100% via config; no client update needed.

Soft-launch before global

Validate retention and ARPDAU in a small, representative geo before scaling user acquisition:

1. Ship to a limited region with full analytics wired.
2. Read D1/D7, onboarding funnel, ARPDAU, and crash-free rate.
3. Fix the biggest funnel drop and the biggest retention leak first (usually onboarding / find-the-fun), tuning via remote config where possible.
4. Only scale UA once retention clears your bar — acquiring users for a leaky funnel burns spend.

iOS measurement specifics

• ATT prompt timing. Show the App Tracking Transparency prompt at a sensible moment (after the player has seen value), with a clear pre-prompt. Opt-in is low on iOS, which has shifted ad revenue toward Android — so don't depend on IDFA-based measurement (Tenjin 2026).
• SKAdNetwork / AdAttributionKit. Configure conversion values to encode early-funnel signal (e.g. tutorial complete, first purchase) for privacy-preserving install attribution. Your attribution SDK handles the postbacks; you choose what the conversion values mean.
• Privacy manifest. Each analytics/attribution SDK collects data that must be declared in PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy (data types + required-reason APIs). Coordinate with unity-qa-release › App Store readiness; a missing declaration is an App Store rejection.

Where this sits

• unity-monetization owns ad/IAP wiring; this skill measures whether that wiring is actually earning without hurting retention, and feeds the ad-cadence policy real numbers.
• unity-gameplay-systems builds onboarding / the core loop; instrument its first-session funnel here.
• unity-qa-release owns the privacy manifest, ATT, and store submission; analytics SDKs add requirements there.
• unity-game-director sets the retention/monetization targets this skill measures against.

Field notes & lessons

• Retention is set before acquisition — the first-session onboarding funnel is the highest-leverage thing to instrument; fix the biggest drop before adding features.
• "More ads ≠ more revenue": raising ad frequency past a point lowers both retention and eCPM, so the right cadence is the one your ARPDAU-vs-retention data supports, not a number copied from a blog.
• Keep every tunable that you might want to change after launch behind remote config with a safe default — App Store review latency makes client-side constants expensive to fix.
• Wire privacy-manifest disclosures the moment you add an analytics/attribution SDK, not at submission time, or the iOS build gets rejected late.