Introducing Sensor Tower's Exciting New Games Analysis Features

Sensor Tower's highly accurate mobile analytics platform has served a variety of businesses over the past seven years, but it's hard to overstate the importance of our relationship with the games industry. Mobile game developers and publishers have not only served as the foundation for the Sensor Tower enterprise customer base, but their feedback has driven the development of key features in our platform. Today, we're excited to introduce two new features built for this audience: Game Taxonomy and Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU).

Unparalleled Gaming Insights

Developed in partnership with Deconstructor of Fun, Sensor Tower's Game Taxonomy offers new insights into how games are performing at the subcategory level and beyond. Segment your data and gain a critical understanding of how games are experiencing success. Leveraging industry-recognized genre definitions transcending both the App Store and Google Play's subcategories, Game Taxonomy reflects Sensor Tower's in-depth understanding of the space and delivers actionable insights for game production and marketing.

Additionally, our product and engineering teams have introduced a new metric to help measure long-term performance: ARPDAU. Available for Enterprise customers that have both our Store Intelligence and Usage Intelligence products, ARPDAU is a valuable signal for an app's monetization success on a per-user basis, measuring app monetization per daily active user and aggregated in rolling daily, weekly, or monthly views.

Let's take a closer look at how games publishers will benefit from these two major updates.

How Game Taxonomy Works

Game Taxonomy functions as a simple drop-down menu that can be accessed whenever applicable Games Category apps are available, including Store Intelligence Top Apps and other views. While the nomenclature for the filter is reasonably similar to the existing subcategories already found across both app stores, they are much narrower and help describe the features of games more clearly. Here are a few examples:

• Strategy - MOBA: Real-time team-based action games with varying objectives. These games have very limited to no power progression and monetize mainly through cosmetics.

• Racing - Arcade Driving: Games with racing as core gameplay, but have arcade-style theming and may not always represent accurate physics or vehicle modeling.

• Puzzle - Hidden Objects: Story-driven games where players must find hidden objects or spot differences between two pictures, often with significant time pressure and player rankings.

With dozens of different genres, users will be able to efficiently segment a selected cohort of existing games that fit a narrow contingent of characteristics and better identify trends at the mechanics level.

Plus, Sensor Tower's incorporation of Game Taxonomy across all Enterprise products allows for a variety of use cases and utility for several aspects of market research, game development, and release strategy. At nearly every stage of planning a new title, this feature will help uncover competitors' strategies and allow for critical takeaways on how games within a certain subgenre perform over time.

Here are a few sample use cases to get you up to speed on the power of Games Taxonomy on Sensor Tower:

• Game Taxonomy works well within App Intelligence to uncover how games within a particular genre have handled ASO, product feature rollouts, and other updates.

• Games Taxonomy implemented within App Intelligence and Store Intelligence further defines the competitive landscape, benchmarking performance at the category, genre, or subgenre level.

• Games Taxonomy uncovers new segments within Ad Intelligence, helping teams refine paid marketing strategies by understanding ad activity and analyzing creatives of games with similar mechanics and characteristics.

From development strategy and launch plans, to partnerships and acquisition opportunities, Game Taxonomy delivers an unparalleled and actively evolving filter to understand game performance.

How ARPDAU Works

Leveraging Sensor Tower's Usage and Store Intelligence products, ARPDAU is another useful way for game publishers to understand how titles are generating revenue. Available for all apps and sub-apps supported by our Usage Intelligence Product, ARPDAU is a view similar to Revenue Per Download (RPD) and determines how overall revenue coincides with daily active users. ARPDAU is an especially handy metric in relation to games, as it delivers a clear picture of how in-app-purchases (IAP) and other revenue-generating strategies (such as subscription content passes) are performing relative to the most engaged player base.

Alongside other metrics, including RPD, ARPDAU can provide teams with a more comprehensive understanding of a game customer's Lifetime Value (LTV). Additionally, ARPDAU delivers strong signals that can help your team qualify how much revenue an average player generates, what daily players are willing to spend, and how IAPs have performed over time for your team.

ARPDAU provides another critical view into how your game is performing and whether your audience is responding to your long-tail content.

Expanding Your Gaming Intelligence

As with our App Teardown feature, Game Taxonomy and ARPDAU are in ongoing development. While there is already a substantial amount of valuable information on the nuanced landscape of mobile games available through these features, we're looking forward to adding even more information to better understand how games with certain features, mechanics, live ops, and other distinctive traits gain and retain players over time. Plus, we're constantly refining our metrics to better serve end-to-end performance of apps and are looking forward to delivering even better indicators of long-term value.

Please stay tuned for more information and updates to these features, and enjoy this new way to look at one of the most exciting spaces in mobile.

Interested in learning more about Game Taxonomy, ARPDAU, or Sensor Tower's platform? Reach out to our sales team.