How to use Google Analytics for tracking players' scores?

Question

I already have Analytics set up for my Android game, so I would like to use it for everything unless what I want is really not possible.

Can I somehow use Google Analytics for tracking the final score of the player for each game they play? Right now I'm using a custom metric for this, along these lines:

tracker.send(new HitBuilders.EventBuilder()
        .setCategory("game")
        .setAction("over")
        .setCustomMetric(1, score)
        .build());

In the Analytics console, I've registered custom metric 1 to represent score. "Scope" is set to "Hit", "Formatting Type" is set to "Integer".

The problem is that the Analytics dashboard doesn't seem to want to let me show this data in a useful way. It just adds up all the scores that meet the requested filters. By dividing this sum by the number of finished games, I can compute the average score, but nothing more.

What I want is probably a histogram:

   0-1000 points     373 games
1000-2000 points     474 games
2000-3000 points     122 games
...

Presumably, I could use a custom dimension instead of a metric, where the dimension value represents the histogram bucket (0, 1000, 2000, ...). But that will restrict my later abilities to slice and dice the data in a different way.

Is what I want even possible with Google Analytics?

Philip Walton Philip Walton · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-15T23:21:57

You're correct that Google Analytics doesn't currently allow reporting on custom dimensions data in this way.

However, I wouldn't change how you're tracking it just to work around this limitation. As you point out, that will affect your ability to change your bucket definitions in the future.

There have been a number of feature requests for bucketing in the next version of the Core Reporting API, so I think it's a safe bet that it will be added soon. And if it's in the API it will almost certainly be available natively in Google Analytics reports as well.

In the meantime, if it were me, I'd fetch your data via the API and use a third-party library to display it as a histogram.

How to use Google Analytics for tracking players' scores?

1 Answers