Puzzle Attack is a match-3 game developed by myself, based on some other popular Facebook games. In this journal I want to talk about the benefits of integrating social networks such as Facebook into your game, and how you can measure these benefits with services such as Google Analytics.

First let me say, it's incredibly hard to develop a Facebook integrated game while travelling in China! I can't test the game in production or any of the sharing features whatsoever, I submit all errors as 'events' to the Google Analytics api to track any errors, none so far other than a few connection errors when I ran the game locally. I made a few changes the other day so you can see a number of connection errors. (0 = Connection Failed, 2 = Web Service Error, 7 = Database Error)




You can also track data such as the major landing pages, (always the same since this is a game rather than a web page we are tracking) and the exit pages. It is concerning me that more people exit mid-game than from the main menu, and there is a 15% bounce rate in the initial connecting page.





I track events such as inviting friends, and sharing highscores \ achievements via page views. The sharing clearly correlates with new users joining. It's really interesting watching the daily progress, the game has not been marketed or shared anywhere (previous to this post), but somehow I got a hit from a player in the Philippines, and it has spread to a number of players there, and branched over to Malaysia and the USA.




I'll be sure to share future progress when \ if there is a larger data-set.