Bug Data discrepancy in dashboards

Hi there, I'm looking at my games performance (DAU, MAU, installs, etc.) on the apple developer console, google console, and unity services dashboard while filtering for iOS or android to compare to the other ecosystem dashboards.

Unity dashboard across the board appears to have higher numbers for every metric I can reasonably compare. (hard to do with iOS as their metrics aren't the same as in the unity dashboard)

As and example google says i have 0 monthly active users, while unity dashboard filtered for android says i have 20ish.

How do I know when to trust a native dashboard vs what unity is saying? I'd like to lean more into using unity metric tracking and analysis. But can't shake the feeling that I'm being told information that feels good (more users more downloads etc on unity dashboard) but ultimately consuming information that's wrong.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

 

The usual recommendation is to stick with one source of truth. You generally don't need absolute numbers, but rather changes over time ("this week we had 20% more users than last week"). The stores count downloads only. We count actual game launches. And if a user reinstalls the game, we count that as a new user, and likely why our counts are higher. Are you using Google Analytics? Where are you seeing monthly active users on the Google dashboard? As mentioned, Google generally only counts initial downloads, not game play metrics.

 

Hey thanks for trying to help me.

When I say google I mean the dashboard that's in the google play console. I'm able to designate certain KPI's i want in the dashboard to display and daily active users and monthly active users are some that I've selected and they display 0.

One thing that confuses me also about unity's numbers is that we have an internal leaderboard, and since there's very few people playing it its very easy to place on the leaderboard. But there's only 2 people on the leader board most wee

My guess it will become a lot clearer what players we have when we implement custom event tracking. I just googled unity custom events, and was taken to this documentation:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-AnalyticsEventTracker.html

I see it says legacy at the top of the documentation page, is this what's currently supported by the funnel analyzer in the unity dashboard?

 

How are you sending player metrics to Google? If you have no specific code or libraries in place to send player metrics, then the 0 values might be expected. You would want to reach out to Google for more details. You pointed to legacy Unity Analytics documentation which is now deprecated. Instead, you'll want to implement UGS Analytics, there is more information here:

https://docs.unity.com/analytics/GetStarted.html

You then want to initialize UGS and send custom events after defining the events in Event Manager

https://docs.unity.com/analytics/AnalyticsSDKGuide.html

https://docs.unity.com/analytics/RecordingCustomEvents.html