Time Spent Funnel?

Hi there, brand new to using Unity Analytics (or any analytics platform for that matter) and while I'm slowly grasping how to use funnels correctly (I think?) there's a few things that I'm not sure are possible.

See, for our game (games) what's very interesting to my team currently is "How much time are people spending on Screen A vs Screen B?"

Would the best way to calculate this just to handle it on the client side and send the elapsed time as a Custom Event? Or is there an easier way that I'm just missing out on.

Thanks!

 

Hey @Ryceratops ,

There are a couple ways you can track this:
[1] Create a custom event for each screen (i.e., "Screen A", "Screen B"), and include time as a numeric parameter. For numeric parameters, we can show you the count, sum and average in Data Explorer. This will allow you to see on average how much time players are spending on a specific Screen. Don't forget you can also break this down by segment (i.e., Android users vs. iOS users)! Check this post out for more info on custom events.

[2] Another way would be to create a funnel that tracks players progression from different screens. This works best if screens are linear (i.e., players must complete Screen A before Screen B, and Screen B before Screen C, etc...). Once a funnel is populated, there is an option Parameter Overview that will show you for each funnel step, the average of numeric parameters. Again, you'll want to make sure that the custom event has time as a numeric parameter. For more info on funnels, take a look at this post.

Hope this helps

 

Thanks @angeloferro !

Something that we were trying to avoid was a lot of in-client calculation for a lot of these metrics. We were hoping that there was some sort of feature that could take two separate Custom Events and calculate the time difference between them. And from what you were saying it sounds like that's somewhat possible with the Data Explorer's count/sum/average feature!

When you say use time as a numeric parameter do you mean put in the elapsed screen view time (as in that's something we'd have to calculate on our end) or is there any way to use the Custom Event's timestamp? Or did I misunderstand something?

 

No problem @Ryceratops !

When I said time - I meant an elapsed screen view time that you'd calculate on your end. For your specific use case, I'd say raw data export (which is an API we are currently working on) is your best bet. All custom events are time stamped, so you'd be able to download your event-level data and perform calculations on your data.

We'll post in the forum once that feature is available!

 

It makes no sense that we have to add a timestamp parameter on the custom event if Unity Analytics already tracks 2 timestamps on every event (one for the local device and one when the server received the event). Funnels and Data Explorer should let us use those timestamps as parameters by default.

 

Timestamps are already included, as you point out. There is no need to add a timestamp and was not suggested. This post is quite old, are you having a new issue?

 

I feel like we are missing a feature for no reason. I don't understand why we have to add our own timestamps to custom events if we want to use them in Data Explorer. Unity Analytics already tracks 2 timestamps but doesn't give us the option to use these timestamps anywhere other than when exporting raw data. It should let us select said timestamps as parameters of events automatically by default. It's a quality-of-life thing. Is this something that the Unity Analytics team would agree to implement?

 

You do not need to add timestamps, you can simply set the report Start/End dates. If you are trying to calculate elapsed time, that would not be possible in the Dashboard even if you sent your own timestamp. Instead, you would calculate an elapsed time in your game, and send it as the parameter for a single event.