While at first blush it appears registered users are keeping pace with the unique visitor growth, a closer look at the unique visitors to new registered users rate shows that the overall quality of unique visitors in terms of conversion to registered users is starting to slip, down by 13% in 2 months.

Marketing costs per new registered user are also climbing, but take a look at marketing costs per new paying user -- the falling cost indicates that while the quality of unique visitors in terms of creating registered users is declining, the conversion rate from these reduced registered users to paying users is actually higher.

Management is moving the marketing costs in the right direction and, assuming pricing has stayed constant, likely operating the game well, as they must be increasing the conversion rate of paying users by attracting a better new registered user, keeping their existing registered users happy, or combination of both.

Looking at the free-to-play, microtransaction-supported MMORPG downloaded PC client game above, we see unique visitors moving up and down each month while marketing cost per unique visitor is trending down almost 12.5% in two months. However, we see New registered users have only dipped 2.8% over the same period. So right away we can see that management has either found a cheaper source of ads to buy, free referrals are improving, or a combination of both.

However, we see that the unique visitors to new registered users rate has declined by 4.8% in two months indicating that the unique visitors -- while cheaper -- are of lower quality in terms of registered user conversion. Worse, we see the lower marketing cost per unique visitors has caused paying user conversion to plummet 25.3% in two months which has pushed marketing costs per new paying user up by 19.5%.

Unless there is a significant uptick in revenue per paying user, management is clearly starting to struggle with their marketing plan, or there is an underlying quality problem with the game that is slowing the uptake of new registered users and paying users. Management would need to return to buying more expensive unique visitors to see if the registered users and paying users' conversion rate move back up before we could tell for certain.

What about metrics that should not be used to compare games?

There are lots. Average revenue per user (ARPU) jumps out as one of the worst offenders. As every game has different play styles, targets different demographics, has different operating costs, and can be in different stages of content released to gamers, comparing ARPU of one game to another can be very misleading.

Average revenue per user is very useful to trend within the context of a single game as it measures how well paying users are responding to new content (or lack thereof) and marketing efforts directed at Paying Users. ARPU is also a strong indicator of when a game has peaked with its current marketing efforts and game content.

Another set of metrics that come to mind are those concerned with the average time of a user play session and the average number of sessions a user plays over a given time period such as on a monthly basis. These metrics can point to how engaging a game is to play, and there is clearly a correlation between time spent playing and the revenue from the user.

However, trying to compare these metrics across games, even in the same genre, is fraught with risk. Play session time is driven by content design and intangible "fun" or playability of the game. These two factors do not always go together. A 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle (content design) can take a lot of time to solve, but not be fun for many users.