In an effort to provide a general framework for social game events, we’ve put together an ontology to guide both Kontagent customers and other game developers in formulating your own event framework.

This ontology was drafted to cover high-level core actions. Some parts of the proposed framework may not be relevant to your particular game. The intent is to get your creative juices flowing in the right frame of mind for how you would instrument your own application.

Here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself as you’re thinking about an event framework:

1) What do I need to measure in each lifecycle of my game?
2) What aspects of user behavior do I want to measure?
3) What events represent core game mechanic elements I really need to measure? What is a ‘nice to have’?
4) What events correlate most with revenue events?
5) Where am I going to be able to optimize my user flows?

By thinking about your game within our ARM Framework, (Acquisition/Virality, Retention/Engagement, Monetization) you can parse your event framework into lifecycle segments and formulate your event tracking within those segments. Remember, you don’t need to track all events and clicks within an application to gain full effect.

If you are unfamiliar with setting up events, we recommend instrumenting a tutorial as the first event string if you have one. A tutorial is usually one of the first engagement events a user comes into contact with, and is likely to lead to both higher retention and ultimately a higher likelihood of monetization.

Once you have an idea of how you want to structure your events, see our event instrumentation guide. As always, any feedback on how this guide has helped you, or how this guide can be improved to help others, is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Facebook Game Analytics, Social Analytics, Social Game Analytics, Social Graphs