Basic funnel tracking in Rails
February 13, 2011 - 2 Comments - elite command analytics ruby rails
This is the first in a series of articles I intend to publish about the technology, philosophy, and process behind my latest Rails project, Elite Command. Elite Command is a turn-based, multiplayer strategy game, and a lot of interesting approaches were taken in developing for its unique requirements.
Before I get too into the grittier aspects of the game, I’m going to cover something which applies to any web application which strives for commercial success: analytics.
Having designed and maintained various analytics platforms over the last three years, I’ve learned a thing or two about best practices and capable architectures for supporting the requirements of a robust analytics infrastructure. I’ve also learned a lot about the types of metrics which are most useful in a business sense. With this knowledge, adding analytics to Elite Command was a matter of choosing the 20% effort which would yield 80% of the useful results. That’s why the first analytics tool I baked in was funnel tracking.
Note that my code is using MongoDB with Mongoid for the ORM, but that this is all just as applicable to whatever data store you may be using…
