Data without understanding is a dangerous combination, especially when it comes to being swamped by the millions of data points popular mobile games generate on a daily basis.

But combining the two requires a range of skills that few but the biggest outfits are likely to possess in-house.

That's the reason for the existence of companies such as Apsalar, which describes itself as a mobile engagement management specialist.

Basically, this means it offers analytics and user targeting tools for iOS and Android apps; something its highlighting with the release of its new Engagement Index and Revenue Analytics platform.

What are they doing?

Combined with its existing free ApScience analytics service, the suite enables developers to track users' behaviour by assigning events.

These can be in-game actions such as levelling up or based around IAP purchases, even when users are viewing your store but not completing purchases. Tracked in real-time for each unique user, these generate reports making it easy to track basic metrics ranging from overall revenue and Average Revenue Per User to more complex ones such as Average Engagement Per User.

Apsalar argues that this level of granularity means developers can drill down to see how behaviour translates into revenue over time, whether within a single app, across a portfolio of apps and how it changes with the addition of new features.

Pushing the envelope

One company already using the technology is the DeNA-owned studio Gameview, which is behind freemium games such as TapFish

"We are very excited about being able to track with precision engagement and revenue in our apps and to explore the causality between the two," said CEO Riz Virk.

"The data from Apsalar is critical in helping to guide our product and business decisions and in achieving our revenue and lifetime value goals."

"Gameview's apps are already among the top grossing games in the mobile ecosystem and yet it realises that to continually improve performance, it needs to be able to measure and optimise the value of its users," commented Michael Oiknine, CEO and co-founder of Apsalar.

You can find out more about Apsalar's services via its website.