How do you diagnose mobile game ad revenue drops?

Studio-wise, I've always been at companies where there were people whose dedicated job included looking at metrics like that and making business development plans around it.

For the various companies there were typically both daily "glance at the graph" meetings and weekly "dive deep into the graphs and numbers" meetings. Both had dashboard-style charts that showed week-long trends and multi-month trends.

As for what they do about it, it's part of business development. Every project will have unique cycles. In some games we had drops on the first and third weeks of the month. On some products we had more resources and could do more frequent updates, as well as seasonal updates. On others they were smaller and had an individual checking on it regularly as part of the business development planning.

Thanks, this is really helpful.

That matches what I suspected: bigger studios usually have someone whose job includes watching these metrics, plus regular daily/weekly review habits.

The gap I’m curious about is the smaller-team version of that workflow.

For an indie mobile game team without a dedicated analyst, I wonder what the minimum useful dashboard/checklist should be:

• latest day vs previous day

• latest 7 days vs previous 7 days

• revenue, impressions, fill/match rate, eCPM

• country and placement breakdown

• ad source / mediation source changes

Your point about project-specific cycles is important too. A drop may not mean “something broke” if the game has predictable weekly or monthly patterns.

Do you think small teams should start with short-term anomaly checks first, or is it more useful to build a longer baseline before reacting?