Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com May 17, the Steam official recently released a blog post "the Future of Steam Traffic report", announcing that it will stop using Google Analytics (Internet traffic tracking tool) in July.

Steam officials say Steam has to use its built-in traffic reporting tool because Google's tracking solution is inconsistent with the way Steam protects customer privacy.

CTOnews.com is attached to the official text of Steam:

We announce a series of changes to the traffic data reports provided by Steam to game developers. The report provides a summary of overall traffic data on the store page, measuring the benefits of traffic from external sources, while continuously protecting players' privacy and preferences.

This update has three major sections, which will be launched in the next few months:

New data and features have been added to store and platform traffic reports.

Updates have been made to our UTM analysis to improve the measurement of conversion to wish list / purchase / activation.

End of support for Google Analytics (analysis).

Player privacy is paramount.

All the tools and features we discuss here are built on the basis of player privacy, and Steam still doesn't share personally identifiable information. This privacy approach also means that we have to make some sacrifices to limit the detail of some reports. In most cases, this means that traffic sources that fall below the threshold are classified as "other" in the report. We deliberately avoid collecting or storing demographic information such as the user's age, gender or race. If you want to know more about our privacy policy, please check our privacy policy agreement.

Updates to store and Steam platform traffic reports

The Steamworks backend has provided detailed reports on Steam internal traffic and traffic from external sources, so you can get a lot of information about how players find their store pages. If you want to learn more about existing traffic reports, check the store and platform traffic report documents.

But from the feedback we collected from game developers, we realized that these reports did not include all the useful data to help you understand the overall traffic on the store page. Based on the most requested new features, we plan to release some key updates as follows:

Regional breakdown: the traffic report will soon include a detailed regional analysis of visitors to the store page. This information is helpful when considering which languages the game should support or where the server should be set up for multiplayer games.

Improved ability to identify external flow sources: developers have always wanted to better understand which sites flow to their store pages. Therefore, we will show more external traffic sources to include more common domain names.

Updates to the Steam UTM system

UTM helps developers measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by providing summary data on user conversion. Here are the key updates to be made on the UTM system:

Increase tracking percentage: we have been working on improvements to better track how players click on a UTM link on a website and jump to the Steam desktop client to complete the purchase. This conversion data will be provided in a summary form and will not provide any further personal information.

Single-day conversion tracking: there have been some technical problems that have limited our conversion tracking updates to a slower frequency, which we are working on. You will soon be able to see the report within 24 hours after the start of the UTM event. Our conversion time window lasts for 3 days, so when we look at the statistics of the previous days, we may see an increase in traffic and the number of conversions.

Regional breakdown: the traffic report will soon include a detailed regional analysis of visitors to the store page. This information is helpful when considering which languages the game should support or where the server should be set up for multiplayer games.

Access device category: we will provide data on the device type (only divided into "mobile" and "desktop") for each event, so that you can get a general idea of how users understand their games.

Comparison of new and old users: when we provide statistics, we will let you know the percentage of new players who have just heard of the game and old players who already know the game.

End Steam support for Google Analytics

Starting in July, Google will no longer run Universal Analytics (UA), the third-party traffic reporting system we use to measure traffic sources on Steam store pages. They announced that they would be replaced by a system called Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Over time, we gradually realized that Google's tracking solution was not very suitable for our practice of protecting our customers' privacy, so we took this opportunity to move to GA4 and decided to end Steam's support for Google's data analysis system. We will instead focus on building the most useful parts of the summary report and integrating it into Steam, as mentioned above.

Those of you who are using UA will find that your Google Analytics report will no longer retrieve data from Steam from July 1.

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