Swrve’s analytics let you test what your users want (exclusive)

Swrve debuted its analytics program last year to give developers real-time feedback on the behavior of gamers. Now it is launching a way to test what users really want in a mobile or social app.

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The San Francisco company is offering a feature that provides for real-time A/B testing for mobile and social apps from within an easy-to use dashboard. A developer offers two different choices for a given feature in an app and then measures which of the two choices, A or B, is more popular with users. Developers can use A/B testing to improve the user experience and make improve monetization.

Other analytics companies also offer this feature, and some game makers, such as Zynga, handle this function internally. But Swrve helps developers visualize data and then take actions based on the analysis of the data, Hugh Reynolds, chief executive of Swrve, told GamesBeat.

“Our product is aimed at marketing people who want to improve the impact of the app and its monetization,” Reynolds said. “It is not aimed at the database engineer or the information technology department.”

The A/B testing platform will let developers tune their apps for a certain segment of users at a very fine-grained level, he said. You could, for instance, run a test on users who have spent under a certain amount of money in the game and then try experiments that will get them to spend more money. You can test different versions for different users simply by clicking on a tab on the analytics dashboard.

“It’s like you have a personal chef, making something exactly for you,” Reynolds said.

Swrve has raised $4.7 million in funding to date from SV Angel, Mantis Group, and Intel Capital. Among Swrve’s 20 customers are PlayFirst, XMG Studio, 5th Planet Games, and Breaktime Studios. Swrve’s analytics focus on metrics such as revenue, retention, and engagement. Swrve has 23 employees. Rivals include Mixpanel, Kontagent, Apsalar, and Flurry.

Reynolds and Steven Collins founded the company in 2010. It has a headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Dublin, Ireland. Reynolds says about a half-dozen games are using Swrve’s platform in an early access program. Among them is Gravity Bear, a maker of Facebook games.

Reynolds and Collins have a long history working together and with Intel. They sold a previous startup, Havok, to Intel in 2007. Then they started Core, a company that created scripting languages for console games, and sold that to Intel’s Havok.

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