Roblox Acquisition Analytics: Where Your Players Come From and What They Do Next

To see where players discover your Roblox experience and whether they come back, use the Acquisition report in Creator Dashboard. A creator’s profile follower count measures a different relationship: it does not tell you how many people played an experience or returned to it.

The Acquisition report helps you compare traffic from Roblox surfaces and share links. The most useful comparison goes beyond the number of people who arrive: look at impressions, plays, qualified plays and the later behavior of comparable groups of new players.

Where to Find Roblox Acquisition Analytics

To open the report:

1. Go to the Creator Dashboard and open Creations.
2. Select the experience you want to analyze.
3. In the left-hand menu, open Analytics.
4. Select Acquisition.

Roblox provides Acquisition analytics for individually owned and group-owned experiences. For a group-owned experience, your account needs the appropriate analytics permissions. If the report is unavailable, check your access before assuming the experience has no acquisition data. Roblox Creator Hub: Acquisition

Before comparing results, record the experience, reporting dates and report view. A source comparison and a share-link comparison answer related but different questions.

Profile followers and experience players are different audiences

Someone can follow your Roblox profile without playing your experience. A player can also discover and play an experience without following its creator.

Our guide to Roblox followers vs friends explains the profile relationships. The Roblox Followers service concerns the visible follower count of a profile. Profile follows are not experience plays or evidence that players return.

What Roblox Acquisition Sources Tell You

The Acquisition dashboard separates new users from returning users and shows their impressions and plays by source. Keep those groups separate: a source that brings back existing players is not necessarily the same source that introduces the experience to new people.

Roblox also lists sources such as Continue Play, Friends, Charts, ads and teleports. The exact source definitions are in the Acquisition documentation.

Search and Home Recommendations

Search is useful when you want to investigate how the experience performs when Roblox users find it through search-related placements.

Home recommendations concerns discovery through the relevant recommendations area on Home. When you inspect the more specific Home Recommendations analytics, keep that scope in mind: its signals describe users acquired through that recommendation surface, not every player from every source. Roblox Discovery documentation

If Home recommendation impressions change, first compare the relevant period and source. A change in impressions is an observation; it does not, by itself, establish which creative change or external event caused it.

External Traffic and Share Links

External traffic can be included in Roblox’s Other source when it cannot be attributed more specifically. To compare individual placements outside Roblox, use the share-link view where available.

For example, you might use one share link in a video description and another in a community post. Keep your own record of where and when each was placed. The link identifies the tracked link, but it does not necessarily prove every subsequent location where someone encountered it.

In its documentation, Roblox uses both Users with plays and Users with qualified plays when describing acquisition attribution and the share-link funnel. Use the label and definition shown in the specific report you are viewing, rather than assuming the two labels are interchangeable.

Impressions, Plays and Qualified Plays

These metrics describe different stages of discovery and engagement. Read them together instead of treating a high value in any one column as a complete result.

What Is an Impression?

An impression is a recorded opportunity for a user to see an experience in the relevant Roblox placement. The report may show users with impressions by source; a specific Home recommendation report can use its own presentation and scope.

An impression does not mean the user clicked, played or noticed the experience. When comparing impression and play metrics, keep the source and report definition consistent. Roblox Acquisition

What Is a Play?

A play indicates that a user played the experience within the scope of the metric. In the Acquisition attribution table, Roblox describes Users with plays as unique new users with plays for the experience.

That user count is not the same thing as profile followers, and it should not be relabeled as the number of people who became regular players. For that question, look at the later engagement and retention metrics for the relevant cohort. Roblox Acquisition

What Is a Qualified Play?

A qualified play is a play session Roblox treats as meaningful for the relevant metric, filtering out accidental entries or quick bounces. Roblox discusses qualified play sessions in its explanation of Home recommendation signals. Roblox Discovery

Do not assume a universal number of seconds or minutes applies to every qualified-play report. Use the definition supplied for the report you are analyzing.

Play-Through Rate vs Qualified Play-Through Rate

Play-through rate describes how often users play after seeing an experience in the relevant placement. Roblox describes it as a recommendation signal for users who see an experience in the Recommended for You area. Roblox Discovery

Qualified play-through rate narrows the outcome to qualified plays. For Home thumbnail personalization, Roblox defines it as qualified plays divided by impressions from Home page recommendations. Roblox thumbnail documentation

The denominator matters. Do not divide qualified plays from one source by impressions from a different source, or mix a new-user count with a total impression count just because the resulting percentage looks useful.

If a dashboard supplies a rate, preserve its name, time range and source when reporting it. If you calculate a separate ratio, state exactly which numerator and denominator you used.

Worked Example: Comparing Two Share Links

The following figures are hypothetical. Assume both links were measured over equivalent acquisition periods and the seven-day playtime figures are mature.

Link A leads on the volume of new users with qualified plays: it has twice as many as link B in this example.

Link B leads on the listed engagement measure: its acquired users have higher seven-day cumulative playtime per user. That does not mean every player from B played for exactly 70 minutes. It is an average for the defined acquired cohort.

Roblox describes seven-day playtime per user as cumulative playtime during the first seven days for new players acquired in the selected range, divided by the number of new players acquired in that range. Roblox Acquisition

The results support different decisions:

• If the immediate goal is more new users with qualified plays, A produced more in this example.
• If the goal is higher measured seven-day playtime per acquired user, B performed better on that measure.
• If the goal is return behavior, inspect D7 retention separately. Playtime per user and retention are related questions, but they are not the same metric.

Neither result proves which link will perform better in the next campaign. Audience, placement, timing and creative can change.

Let Cohorts Mature Before Comparing Them

A group acquired yesterday has not had the same opportunity to accumulate seven-day playtime as a group acquired two weeks ago. Avoid treating a partial seven-day measure as a finished result.

Roblox defines D7 retention in this report as the percentage of new players acquired in the date range who played again on the eighth day after their first session ended. Use Roblox’s definition when reporting it; do not substitute a general definition from another analytics platform. Roblox Acquisition

For a fair comparison, use the same cohort type, date logic and observation window. Also note whether the experience, promotion or placement changed during the comparison.

What to Check Next

Use the report to choose a specific question rather than trying to improve every number at once.

If Impressions Are Low

Check the selected source, dates and whether the experience was eligible to appear in that placement. For Home recommendations, also check whether Exclude from Recommendations is enabled.

Low impressions tell you that the measured exposure was limited. They do not establish that a particular thumbnail change will produce more distribution.

If Impressions Are Strong but Few Users Play

Compare the relevant play-through or conversion rate with your own earlier, comparable periods. Review whether the title, icon, description and screenshots accurately represent the experience players will enter.

A mismatch is a hypothesis to investigate, not a proven explanation for every user who did not play.

If New Players Arrive but Return Behavior Is Weak

Allow the cohort enough time to mature, then examine retention and playtime alongside the acquisition source. Check the first-session experience: what does a new player encounter immediately, and can they understand what to do?

Keep your notes specific. “Players from link B had higher seven-day playtime per user in this cohort” is a supported observation. “Link B always brings better players” is a prediction the report does not establish.