Mobile App Analytics (PART 1)

Published On: 15 August 2018.By .
  • Mobile

 

       Mobile Applications as one of the most rapidly emerging technology has changed the world we are living in today. With no doubt, they are covering a larger part of our livelihood day by day. Millions of applications have been published so far out of which some are playing excellently such as ExpressVPN, 1Weather, Blue Mail, Google Maps, Google Now, Google Assistant, etc. and hundreds of new applications are published every day.
       If we take it from app developer’s and development agency’s point of view in today’s competitive environment in this application marketplace, it is going hard for the app developers to distinguish their application from other similar kind of mobile applications. Some of the questions for marketing & sales team with developers who develop and improve that application may be:
  • How their mobile app is performing?
  • How to get to more and more new users while managing current user?
  • Where they are lacking in the app?
  • What experience is the app creating for the end users?
  • How they can take their application to the next level in this competition?
  • What features of the app are attracting user and which features need to be revised?
       Providing a quality application and showing a good level of attention to detail will help developers to stay on top of the table in this competitive time. Mobile apps are difficult to make sticky, and users are like quicksilver. Trying low prices for your app or making it free to use is one alternate, but any such experience that users don’t enjoy can take you from 100 (high success) to 0 (abject failure) in no time. An essential key for success is fast reaction to any bad experience that users might be having. Bad experiences primarily come in two ways:
  • Crashes:
    The app falls over or at least doesn’t work right.
  • Bad User Experience:
    The user can’t find how to do something, or has to do a lot of hard work to achieve a desired result.
So, collecting real-time data about all product users, their preferences and their experience regarding the app and analyzing them is the key area one should focus to take the app at the next level. Without this deep visibility, it is impossible to drive innovation and to improve the usability of your mobile offering.
Let’s take overview of metrics you need to be updated for your app’s success:
Analytics Metrics
    • Counting Installations:
      One of the first and simplest acquisition metrics, is measured by the app marketplaces.
    • Active and New Users:
      Well, anyone can download and install your app, but the point will be how many of them are used by user regularly. The active and new user metrics collect such data at runtime directly through all running app instances worldwide.
    • User Engagement:
      User engagement measures how often the users are active within your app and how much time they do spend working with your app’s features.
    • User Sessions:
      A user session is defined as the time period of use of your app by an individual, i.e. time between when the user started the app and ended the app by suspending to the background or closing the app.
    • Retention and Churn:
      The retention rate calculates the chance of a user who keeps your app for a defined period of time. But, the Churn represents the opposite of retention rate. It is the measure of users who will stop using your app in a defined period of time.
    • Lifetime Value (LTV):
      The lifetime value (LTV) is the driving metric for evaluating how much your users are worth in terms of financial revenue, loyalty, and evangelism (users who are actively sharing and recommending your app) while they are engaged with your app.
    • Personas:
      The basic idea behind this metric is to create representative focus groups within your audience by mapping specific metric characteristics, such as age, gender, geographic locations, country information, and interests. Creation and classification of your users into digital personas in such a manner will give you a deeper understanding about the demands, preferences and interests of your audience/users.
    • App Crashes:
      The most important metric from developer point of view regarding app users, usability and reliability of app depend largely on issues and problems related with app crashes.
    • App Performance:
      Slow application response is much more annoying for users. Mobile application development relies heavily on asynchronous tasks that should not directly block the interaction between the user and an app. Effective and efficient app design means reducing users’ waiting times to a bare minimum for information or where waiting is unavoidable, or distracting the user while loading necessary pieces of information in the background.
Even a recent report by the Aberdeen Group found companies using mobile analytics saw an 11.6 percent increase in brand awareness while those without a mobile-specific analytics strategy had a 12.9 percent decrease.
There are a lot of App Analytics Tools available for the purpose. Here I am listing some of the famous analytic tools:
       But other than from these famous players, there are some other cool analytics suits too, which are providing cool features you would love and even some of them are more than just an analytics tool. If you don’t wanna use these famous suites or looking for some other/extra features you are not getting in these, check part 2 (coming soon) of this blog to have a look at them.

 

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