We’ve all been doing web analytics for years, and we all kind of heard of all the big names like Omniture, Web Trends, or at least, Google Analytics. We are also very familiar with all the web analytics metrics: page views, bounce rates, etc. But what about mobile apps analytics? In this post I’d like to talk about what data or metrics should we be looking at and the several tools that I encountered in the market.
What Justin Bieber would love to know?
Imagine you are now Justin Bieber. You do albums (yea, I know you do lots of other things too), and you put them on big music chain stores for sale.
What would you like to know (apart from how many female fans you’ve got) so you can make better sales, better quality albums, and make you a more popular artist? To name a few:
To have better sales
- How’s your album compare to other albums in stores? Are you in top 10 weekly? Being in top 10 helps you to promote your album, as usually the store will feature your album at noticeable places
- Who is buying your album? The more you know the better right? Songs that young kids love would be very different from old ladies (though I know everybody loves you)
To have better quality albums
- Which are the songs that your fans love most? Oh maybe they are craving for your first Cantonese song. This may affect your choice on which song to be promoted on radio, TV or internet too
To be a more popular artist
- Is any of your fan stop buying your album, but instead, buying Austin Mahone‘s albums? Can you keep your fans? And can you make new fans?
I am sure you can think of even more questions to ask too.
What are the metrics we can look at for mobile apps analytics?
Now back to mobile apps analytics. You’re actually selling your app like when Justin Bieber selling his album:
| Justin Bieber’s album | Your apps | |
|---|---|---|
| Ranking |
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| Sales Channel |
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| Engagement |
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| Loyalty |
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| Customer Value |
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What are the tools available?
From what I’ve seen so far, different tools seem to have its different focus and its areas of excellence. But here’re some of the tools that I encountered recently:
- Google Analytics
Our all times favourite, in my opinion very good at capturing your acquisition (i.e. source of traffic); however won’t be able to report individual users’ activities. Find out more on what GA can offer for mobile apps reporting here - Artisan
A very powerful platform that allows you to not only track user behaviours, but actually make use of the user data to do things like A/B testing, personalization or even pushing marketing messages to the users - Liquid
A platform that is still under development, though love its simplicity of their UI and reports and they also have personalization features. Relatively easy to install too - App Annie
The tools I’ve mentioned above are all quite focusing user’s engagement; App Annie however gives you lots of insight about the ranking of you app across the different app stores - MixPanel
Actually I’ve gone through this in my blog before on using it to track web site performance. I think they have one of the best individual user analytics interface that shows how each individual user interact with your app
Summary
If you’re like me – haven’t been doing mobile app analytics before, I hope this intro can help you to get started on exploring the possibilities on tracking mobile app users’ behaviour, like the way I started. If you’re a very experienced mobile app developer or producer, share with me what are the mobile analytics software that you like most (especially if it’s not included in the list but you think it’s good!)! Looking forward for all your comments!