Understanding Mobile Analytics Tools

When was the last time you checked your phone? Was it ten minutes ago or five or merely a minute ago. Oh wait, are you reading this on your mobile? We're all hooked to our phones throughout the day. To be candid, why wouldn't we be? After all, our phones literally can replace books, televisions, thesaurus, radio, home stereo and even our wallets. There's an app at our disposal for everything.
 
If you need an alarm clock, you have an app. You need a meditation guide to help you sleep, you have an app. Whether you want to shop or you want to listen to your favorite band, there's an app, they are there for everything.

Needless to say, these mobile apps become at source for data. However, data on its own is gibberish if you can’t use it to your advantage and to make use of this data, Mobile Analytics Tools come into play. What Are Mobile Analytics Tools? Let us decode that in our next section.

The word 'analytics' in today's world is as common as McDonald's; you'll find it everywhere you go. When we talk about mobile analytics, we are talking about the system of measuring and analyzing user behavior through the data, collected from mobile devices. The point of this analysis is to boost conversion, drive engagement and retention of app users. While this does include user behavior points from the mobile web, it is a worldwide accepted fact that mobile analytics focuses on analyzing data for native iOS and android applications.

You'd probably have figured this out by now but we'd like to state this for the record, Mobile Analytics Tools are software that help you carry out mobile analytics (what else would it be!).
 
These tools help you with information such as the number of app installs, session length, session interval, app interactions, conversion rate, retention, funnel analysis and more. Jargons aside, you get the gist, right? These tools help you monitor every interaction of your app users. 
 
Wait, there's more! The tools would also tell you about your users. You would know whether you're getting new users or just the same returning users, their locations, the devices they're using and even how they came across your app.   
 
Google Analytics, Flurry, Mixpanel and Facebook (Meta now) Analytics are some of the leaders in the game but there are innumerable Mobile Analytics Tools in the market at present. Though, that was not the case always. In fact, until the mid-1990s there was no concept of website or mobile app analytics at all.

Here's how it all began.
 

History And Evolution Of Mobile Analytics Tools

 
You can trace the history of mobile analytics to the days when log files were created for every hit on a webpage. Back then, a hit was recorded every time a user interacted with any HTML element on the page – be it a video, a link, or an image. Since the log files were in place, some people decided to analyze them to understand website trends and performance, that's where a tool name WebTrends was launched in 1993.
 
However, WebTrends was something only tech geeks could make use of - until Stephen Turner decided to open website analytics with Analog in 1995. Reports from analyzing log files could be now turned into comprehensive data with visual representation so that they'd make sense to business owners and marketing professionals.

Soon the world of marketing was flooded with similar innovations. The next breakthrough was when Google bought a web statistics analysis program named Urchin and launched Google Analytics. A trendsetter like always, Google then defined different types of analytics such as In-Page and Universal Analytics, that recorded data across devices. You could say this was the seed for mobile analytics. Soon enough, with the popularity of mobile apps, Mobile Analytics Tools came into being. While the roots of mobile analytics have been desktop analytics, don't be too quick to assume that they'd work the same way. There's a big difference.
 

How Do Mobile Analytics Tools Work?

 
Here's a trick for you – imagine there's a website that you visit often (we're not taking names!) but you don't want them to find out that you're a frequent visitor. You could simply clean all your browser cookies every time before launching the site on your desktop! #lifehack
 
However, you won't be able to do this for your mobile apps. You see, unlike websites, which use cookies to trigger your information to an analytics tool, mobile apps have Software Development Kits (SDKs), that are embedded within the app's code and don’t have an incognito mode. So, based on your interaction with the app, various data is captured and sent to the analytics tool to interpret.
 
In fact, there's a lot of information that the tool gets to know through the SDKs including the page or screen on the app you viewed and where you went after that etc. That's just one part of it – how many times you opened the app, which device you used to open the app and even your geographical location is captured.
 
In simpler words, you would get to know the number of people using your app, how they interact with your app and what series of actions they take on the app along with other details about the visitor.
 
The next question is how would knowing all this help?
 

Why Businesses Need Mobile Analytics Tools?

When you know how people are interacting with your application, you're able to understand their behavior and act accordingly. For instance, if you have a food delivery app and you see that most of the people go to the cart but don't complete the purchase, you can probably check if there's an issue with your payment process. Not just that, you also know the demographics of your users that tell you what features of your app are working at what locations, what’s not working and make informed decisions about scaling your business, based on that data analysis. So, Mobile Analytics Tools give you data to help improve your app.
 
Most importantly, you can measure your efforts. With analytics, you can check if you're meeting your goals in terms of app installs, which marketing campaign is getting people to the app, etc.
 
This way, all the data harvested from your app user’s interaction goes into making the app experience better for them. That’s what we call a win-win!
 
Let’s see what all can be done using a Mobile Analytics Tool.
 

Features Of Mobile Analytics Tools

Some of the major metrics that every Mobile Analytics Tool will track for you, includes:
 

• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

  The average revenue each active customers contributes to your business

• Cost Per Install (CPI) and Cost Per Loyal User (CPLU)

  The app tracks your new customer acquisition costs and the cost of acquiring an active user (anyone who launches your app at least three times).

• Engagement

  Movement within the app and behavior of active users such as session length, App screens per session, Opt-ins/ Opt-outs, etc.

• Retention

  The number of customers that continue to use your app, after one week or more actively.

• Performance

  Crash reports, loading time, network issues reports

Benefits Of Mobile Analytics Tools

Mobile Analytics Tools offer a variety of features that can help different teams according to their goals and functions. Here's how:
 

• Marketing

  Mobile analytics have event tracking and campaign tracking that tells you which campaign got people to come onboard or download the app. You also get to track sources and landing pages to know how to improve your marketing strategies.

• Product And Tech

  Analytics also can be insightful in knowing if your app is performing right. A sudden spike in traffic sometimes means you've been hacked (yes, it's not good news!) and a sudden decrease in activity can suggest downtime or that your app has crashed.

• UI And UX

  LinkedIn launched stories and well, they didn't generate much popularity. Through analytics, your UI and UX teams get to know user behavior which they can use to test new features.

 
All said and done, there's a lot to be explored in mobile analytics.

Future Of Mobile Analytics Tools

While we can't predict what the future has in store, there are some trends that are clearly emerging in the field of mobile analytics. With the constant desire to predict what's next, it's safe to assume that Mobile Analytics Tools too would offer predictive analysis that would use past data to anticipate user behavior. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence would invariably play a key role in driving this change.
 
However, it would be exciting to see how much depth analytics could offer in the time to come. Data is always plenty but tools have to evolve to provide better data visualization, maybe through augmented analytics. After all, what's the use of data if we can't comprehend it well.
 
In today's day and age, if you want to run a mobile app, Mobile Analytics Tools becomes a package deal. You can't sustain and build an application without knowing which areas to improve.