The Need for Mobile Analytics

The important of Metrics for feedback cannot be over-emphasized. Its like the basic feedback loop in circuits, appraisals for employees, Balanced scorecard in companies and more recently web and mobile analytic in the digital era.

The Growing Mobile App Market

Gartner estimates the mobile app downloads to touch 17.7 bn in 2011. As the mobile apps market grows tracking what users are doing on these 17.7 bn downloaded apps becomes of prime importance to advertisers, marketeers and big brands. The sale of Smart Phones and Tablets is also estimated to surpass the Desktop and Notebook PC sales in 2011 by Morgan Stanley. Hence there was no better time to start monitoring the mobile app usage in additional to analyzing behavior on the web.

Mobile Analytics

While various tools are available for mobile analytics. I have found Flurry to be highly useful. The platform lets you track the number of new users across time, geography and customer segments along with active users, session lengths and number, frequency of use and retention. Moreover they compare your data with genre averages to help you get a better sense of where you stand in the segment.

These metrics can be combined to derive more important results like analyze customer segments across demographics to help devise and improve both your product and marketing strategy.


This also helps the relevant placement of advertisements and putting the high yield ads in the more frequented mobile app screens.

Challenges

• Mobile app analytics has some basic challenges compared to the web analytics, due to the nature of the mobile platform. A considerable amount of mobile application usage happens when no network is available. As a result, analytics data has to be stored locally on the device and reported later.
• Apps are downloaded onto the phone as opposed to a website where the content is all dynamic. This requires the analytics to be finalized before app release, because you can't change the tracking points once it's downloaded, unlike the web where its all dynamic
• Data overload can also become an issue. You need to know what you want to track and how you want to use the data for interferences so that you do not get overwhelmed.
• One frequent argument against all the data collection is that it discloses sensitive user data. Hence you should always ensure that you take the user's permission before capturing such data.