Analytics within mobile apps

Importance of analytics within mobile applications

Any application that we create we aim to continually improve upon it based on user feedback, new technologies and security alerts. Analytics is a key tool in gathering such data but is also important for marketing purposes as well as tracking advertising campaign successes and failures.

What is analytics?

Analytics is data collected regarding who and how users are using your application. By far the most popular analytics tool is provided by Google, but very few people explore the full potential of this free service. Below we discuss various ways in which you can use this information to improve your core application and marketing strategy.

Goal tracking

By collecting information how users are navigating through your application you can adapt your application to increase goal success, in example:

100% of your users get to stage 2 of an application flow, however only 10% complete the application. This highlights that there is a barrier for the user in stage 2 of this application and it should be addressed.

Acquisition tracking

If you are spending £1000 each on both an internet advertising campaign and a mail campaign, you want to know how each of these campaigns are performing in terms of your end goal. With analytics correctly configured you would be able to tell which of the methods brought the most users, and how many of them users actually resulted in a sale. The more users is not necessarily better as they may only provide a small number of sales. It is important to track the user from acquisition all the way through to sale to identify the best quality users in which to target further.

By using this approach, you can see which marketing methods are working for your business and invest more time and money into those with the highest return.

User interface improvements

By gathering data on which bits of your application are used the most you can further improve your application to bring these sections within fewer taps of first launching your application. You can take this step even further by tracking based on device or user login to then present information automatically that each user has expressed an interest in via a tap or other gestures.

How hard is it to implement Analytics?

It depends on the level of tracking you require. I would personally be confident in saying that those capable of setting up a simple WordPress site would be more than capable of handling basic acquisition and goal tracking within a website. Those with mobile apps and require this data to be used for automatic user interface improvements would be best to leave it to a professional. For such developments we would tend to implement a custom analytics system allowing for quick integration within existing data sets.

If you would like to talk to us about personalising applications to user behaviour then please get in touch.