10 Ways Analytics Can Track the Success of Your Mobile App

Analytics can now reveal a number of details about an app, including where it is being used and whether there are failures along the way of an e-commerce sale.

There are tools on the market that claim to be able to tell you how many people have visited your App Store or Google Play page. Google offers ways for developers to track Google Play’s acquisition funnel, and now Apple has released App Analytics to do the same. Using App Analytics (found in iTunesConnect), developers can now track App Store views, units downloaded, units installed, active devices and active sessions.

The app stores finally have caught on and realized that an app developer cares how his/her app store page is being discovered. You can track how many have hit the app store page (App Store views on the previous slide) and which campaign or URL drove them to that page.

Using analytics inside your app, you can now track when people use your app, how frequently your app is in use, how long the average person uses your app, and if they’re still using your app 10 days or 30 days later. These metrics have all been available since the birth of the Web, but are now being offered for apps at various levels, including free options from the app stores themselves.

A common feature for Websites is to be able to see how many active users there are on the site—in real time—and what those users are doing. This is now available to all developers. Wondering if users are still using your app after downloading it, or what they’re using inside of your app? All of this information is now available.

One of Joel Evans’ favorite tools from his days of running Geek.com was the ability to see a heat map of most clicked areas. Mobile has taken that to a new level, giving developers the ability to see areas clicked on—by page—and even recording and playing back user interactions with the app.

You can track which iOS or Android version, and which platform—and on which carrier—your user has been consuming your application. That coupled with active device information will show you exactly who your market is—and where your trouble points are—since you can also view device data and correlate that with App Health (see Slide 8).

Thanks to all of the sensors embedded in mobile devices, we can now see where a user is during the time of use of the application. Are they on the move? At home? At work? In which country are they using the app? At what time?

App stores themselves will report on crashes and let you view associated crashes, but there are more ways to measure the health of your app. For example, you need to understand app operational experience, such as identifying metrics to quantify performance issues (latency/response times), crash and non-fatal errors versus operating environment. Companies used to focus on simply monitoring their server’s performance, but they can now track response times related to processing an e-commerce transaction. They can do all of this by monitoring the app’s performance.

A number of tools will allow you to set the start and end points of an app-focused transaction. This will allow you to see how well your app is performing. Did the user get from point A to point B? Was there a timeout along the way? You can even drill down to see what failures may have occurred and associate a customized cost to the transaction. Some apps will even watch for repeat behaviors and automatically create events to watch and measure.

If you use a service that is embedded in a number of other apps, you can learn even more about your user. These include things such as behavior or other key demographics—even personal information, if allowed.