Mobile analytics give you the insights you need to identify performance issues, understand your users and make data-driven improvements to your app. Read on to learn how to apply them in your business.
Mobile apps and websites are complex creations, so understanding why they’re successful—or not—often requires deep analysis.
Thankfully, mobile devices gather incredible amounts of data that can help you identify issues and make improvements. However, the sheer amount of data available can be overwhelming for app teams. To uncover the hidden insights lurking in your data faster, you need a secret weapon: mobile analytics.
In this guide, you’ll learn how mobile analytics help you understand your app’s performance and users, so you can:
Mobile analytics are the key to creating better mobile experiences that users love—so let’s dive in!
Mobile app analytics means learning from the data you gather in your mobile app. It involves analyzing your app’s performance to understand the user experience, including user sessions, app events and the way your users interact with your mobile platform to find opportunities for improvement.
By looking closely at this data, you can learn what’s going wrong and where users are getting stuck. This helps your team optimize the app to increase engagement, conversions and retention—and then track the impact of your changes.
Mobile analytics involves any data your app gathers about your mobile users' performance or how mobile users interact with it. Common examples include:
Glassbox interaction maps show how far users scroll on mobile app screens.
In the current landscape, businesses need to serve up excellent mobile experiences to remain competitive. There are over seven million apps competing for users’ attention today, and the standard of experiences they deliver is ever-increasing.
Accordingly, users have high expectations for mobile apps and websites—and if they don’t like what they find or experience an app crash, they go elsewhere. Mobile apps generally have a high churn rate, and customers delete half of the apps they download within 30 days.
By monitoring mobile analytics, companies can resolve issues and improve their app to keep users coming back.
Data gives you powerful ways to understand how users are thinking and behaving using their mobile devices in your app. Most importantly, it lets you spot trends in user behavior across thousands of different customer journeys by understanding mobile traffic.
For example, mobile analytics data might show you that visitors on Android devices experience slower loading times and leave your app more often. This discovery leads you to improve the loading time for your Android users—a small change that could mean a significant revenue boost.
However, insights like this are almost impossible to achieve via other research methods like customer interviews or user testing. Mobile analytics platforms are the most efficient way to get the hidden insights you need to detect mobile experience mistakes.
Both involve similar goals and processes, but web analytics focuses on gathering data around websites. Mobile analytics specifically focus on mobile data, and the nature of mobile apps means there is a greater range of data available:
Gather relevant data. Using a digital experience intelligence platform like Glassbox, you can automatically capture information about app performance, user engagement and user behavior.
Visualize and analyze data. Advanced analytics tools will allow you to segment your data, or to sort it in a way that reveals key insights. In addition, some tools will allow you to visualize your data—for example, with graphs that show where users drop off in your funnel.
Create a feedback loop. After gaining key insights about what’s happening in your mobile app, you can then launch an improved version of it. By using mobile analytics to assess your changes and do more of what’s working, you can create a positive feedback loop in your development processes.
Understand your funnel’s performance with Glassbox
Glassbox lets you measure custom metrics from your funnel, so you can understand conversions, abandonment and revenue impact.
Mobile app analytics platforms give you virtually limitless options for exploring data. Depending on your business model and goals, you may want to focus on one of the main types:
In-app advertising can be a major source of revenue for your business. Mobile advertising analytics show you how your ads are performing and who’s interacting with them, so you can find opportunities to generate more revenue.
Even if your app is free, you may be monetizing it through in-app purchases on mobile devices, subscriptions or affiliate marketing schemes. Monetization analytics allow you to see the success of these strategies and the revenue they generate.
For example, if you’re charging a subscription fee, analytics data could show you which plan is most popular and how long the average user stays subscribed for.
Tracking these metrics could help you optimize different aspects of your strategy—like your plan prices—so you can maximize the revenue you generate.
In-app engagement analytics give you quantitative data on how people audience segments use your app on average. Key metrics could include:
Your performance in the app store will affect how many people find and download your app. App store analytics help you track key metrics like:
Analyzing this data can help you find ways to improve your ranking, target the right audiences, and ultimately acquire more users.
Your app’s performance directly impacts the user experience, and ultimately, your retention rates. Identify issues that could cause users to leave by checking performance analytics data like:
For companies that drive revenue or engage with customers through an app, mobile analytics can be a game changer. They’re useful to various departments including marketing, product, technical, UX/UI design and customer success.
While their goals might vary, all these teams are focused on understanding and serving users—and mobile app analytics gives them the insights they need to do so.
Mobile analytics allow marketers to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. By learning more about the people who convert and make purchases, marketers can optimize their strategies to target the right audiences.
Marketing teams can use mobile analytics to:
With the insights they gain from these processes, marketers can optimize their funnels for maximum conversions while minimizing costs.
Product teams make it their goal to continuously improve their app so that customers keep coming back. However, in order to identify the most important areas for improvement, they need real data about what customers need.
Mobile analytics offer several ways for them to do this:
By listening to the data left by users, product teams can avoid common mobile app traps and make decisions about what features to add, change or remove.
UX and UI teams are concerned with optimizing the user experience in their app. Since one of their key goals is to remove friction from the user journey, mobile analytics play a vital role in identifying where users are struggling.
Mobile analytics help UI and UX teams to:
Technical teams use performance analytics to ensure their app runs smoothly, without any errors or crashes. This is an important activity because users are highly sensitive to apps that are slow or buggy. According to Google, 29% of users will switch to another app if the one they are using takes too long to load.
Technical teams typically look at KPIs relating to app performance, such as:
Customer success teams work directly with users to help them have a better in-app experience. Because they proactively reach out to customers who might be struggling, customer success teams need to understand trends in user behavior.
Mobile analytics can help customer success teams to:
Using analytics for mobile apps and mobile products is a skill in itself. Avoid these common mistakes to get better insights from your data while speeding up the learning curve.
With the sheer amount of data available, mobile analytics can be complex. If you don’t have a plan, you’re likely to get overwhelmed or end up with irrelevant data.
At bare minimum, you should establish:
Keeping things simple is a good idea, but using a single metric to gauge your success can be misleading.
For example, tracking downloads shows you that large numbers of users are acquiring your app—sounds great, right? But without knowing how much users engage with your app, you don’t yet know if it’s serving your target audience well.
Similarly, if you only worry about conversions or ad revenue, you won’t learn whether customers are actually getting value from your features.
At the other end of the spectrum, it’s tempting to simply track every vaguely relevant metric. But analyzing hundreds of different events or tracking every single screen touch can leave you overloaded with data.
Glassbox’s mobile app analytics captures and classifies more than 1,000 events in an average session–but ensures the meaningful insights bubble to the surface–giving users actionable insights without spending countless hours on data mining.
Often when looking at analytics data, our own biases kick in. We look for data that confirms what we already think is true—or simply accept the easiest answers.
For example, imagine you’re trying to understand why customers drop out before completing your app’s onboarding sequence. To investigate what’s happening, you look at the user behavior flow and find that some users do complete onboarding—suggesting that there are no bugs with the app’s functionality.
Your initial conclusion is that the onboarding flow works and users simply get bored when completing it. But if you’d have looked further into the data, you’d have learned that a specific segment was experiencing the high drop-off rate: users on iOS. Taking data at face value can often lead you “off the scent” of what’s actually going wrong.
Like any industry, software and mobile development has its own trends and movement. It can be tempting to track certain metrics, or jump to a specific conclusion about your data, just because it’s the current popular idea.
We’re all guilty of doing this sometimes—but be sure to base your important decisions on in-depth analysis and knowledge of your app.
Product and marketing teams often rely heavily on numerical data when analyzing trends in their mobile app.
However, numerical data—like raw numbers around conversions or clicks—only gives you part of the story. In other words, it tells you what users are doing. In order to find the why behind the trends, you need take a closer look at customer journeys with tools like session replay and heatmaps or interaction maps, the next generation in heatmap tools.
Depending on your business, it can be helpful to analyze user behavior across channels and platforms. This is particularly true for e-commerce, where users may interact with blogs, desktop websites, emails and your app before finally purchasing.
Measuring DAUs is an effective way to assess your app’s growth, but be careful not to overcomplicate your definition of a DAU. If your DAU criteria filter out everyone except power users, you can’t effectively measure the growth of your app. What’s more, you may miss the opportunity to learn more about important segments.
When setting up your analytics, you’ll have the option to track specific events—like when a user clicks “add to cart” or uses a key feature.
Many analytics platforms will give you the option to name these events and their categories. Be sure to give them meaningful names at the moment of setup, or you’ll struggle to understand your reports later.
Your product, marketing, design and customer success teams will all have different goals for mobile analytics data. Rather than creating a general dataset for the whole company, consult with each team to find out what metrics they need.
Mobile analytics tools give you the ability to measure almost any KPI you could think of. However, most companies focus on KPIs that help them measure engagement, retention and revenue generation, such as:
When it comes to using mobile analytics, the skill is to interpret these metrics correctly for your business.
For example, a long average session length is good news for a gaming app. But for banking apps designed to offer fast assistance, a long average session length could indicate a usability problem. A good app engagement tool can help you interpret these metrics.
Read our Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Mobile App to learn more about how tracking KPIs can unlock helpful insights.
There are many mobile app analytics tools on the market today, so we've compiled a list to help you find the one that best fits your company's goals and needs.
Glassbox is a digital experience intelligence platform that helps you understand and optimize user journeys.
It allows you to see the big picture of what’s happening inside your app, with detailed visualizations and performance reports. And to uncover the why behind key trends, Glassbox gives you a close-up look at the journeys of audience segments and individual users.
What’s more, Glassbox uses a lightweight SDK that gives you access to a suite of analytics tools without slowing your app down.
Firebase is an app developer platform backed by Google. It’s designed to help you build apps that meet Google’s standards—and on top of this, it offers free access to a range of helpful mobile app analytics tools.
Included in Firebase is Crashlytics, a tool which helps you resolve issues and find out why crashes occurred. The platform also enables Google Analytics for Firebase, which is a free app measurement solution.
Features: Crash reporting, event tracking, performance monitoring, app usage monitoring
AdMob is Google’s advertising platform for mobile apps. Designed specifically for app developers, it allows you to monetize your app by displaying ads from Google Ads and other third-party ad buyers.
The platform also allows you to place your own ads so you can market your app elsewhere. Google AdMob is free to use and syncs with Google Firebase to give you a range of mobile app analytics tools.
Features: Automated ad bidding, multiple ad formats, analytics and reporting, easy integration through the AdMob SDK
App Analytics is a mobile app analytics tool created by Apple. Part of a larger suite of tools called App Store Connect, it shows you how people are engaging with your app in the Apple store.
While it only works with iOS apps, the tool provides fundamental insights you can use to make marketing and product decisions. Learn how visitors discover your app, what channels bring visitors to your product page, what your app store conversion rate is and much more.
Features: Marketing campaign analysis, app store conversion insights, user engagement metrics, sales and trends reports
Integrating Google Analytics with mobile analytics within a digital experience intelligence platform can offer several benefits, enhancing your ability to understand and optimize the digital experience for mobile users. Here are some advantages of this integration:
Integrating Google Analytics mobile app metrics with mobile analytics within a DXI platform helps you gain a deeper and more unified understanding of user behavior across devices, leading to improved mobile engagement, better user experiences and higher conversion rates. This data synergy empowers you to make data-driven decisions and continually enhance the mobile aspect of your digital strategy.
Data security and privacy is a growing concern for consumers and businesses alike. According to Pew research, 79% of Americans are concerned about how their data is used. At the same time, industries like finance and healthcare are seeing increasingly strict requirements for handling data securely.
So when it comes to analytics for mobile apps, you need tools that can guarantee data privacy—and meet the compliance needs of your industry.
Glassbox has built-in privacy controls that actively omit and mask secure data, such as bank details, from session replay. We are the only digital experience intelligence provider to be ISO 22701 certified, and are compliant with regulations including HIPAA, GLBA, PCI, CCPA and GDPR.
In fast-paced industries like software development, teams are under pressure to work quickly. However, most app analytics tools require you to manually tag page elements, events and conversion points in order to track key metrics.
Over the course of a year, these actions could add up to days, weeks or even months. And if you don’t tag a specific screen or event after a mobile app update, you won’t have data on that element available for funnel analysis later.
With Glassbox, you capture 100% of sessions and 100% of session events without any manual tagging. The platform captures every event, including user behaviors and technical events, so you can make sense of your data while taking back your time.
Software development kits (SDKs) help you add features and functionality to your app without custom coding. But while they cut down on development time, they can also increase your app’s size and slow down its performance.
The average app leverages more than 17 separate SDKs, and each of them requires monitoring and updates. And if you don’t perform regular upkeep on your SDKs, you risk viruses, malware, crashes and performance issues—also called SDK fatigue.
All this means that when it’s time to choose a mobile analytics solution, the size and quantity of SDKs you use is important.
With Glassbox, there’s no need to deploy three separate SDKs for qualitative, quantitative, crash analytics. Our proven lightweight SDK covers all three, giving you the analytics functionality you need without affecting app performance.
You’re already gathering a whole lot of data—and that means there are some game-changing insights waiting for you. But with so much information to sort through, analyzing your data can feel like an uphill struggle.
Fortunately, the right tools can help you solve your mobile challenges faster. With Glassbox, you can capture, analyze and visualize 100% of your data—and get answers to the most difficult questions about your product and audience.
