Never in the history of mankind has any single object or device caught the fancy of the people as much as mobile phones. What started as a communication device is now a full-blown multimedia device, a computer, a camera, a clock, and many other things. In any urban area, it is rare to find someone who is not using a mobile phone.
Intimate Device
The mobile phone has become the most intimate thing for an individual. People rarely lose sight of their mobile phones. Whether they are in the toilet or lying on a bed, whether they are at work or in a meeting, they are aware of their device. This close relationship between a human and an object is unprecedented in the journey of humans down the ages.
It is said, and without exaggeration, that a mobile phone knows the owner much better than any other human being. The wife, the girlfriend, best friends, siblings and parents, all will lose a quiz to a mobile phone on ‘Who knows this person the best?” We interact with the phone for everything, no matter how secretive or intimate the instance is, the phone is always there.
How It Became The BFF
Since a mobile phone knows so much about the owner, that device becomes the best source to get information about the possessor. This information collected by the phone is called ‘data’. The new world geniuses say that “Data is the new oil.” The analogy is comparing the preciousness of data with the value of oil. All products or services that have mobile applications for interacting with customers should understand the value of data, for it is as valuable as having an oil field.
While developing the app one must integrate mobile app analytical tools that can record and save the data. Any interaction of the user with the app on the device generates some amount of data. The app developers should build the app in such a way that data collection is an inherent feature of the app. This data is the crude oil that has to be refined. You have to list down the segments of the data that are relevant to your app or business.
The refining of the crude data is also called ‘data mining’ as an analogy of finding gold and precious stone in the mud and stones of a mine. To understand this better you will have to understand the mobile app analytics fundamentals.
What Data To Capture?
The mobile phone operating system and the app are capable of capturing a lot of data inputs. Primarily it records the owner’s constant location, profile details, navigation of phone between apps, activity and engagement. You may get inundated with a lot of data, much of it may be of no direct use to you. You will have to plan what data is critical for your business model and concentrate in tracking those first.
When the app is downloaded, it is not yet considered as a plus, until the user launches the app and signs up or logs in. Then the app count of ‘installs’ can go up. This is the first metric of data. The time difference between download, app opening and signing up shows the acceptability of the app. Now the app is recording each session of engagement by the user. Content apps tend to have longer user sessions than utility apps.
But then utility apps are problem solvers and here the session data capture is far more useful. We can clearly see at what point the utility app’s sessions are ending without a successful outcome. A pattern may emerge to show a stage that causes people to stop engaging. The same is true for all other apps except the passive content streaming apps.
Stop Churn
Every app has some amount of churn regularly. There could be innumerable reasons for that. Analyses of the data can show the probable reason for the churn of that user. A long period of data starts showing a pattern of activity which leads to the churn. This helps in mitigating that aspect of the app.
One can form a strategy to improve the retention of users. Regular and long-term user’s data can also be analysed to understand the strong points of the app which is being accessed frequently. We can easily spot the strong points and the weak zones of the app.
Apps that are market places or selling a service always calculate the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). This is the average total of the revenue which an app receives from the user. Data analyses help you to find a correlation between different levels of ARPU’s. You can calculate the total revenue a user will contribute as a lifetime customer.
Good mobile app analytics practices can help you not only slow down the churn, improve retention but also increase your ARPU. This is the best option of knowing the health of the app and its functionalities.
Accurate Growth Indicator
Companies are always hungry for growth. Data analytics helps a business chart out their future course of action. Mobile apps are most accurate in capturing data of user’s engagement with app. This is substantially more accurate than any market research or polling. Mobile app analytics tools can help allocate resources to trigger growth. A lot of resources can be conserved and money saved when one has a qualified opinion and precise areas of concentration. You can fortify all the weak spots in the app functionality based on the data analytical report.
Every company is planning for the future and drawing up plans for expansion. A company can use these mobile app analytics fundamental reports to plan their long-term vision and growth trajectory. These reports can help support the plan vision.
Mobile app analytics best practices are the future of all business planning and management. These are the most accurate navigation tool for the company to maneuver its business to new heights.
