Behind every successful app is a savvy team that understands the importance of monitoring and analyzing mobile app analytics. Analytics provide the information you need to iterate an experience your users will love by feeding you data on your users’ behavior. Analytics can be used to record behavior, track the user journey, and report on performance. This guide covers the basics you need to know to monitor and interpret your mobile app analytics.
App Metrics You Should Track
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are benchmarks for determining the success of your app. There are many metrics you can use, and which you choose will depend on your goals. Here are the most important for you to consider:
- Active users — Historical record of growth in your app
- Session length — How much time users spend in your app
- Time in app — How often your app is used and the level of engagement of your users
- Acquisition — The number of users who download and install your app and where they downloaded it from
- Retention — Tracks your most engaged and valuable users over time
- Session interval — Shows how often users go into your app
- Lifetime Value (LTV) — How much each user is worth, providing insight into loyalty and providing insight for financial projections
- Events — Important occurrences in your app that you want to measure
It’s worth taking the time to review all of the app metrics that you can access to see what may be most important for your specific app. When you use the various analytics together, you’ll gain important insights into performance and clearly see areas for improvement.
How to Measure App Metrics
The wide selection of tools available for tracking app analytics can be overwhelming, but you’ll need to consider how you’ll measure your metrics. Here are a few of our favorites:
- Flurry Analytics — View data for app tracking and analytics to monitor user interactions across multiple applications. You can get a holistic view of users’ interactions in the app and then compare behavior trends.
- Mixpanel — This tool is an analytics solution for both mobile and web products. It provides insights into how users engage with all products and gives you a thorough understanding of the user’s journey.
- Localytics — This feature-heavy tool lets you improve mobile app acquisition, engagement, and retention. Features include A/B testing, funnels, screen flow, smart targeting, and marketing automation.
These tools not only measure app metrics, but they also make them actionable by tracking how users interact with the features and flows within your app. This provides you with the ability to test and implement new features or improvements that users will find meaningful.
Interpreting Mobile App Analytics
Interpreting your analytics is where the magic happens. Your analytics will reveal what features or changes to prioritize. Start by setting your goals, then determine the analytics that will most effectively enable you to track towards those goals.
Event tracking is one of the most important metrics (or more accurately, set of metrics, since you’ll be tracking more than one). Event tracking enables you to monitor how users interact with features and flows within your app. This goes beyond just analyzing which screens users visit to tracking the specific actions they take. You can review pre-defined events and create customized events to track what is most critical to customer conversion. For example, if your primary goal is revenue, you may track in-app purchases and the process users take to make them.
When you can see all of the steps users go through in their journey, you can then adjust the flow to test the impact. If you reduce the number of steps a user has to take to make the purchase, does that increase the conversion rate? Can you provide other incentives along the way to encourage other users on the same journey in your app to make a purchase?
Analytics = Success
Success happens as you hone product-market fit, and you can’t achieve product-market fit without knowing your analytics. Your metrics will provide significant value as you gain actionable knowledge that you can test and implement. Leverage the insights to up your game by making enhancements to your app that your users will love.
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