Why your app needs real time mobile analytics

What’s every mobile developer’s worst nightmare?

The mere idea that their app has fallen into obscurity and it doesn’t have a single user engagement or installs!

If you are a mobile developer and you are reading this, you might be well aware of this thought, in imagination as well as in reality sometime or the other. We all know that traditional analytics methods adopted and made popular by Google don’t really have a great impact on mobile apps. They are not helpful in finding out the exact reasons why your app might have failed to register a high number of installs or user engagements.

So the real question to alleviate your fear is: what are the data pointers necessary to figure out a way to filter out the noise and make your app stand out among the clutter? The answer is not merely a name change, but a change in approach and it’s called mobile analytics.

For starters, some reasons users typcially don’t interact with your app are:

The UX is not tempting enough

The app is slow

The app doesn’t live up to what it promised

The target audience segment is wrong

Your app is really bad

Barring the last pointer, the other four can have real life solutions that can salvage your app, if applied in time. Here we are putting more focus on the phrase “In Time”. That’s where real time mobile analytics come in. Because in case of mobile apps, every minute counts, literally.

Mobile analytics works on the ways and types of data collected. In order to understand why your app is not an instant hit, you will have to keep a track of:

Geographical data of app installs: This will help you to identify your geographical strongholds i.e., from where you have got the most response. You can then analyze other geographies or similar locations that you can target in order to make your ad campaigns effective.

Demographics of the users who engage with your app: This data will be particularly helpful in identifying the age group and the type of users who are engaging in in-app purchases. Thus, helping you to reach your overall goal.

Which Sources provide loyal users and generate more revenue: Knowing the right media outlet to promote your ad is imperative to its success. This will enable you to target the correct media sources for maximum revenue and in creating more loyal fanbase.

What are the reasons for the users to quit: This will identify the reason behind the app not getting popular. Analyzing this data will enable you to learn about potential flaws in the UX or in the app performance or any security issues which might be prompting the users to quit your app suddenly.

So how do you enable real time mobile analytics?

There are a few platforms which provide ready-to-deploy real time mobile analytics. Fair warning, you might end up feeling like you used a black box where you feed data and the result comes out without knowing why you came up with those results. However there are other solutions being provided by IBM cloud, AWS Pinpoint, among others which will enable the developers to be a part of the overall analytics process and also play with the parameters to see predictions of app usage and conversion.

The real challenge however lies in bringing all these analytics into your mobile device.

For example, if you have seeing sudden uninstalls of your app and what you have right now is your mobile device, then you should be able to access the cloud and upload that data and analyze that on your mobile to get insights on what should be done. Like whether there is an urgent UX issue that needs fixing or there is a sudden bug in the application, or there might be a sudden security threat that potentially can compromise user data. To perform these mobile analytics natively and real time, we would most definitely need better computation capabilities and battery power.

Whether the tech giants like Google, AMD, Microsoft will come up with a possible solution to this mobile computation problem with a much longer battery life, is something that time can only tell.

Packt teams up with Humble Bundle to bring developers a selection of mobile development bundles

Five reasons why Xamarin will change mobile development

Hybrid Mobile apps: What you need to know