What Kind of information Can App Data Reveal About Your Clients?

Businesses create mobile apps for all manner of reasons. They include increasing interaction with customers, round-the-clock service delivery, growing revenue, content sharing, and standing out from the competition. However, an underrated opportunity that mobile apps create is the ability to collect data that sheds light on user behavior, properties and the opportunities therein. Businesses can frame problems and develop the correct metrics to answer such problems using data from their apps.

A good example would be asking how to determine the success of an app. Mere download numbers from app stores would be a too simplistic way to do so. However, with app data, you can track usage rates, length of sessions, frequency of certain events and more. App analytics tools allow your business to filter app data using all sorts of variables. You can view data by the device platforms, whether Android or iOS. You can filter by age, location, dates, and so forth.

So, what kind of insights can app data reveal about your users?

Active Users

A metric of how many users logged in to your app today may not be very useful. However, when plotted over a period of time, it starts to tell a story. Over a period of several months, you can spot hikes or drops in the number of unique active users and drawn correlations with other events. Perhaps you had a marketing campaign or launched a new feature. If a new version of the app was released and user rates dropped, you may be looking at a bug.

Being able to track active users will also help to make better marketing decisions. For instance, the best day to launch a marketing campaign would be when the number of active users is the highest.

Having a dashboard for real-time analytics is also important and helpful. It’s a great way to spot problems such as people being unable to log in. For instance, a sudden spike in the number of login events may not necessarily mean you have a surge in new users. It might be that there is a problem with the login feature hence the multiple attempts to log in.

Tracking Conversions through App Data

Apps have different use cases and varying definitions of what constitutes conversion. It could be making an e-commerce purchase, subscribing to premium content on the app, signing up for a newsletter, or referring new users to products. Whichever the case, using analytics tools to track conversions over time helps develop a narrative to guide decision-making. Most app analytics tools have an A/B testing feature that allows businesses to attempt two different approaches to solving a problem before settling on one. Using analytics, your business is able to test what resonates with your users. It leads to better utilization of marketing budgets.

Insights into Revenue

The success of any business app meant to generate revenue should be objectively determined through the revenue generated. However, the total revenue figure does not tell much on its own. It’s important to delve deeper to understand how various revenue drivers are affecting it. For instance, if there are multiple products or services on the app, how much is each contributing to revenue? How does revenue vary throughout the year? How does revenue relate to user demographics? Where are your most important customers located?  Such questions help your business to create better segmentation strategies, focus marketing spend on the right places, and so on.

Retention Data

App retention is one of the most objective metrics on the success of mobile apps. Businesses can classify users into retention cohorts- basically, a group of users who began using the app in the same period, for instance, a week. For each group, you can track the number of sessions logged over the observation period. You can slice the data by platforms, locations, and gender to get a better understanding of what is influencing retention rates. Remember, data analytics is about developing and testing different hypotheses.

User Session Data

Besides just tracking how long each user session takes, your business can gain massive business intelligence from user session data. Longer sessions may mean that users like the app, but it could also mean that the UI is too complex, and they are taking longer to find what they need. It’s therefore important to find more useful information about what the sessions entail. For instance, what’s the time between putting items in the cart and checking out? How many sessions does it take before users make a purchase? What features do users interact with most?

What are Mobile App Events

When you integrate an analytics tool into your app, they capture different events on the app. The sum of these events forms your mobile app data. When you begin tracking your app analytics, you’ll need to define your user properties. These are the different attributes you want to identify users with in order to contextualize the data. You may classify users using many attributes, age group, location, gender, period of use and more.

Most analytics tools with capture certain events by default. These include unique logins and length of sessions. However, you can also create your own custom events to be tracked based on the kind of data you are interested in.

The Advantages of Capturing Mobile App Data

Increasing ROI using App Data

The use of analytics to monitor business apps greatly increases the ROI of your business app. By monitoring metrics that affect user retention, for example, you will be able to make adjustments to various attributes of your app. You may tweak the content, the UI, or even fix bugs in your backend that could be negatively affecting the users’ experience.

Better Marketing Campaigns

Apps data will help you understand your customers better and target them with personalized and nuanced marketing messages. These perform way better than generic campaigns and you’ll realize a better response to your marketing efforts.

It Will Inform Your Product Development Path

In today’s business world, app development does not stop after the testing and launch of the first version of your app. The data from app monitoring is what informs further app improvement and the building of new features. If users are interacting with certain features, the team may want to build further upon those features. It may also lead to the dropping of features that don’t add utility to the user experience.

Finding the Right Analytics Tools

Once your business builds its app, your product team has to handpick the right analytics tool to integrate with the app. Remember, the analytics tools will not work in a vacuum but rather it needs to warp into the technology stack you are using to run your business. Most times, the stack of technology includes the data management platform, the app itself, the advertising platform, the payment processing solution, a content management system, a CRM platform and more.

Companies need to have a team with the right skills to get the best out of all these technologies. Reach out to NS804 for assistance with the development of your business app and integration of mobile app data analytics solutions. Our team will help you track the right metrics and craft a path for your future product development.