Your mobile analytics software is great at telling you how users use with your app and helping you run A/B tests, but it isn’t perfect. No matter how much mobile analytics data you collect and analyze, there’s always some information that falls outside the scope of analytics.
That information — from user sentiment to word of mouth — can be very valuable for improving your app’s usage, retention and revenue.
Digging into your analytics data to learn more about how people use your app is a great thing to do, particularly if you’re interested in optimization. But looking at other information is just as vital if you’re interested in achieving the best possible return on investment from your app.
Below, we’ve listed three usage, retention and revenue factors that your mobile analytics aren’t telling you. If you’d like to retain users longer and generate more revenue from your mobile app, try adding these three metrics to your “to monitor” list.
User sentiment
What do users think of your mobile app? Analytics like Flurry and MixPanel will give you a huge amount of data on how people use your mobile app, but they won’t tell you what people think of your app.
User sentiment is one of the most important factors for retention and revenue. People that enjoy using your app are likely to return (and also to recommend your app to their social circle). Users that don’t like your app may use it once or twice, then either ignore or uninstall it.
Since there’s no way to assess user sentiment using analytics data, the best way to learn more about what users think of your app is to poll them directly.
One of the best systems for analyzing user sentiment is Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a metric that measures the chance of an existing user recommending your mobile app to friends, family members, colleagues and other members of their social circle.
Your NPS is calculated by asking your existing users one question: “On a scale from zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend [your app] to a friend or colleague?”
The higher your company’s NPS, the happier users are with your application. NPS is typically a more accurate way to assess user sentiment than reviews, since it’s a measurable metric that’s easy to track and it gives you data from a more diverse, accurate cross sample of your users.
Word of mouth
Many of the most successful apps grew not because of multi-million dollar marketing campaign or referral programs, but because of word of mouth.
People discovered an app, enjoyed using it and recommended it to their friends. Some growth hacking may have occurred along the way to incentivize word of mouth, but the majority of the app’s growth was fueled not by marketers spending, but by people talking.
One of the best ways to learn more about what users think of your mobile app is to look at how they discuss it online:
- Are there any discussions on community websites like Reddit or Product Hunt?
- Are there any threads on niche-related message boards or social networks?
One easy way to follow word of mouth is to track mentions of your brand name. You can create automated email alerts using Google Alerts so that any mentions of your mobile app are sent to your inbox for you to monitor and — if necessary — respond to.
People are often far more candid with their friends and online acquaintances than they are with your support team or survey form, especially when they can remain anonymous. Forum threads may have a lot of noise, but they can also contain valuable feedback about your app.
Crashes and exceptions
While some analytics tools will provide basic information on crashes and exceptions, few offer detailed crash reports.
Crashes and performance issues are two of the most common reasons for users to uninstall or stop using your mobile app, making it important to track and monitor them. If your analytics tool doesn’t provide detailed crash data, it’s worth using a dedicated crash reporting tool.
Tools like Crashlytics and Countly provide helpful crash reporting analytics, letting you track not just how users interact with your app when it does work, but also what happens when it doesn’t work as expected.
As well as analyzing usage data to assess stability and performance, it’s worth testing your app to discover bugs on your own. A quick bug hunt using MyCrowd can often uncover bugs that are annoying your users, fuelling uninstalls and leading to bad reviews.
Find your mobile app’s bugs before your users do
It only takes a single bug to ruin your app’s user experience, leading to bad reviews and serious retention problems. Our powerful online crowdtesting platform lets you outsource bug testing to thousands of different testers and devices so that your mobile app is as bug-free as possible.
