Do you know how users behave when they interact with your mobile app? While it’s easy to limit your focus to your app’s key performance indicators like downloads, revenue and review scores, you can gain a huge amount of insight into the way people use your app with analytics tools.
This data allows you to make optimizations to your app that keep users delighted and help you make more money. Talk about win-win.
Google Analytics for Mobile Apps
A favorite of marketers and webmasters, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps brings the power of Google Analytics to app developers. Analytics for Mobile Apps is part of Universal Analytics — a cross-device analytics system that lets you track user behavior using Google’s User ID system.
With Universal Analytics, you can measure user behavior across your mobile app, web platform and other devices. Reports are grouped into four categories: acquisitions, mobile app behavior, mobile app audiences, and mobile app conversion.
If your app is monetized using in-app sales or a premium upgrade, you can create a conversion goal in Universal Analytics to monitor your app’s conversion data. Universal Analytics also gives you the ability to view acquisition and conversion data for your app from the Google Play Store.
Apple App Analytics
Apple App Analytics is a free analytics tool available for iOS developers interested in gaining an additional level of insight into how people use their apps. Part of iTunes Connect, App Analytics sorts app data into three categories: App Store Data, Sales Data and Usage Data.
Using the App Store Data data set, you can view how many times your app has been viewed in the App Store and other useful statistics. Usage Data lets you dig into how users use your app, covering basic metrics such as installations, sessions, and total in-app purchases.
Since App Analytics is relatively new (it was launched in 2015) it lacks the power of Universal Analytics, but still offers a reasonable amount of user data and a helpful view into how people find and use your iOS app.
Facebook Analytics for Apps
Facebook Analytics for Apps is a free analytics SDK available for iOS, Android and Canvas. It’s one of the simpler mobile analytics tools, with a simple UI that puts the focus on key metrics like app installs and active users rather than the detailed, complex data of Universal Analytics.
Analytics for Apps sorts data into events, funnels, cohorts, segments, and integrations. Your app needs to be registered with Facebook to access Analytics for Apps, which is a quick and simple process.
One of the biggest advantages of Analytics for Apps is that it provide Facebook’s demographic data, helping you learn which audiences use your app, as opposed to just how existing users interact with it. With a simple UI, Analytics for Apps is a great beginner mobile analytics tool.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a powerful analytics tool for iOS and Android. Used by companies like Salesforce, it offers powerful analytics and tracking based around specific events like account creation, in-app purchases and more.
Using Mixpanel, you can create funnels of several events that let you track long-term conversion rates from free user to paid user. You can also segment users based on behavior to send email, push notifications and SMS to specific audiences based on how they use your app.
Mixpanel’s biggest strength is its great event and funnel tracking, which make it easy to analyze how users move through your app’s sales process. Available as freemium software, Mixpanel’s free version lets you track up to 25,000 data points a month.
Flurry Analytics
Flurry Analytics is a free analytics app included as part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite. It provides a great amount of data, ranging from usage statistics like active users and sessions to technical data on devices and mobile carriers.
Like in Mixpanel, conversion tracking in Flurry Analytics is done using events and funnels. User paths are visualized in simple flow charts, letting you quickly gain an understanding of the path users take through your application from the beginning through to the end of each session.
Flurry’s customizable dashboards make it easy to view your key behavior and conversion data right after logging in. You can create up to 10 custom dashboards, giving you quick access to all of your key data without having to dig too deep into Flurry’s somewhat complicated menus.
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