Mobile App Analytics: Best Practices for 2021

Mobile app analytics is the driving force behind finding ways to streamline the user funnel and optimize app performance. App analytics tools help in improving user acquisition and user engagement. Without the help of mobile app analytics, you would be experimenting with different strategies blindly, and no data to validate your experiments.

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It is crucial to follow some best practices for mobile app analytics to achieve the best results. You’ll also gain insights into whether you’re achieving your goals for your mobile app, whether it’s revenue, conversion, engagement or other KPIs, and then harness the data you have to modify your strategy and optimize your app to further reach your goals. They’ll help you get a better understanding of what your users are doing and what you should do about it.

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You also need to identify suitable metrics to track for your business. There are several key performance indicators to help you measure the performance of your mobile app. Not all of them will prove useful to you or affect your bottom line. To understand the most useful KPIs to focus on, here is an article that we have put together on the top 10 mobile app KPIs of 2021.

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Given the scope of information that can be derived from mobile app analytics, app marketers need to keep some app analytics best practices in mind. To get the most out of your app performance tracking, here are some pointers to take into account.

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What are the mobile app analytics best practices?

Before delving into the best practices for tracking mobile app analytics there is one question that app marketers need to ask themselves. What are you looking for? All the data that you have collected from your app analytics tools will only take meaning when you know what your goals are. The answer varies from business to business. Identify your goal first and then work towards accomplishing those goals.

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• Segmentation and filtering of data: Data segmentation allows you to filter your accrued data by using filters. Segmenting your users by paying vs. non-paying customers, recent installers, or heavy users helps you understand in-app user behaviour.

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You can also filter data based on certain parameters such as:

• Date filter: Define a custom date range, or viewing data from last week, last month, etc. 
• Types of users: Repeated users, unique users, etc.
• Device: iOS or Android version
• User demographics: Age range, gender, device model, etc.

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This will help you gain a clear perspective of what kind of users use your app. Mobile app analytics tools allow you to export the filtered data into a CSV file. 

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To validate your findings, make use of qualitative data that can be acquired from user session replays. By checking anomalous sessions in depth, you can analyse issues quicker and optimise user experience better. 

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• Funnel Analytics

Funnel Analysis with UserExperior

An important feature that helps you identify where drop-offs occur is funnel analysis. You can monitor the conversion from one step to the next in your funnel. For better understanding, slice and dice funnels by user segments, app version and time period. Before you can begin to identify why users are not registering, you need to know a few things.

• Current conversion rates of your users
• Current dropoff rates of your users

Constantly measure this funnel and monitor your conversion/drop-off rates. This will help you evaluate how the changes you make affect user behavior. Understanding your funnels is one of the most important things you can do to increase quantitative understanding of your mobile app.

UserExperior helps you visualize your user’s journey and reveals opportunities for better conversion rates with its funnel analysis feature. You can see why users drop-out from your app’s critical journeys. You can also make funnels for every milestone in your app.

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• Monitor mobile app KPIs in depth

Mobile app KPIs will help you in measuring the effort that you put in to deliver a great user experience. Most mobile app analytics tools help you monitor engagement metrics, performance metrics and acquisition metrics.

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1. Usage of your app

Active users: Keep track of daily, weekly, and monthly active users within a time period. Also, make sure to check how many users have been active within the last 30 minutes, as well as the top conversion events during that period. This could include data like a user opening the app for the first time, registering for a demo, etc. 

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Session replays with UserExperior

• User sessions: Monitoring user journey and replicating their exact actions is necessary to better understand user behaviour. You can identify crashes and bugs in your app as well as provide contextual support to fix issues quicker. UserExperior helps you to analyse every user interaction and fix broken experiences with powerful visual analytics. You can see exactly how your app is used by your customer with UserExperior’s video session replays feature.

• ANR and app crashes: One of the biggest indicators of a session with poor user experience is how often the app crashes. Users that encounter crashes are much more likely to uninstall an app than any other reason. UserExperior’s platform helps you see what went wrong and improves SLAs with its ANR and Crash Diagnostics feature.

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2. Screenwise App Analysis

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Heatmap Analysis with UserExperior

You need to monitor metrics like the amount of time spent by a user, user clicking on important functions and performing necessary actions, and user experience on each page. Heatmaps on every screen allow you to identify user pain points throughout their journey. UserExperior helps you discover user intent in real-time with its mobile app heatmap feature.

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If used correctly, the mobile app touch heatmap tool can help you answer important questions like:

• Are users seeing the main content that you want them to see?
• Are users clicking on important  page elements (links, buttons, and CTAs)?
• Are users getting confused by non-clickable elements on the screen?  
• Are users experiencing issues on each screen and/or across devices?

• Test your app on as many different devices as possible

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It’s important to test your app on many different devices so that performance can be reviewed for every potential user. It is more of a problem with Android devices than the iOS ones. You need to be vigilant about testing on each different device that you plan to support, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

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To experience how UserExperior can help you increase your app engagement and boost your conversion rates, request a free demo today!