How to drive app growth with smart mobile analytics

Enterprises of all sizes across the globe are turning to advanced analytics to understand and optimize the user experience. But when your users are spread all over the country (or the world), how can you get the information you need to create a more engaging and meaningful app experience?

Mobile analytics give you the power to see how users are engaging with your app, and where you can improve the user experience to drive app growth.

What Analytics Tell You

Mobile marketing engagement platforms record usage behaviour on every aspect related to your app. From simple metrics like downloads and uninstalls to more complicated analytics like retention rates and drop off points.

For example, you can see how many of your daily active users (DAU) are still using the app after 30 days — from their onboarding experience to their repeat behaviours.

Analytics can also help you compare your app to industry benchmarks. The average app loses 90 per cent of its daily active users in the first month—if yours is losing fewer than 90per cent, you’re doing something right.

Or let’s say you use push notifications to encourage customers to make a purchase through your app. You can test different kinds of notifications to see which ones are most successful. Are users sharing your coupons to Facebook? Are they tapping “Learn More” when you show them a product? Do they open your app when you send a location-based notification?

Knowing the answers to these questions lets you double down on the most effective notifications — which means more conversions.

There’s no limit to the type of information you can collect. But how does that help engagement?

How Analytics Drives Engagement

Mobile analytics give you insight into how your users behave from onboarding (install the app, complete a profile), to engagement (search for information, add product to cart) to retention (repeat purchases) or uninstall.

In the case of travel apps, for example, 80 per cent of users who perform a search move to the engagement stage within 44 minutes.

You know that encouraging users to try a key feature, consume content, or add an item to their cart will increase engagement. By testing push notifications, marketing emails, in-app messages, etc., you’ll be able to see which are most effective.

Or you might discover that people who download your app from a certain source are more likely to engage with your app. You can now double down on your marketing for that channel.

Keeping an eye on user behaviour shows you which in-app actions increase or decrease engagement. You might see that 60 per cent of users close your app after getting to a certain screen in the checkout process. Is there a bug? Do you need to streamline the payment process? Now you know where to focus your efforts.

Or perhaps you notice that new users who create smart playlists purchase a premium subscription more often than those who don’t. You might even see that you get different behaviour from users at different times of the day, week, or year.

These insights will help you perfect your app’s interface and functions to better suit your users.

Start Small and Scale Up

The possibilities for increasing meaningful user engagement through analytics are almost endless. And that can be overwhelming.

But the first step is always getting started. Get analytics tracking in place and create a basic dashboard with the simple metrics that you want to track—things like conversion rate and the number of daily active users that you’ve gained or lost. From there, you can build on the foundation to better user engagement

By:  Almitra Karnik, Head of Marketing and Global Growth, CleverTap