Hey App Marketers: Don’t Look Too Far, Find Hidden Treasures In Your Data
When business isn’t working and consumers aren’t responding to your brand as you want them to, it’s hard to know exactly what to fix. In the past, app marketers tried to learn about what their consumers really wanted in old fashion ways, which mostly included surveys and questionnaires. The problem with such methods is that they are expensive and slow, making them incredibly inefficient, and most importantly, users sometimes can’t point out at the specific issue they are experiencing, don’t feel comfortable admitting them, or simply lie about them. These days, when brands that don’t have a mobile app are the minority, app marketers can learn about consumers simply by looking at their app’s analytics. Tracking users’ actions within the app best teaches app marketers how users really feel by showcasing their real-time behavior without any external intervention. In fact, not tracking users’ in-app actions whatsoever can lead apps (and their companies) to a complete failure. Being data-driven in your brand’s development, and constantly working on optimizing your efforts based on such valid information can boost your brand’s growth dramatically. 
If you don’t have the necessary resources to embed analytics all throughout your app, select certain focal points that matter most to your business and that you’re interested in monitoring the most. These focal points are referred to as KPIs – key point indicators. Whether it’s the app onboarding, new features, viral features, calls to action, retention, or even coupons – creating appropriate funnels for each category and tracking users as they go through these stages will help you point out the problem and fix it. Let’s take the app onboarding stage for example. A company interested in tracking its onboarding analytics is one that’s most likely experiencing a large amount of users who simply leave the app and never come back before even completing registration. Creating an appropriate app onboarding funnel that includes a couple of pre-signup screens, a signup screen, a tutorial, and a main screen, and monitoring each of these steps, can help app marketers point out where the problem is.
Monitoring your app onboarding funnel analytics, you may notice that users leave the app at the pre-signup stage. That can indicate that the first screens don’t leave a good enough impression and users aren’t intrigued to sign up. Or when users drop out at the sign-up screen for instance, it might point out that it is too complex and overwhelming. Although you don’t know the cause of these two issue, you are able to learn from the analytics that they exist. At this point, you should consider A/B testing in order to find the root of the problem. Although you should be monitoring the behavior of your users on a regular basis, it’s also important to note that in order for the data to actually provide you with valuable knowledge, you need a significant amount of users to perform the action you are interested in testing. If your app is very popular, one day might be enough for a sufficient amount of users to perform the action, whereas if you’re an up-and-coming app you’ll have to exercise more patience before you can draw significant conclusions from your data. The bottom line is that not tracking your users’ performance is like driving with your eyes closed and will sure lead your business towards failure. Optimizing your mobile business shouldn’t just rely on logistics or finances, but also take users’ opinions into account. At the end of the day, when it comes to mobile, a thriving community of users is what it’s all about.
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