App analytics

Mobile app analytics provide insights into app performance on a variety of levels, including performance, usage and marketing.

Performance app analytics tell you how your app is running, if it is stable or if it is crashing, and if it is fast or slow. Performance-focused mobile app analytics may share insights about models and devices using your app as well as carrier and connection speeds.

Usage app analytics tell you what users are going inside your apps: where they’re going, what paths are failing, what activities are taking a long time, and when people are leaving your app.

Marketing app analytics show what’s happening as a result of the marketing campaigns you’re running. That likely includes data like ad clicks, app installs, opens, and may include information on purchases, registrations, and more. Marketing and advertising app analytics are critical for determining your ROAS (return on ad spend) and an effective CPM (cost per thousand impressions). 

Marketing analytics also demystifies which campaigns are working and which are not, providing insight for optimizing growth. App publishers need to know which channels and advertising partners are the most successful, and marketing analytics — particularly mobile attribution — is how they get that data.

In this section, we’ll discuss uses of mobile app analytics in more detail for both developers and marketers.

Mobile app analytics for developers

Mobile app analytics are an essential tool for developers to understand how users are behaving within an app. This usage information enables developers to improve the design and functionality of an app. For example, they can optimize the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) based on usage data: how people are actually using their app.

If a developer has a specific goal or action they want users to take inside an app, they can use analytics data to guide the app development and design process instead of blindly trying to figure it out on their own. For example, mobile gaming apps often have a goal of maximizing revenue through in-app purchases, so they will use analytics data to direct users towards these actions.

Mobile app analytics for marketers

In the context of marketing, brand leaders often work with a number of platforms, channels, and campaigns in order to achieve certain user acquisition KPIs and revenue targets. Since each end point provides a vast amount of data available for analysis, marketers rely on app analytics platforms like Singular to aggregate and standardize this data. That simplifies and streamlines their reporting workflow. Ultimately, marketers rely on unified app data to measure, analyze, and optimize the ROI of their media investments and marketing campaigns … all of which is crucial information to help them grow

MixPanel summarizes the use of app analytics for both developers and marketers as follows:

There are more than 6.5 million apps in the major mobile app stores, millions of web apps, and more than a billion websites in existence. Companies use mobile analytics platforms to gain a competitive edge in building mobile experiences that stand out. Mobile analytics tools also give teams a much-needed edge in advertising.

In order to organize and streamline app marketing analytics and reporting for brands, Singular works with over 1000 partners to automatically collect, standardize, and visualize advertising and campaign data. Specifically, there are four components to our iOS and Android data collection process discussed in our in-depth guide to app analytics. These include:

• Extraction: This is how all the data is collected from each client’s marketing platforms and partners and organized into a unified app analytics platform
• Enrichment: This refers to applying unique tags and business processes to data in order to enhance its value and achieve the level of granularity required for in-depth analysis.
• Combining: This is the process of putting top-funnel campaign and advertising data together with bottom-funnel conversions and results or attribution data, giving app marketers and developers a much more complete picture of how their marketing is working.
• Loading: Finally, Singular’s proprietary loading process imports data into the analytics database and/or your internal BI systems, making it available in customizable reports and dashboards.

While building mobile data “pipelines” that can take in data from a variety of platforms is a core aspect of Singular’s proprietary technology, there’s a lot more that goes into building a unified app analytics platform. In particular, we’ve been working for years on infrastructure capable of combining and connecting disparate data sets with the required level of granularity. This infrastructure is what enables both app developers and marketers to optimize their mobile user experience, the ROI of their marketing campaigns, and their business insights from data.