If you have a mobile app, you want more answers.
You want to know more about what your users want, who your most profitable customers are, how to retain them, engage them etc.
And mobile app analytics is continually evolving to give you better answers.
So what are the biggest trends in mobile app analytics that you need to make the most of – to take your app to the next level?
To find out, we asked 62 influencers and experts in the mobile app ecosystem one question:
“What current trend in mobile app analytics are you excited about?”
We asked CEOs and leaders of companies which have mobile apps, app analytics companies, app development veterans, influential bloggers and podcasters.
Over to our 62 guests (In alphabetical order of last names)
Deepak Abbot
Head of Mobile Growth at Times Internet
“Analytics tools are getting smarter. From doing mere data presentation, most tools are evolving to actually do data analytics. With Firebase, Google is trying to reimagine Analytics for mobile. They have packed notifications, attribution, invites, deep links, storage, AdWords, admob in one neat packaging.
Google Analytics has introduced Assistant which helps business managers get some interesting insights without mining data. User level analytics in GA is yet another step towards making analytics really meaningful by going deep into individual user’s journey.”
Raj Aggarwal
CEO and Co-Founder, Localytics
“We’re most excited about the industry’s shift in focus away from user acquisition and towards user engagement. For too long marketers have been focused on racking up downloads – putting budget and effort into finding more new users rather than keeping the ones they have. However, that situation has changed – we’re in an engagement crisis where it’s growing more challenging to retain users and businesses are starting to catch on.
Our research shows that 25% of apps are only used once and 58% of users churn in the first 30 days of using an app. At Localytics, we believe the best way to overcome these challenges is to stop “bad” engagement (such as blasting push messages to all users) and strive to better understand your mobile users, offering them carefully segmented and personalized mobile experiences.”
Marc Altshuller
IBM Business Analytics General Manager
“A current trend we are excited about in mobile app analytics is geospatial analytics. With businesses accumulating more and more data on their customers’ locations and corresponding activities, it is necessary for decision makers to generate insights that include this information to increase customer loyalty, sales and other outcomes.
To address this challenge, geospatial analytics accounts for both time and space in predictive models, enabling accurate forecasting of events at a particular location. The ability to recognize patterns with similar geographic context—including weather data—offers decision makers insights not found in traditional charts or tables.
IBM is seeing increased demand for geospatial analysis from virtually all industries and sectors, as data explodes at a faster rate than sensors as the Internet of Things takes hold in the enterprise.
For example, a retailer could use a self-service tool like Watson Analytics to analyse geospatial data along with weather, social sentiment and organizational sales data to target nearby customers with a promotion for ponchos (instead of umbrellas) due to predicted rain at a popular outdoor event near a specific store.”
Akhil Aryan
VP of Product, HapTik
“Mobile Analytics for as long as I know it has been fragmented and broken. Everyone from Flurry to Google Analytics was only able to give so much information into the actual lifecycle of a mobile user. In recent times, I’m seeing analytical platforms build towards a centralized point of information. This means compiling all of the critical data in a user journey from discovery attribution to engagement, retention and uninstalls.
It’s unimaginably useful to have a dashboard that can access and respond to events across these multiple states in a user’s interaction with mobile apps. We’re finally coming to a point where even small startups can truly represent, track and contextually respond to their mobile user base from one platform.”
Alex Austin
CEO, Branch
“In the lifecycle of all industries, there’s point when we hit peak saturation and consolidation begins to occur. We’re very much in that peak saturation point in mobile app analytics today, and consolidation is approaching fast. Just as consumers only have the attention span for a single Facebook, marketers and product folks only have the attention span for a single dashboard.
The single dashboard is the future of analytics. Who will own it is still up for grabs, but my money is on the enterprise marketing platforms (Adobe, Salesforce, etc.) that dominate the web. That’s where we’re investing from a partnership perspective, since it’s the platform that the large enterprises are most familiar with and unlikely to switch from.
Branch’s deep linking technology connects the mobile app to the mobile web, unifying the user experience and analytics across both platforms. This is the trend I’m most excited about. I can’t wait for the day where a user on a device can be visualized on a single dashboard, showing the entire lifecycle of the user no matter whether they use the desktop web, mobile web or native app.”
Manick Bhan
CEO, CTO and Founder, Rukkus
“I am most excited to see user experience lead technology. With the growing variety of mobile devices, the in-app user experience is becoming more important than ever. The increase of in-app advertising makes user experience even more of a challenge, and developers will have to rely on more analytics to create better experiences.”
Sid Bhatt
Co-Founder & CEO, Aarki
“Recent advancements in deep tracking and mobile app analytics are enabling marketers to significantly improve their app marketing ROI. Marketers can now leverage both attributed and unattributed tracking data to predict pre and post-install actions at the user level. This information can then be married with real-time bidding (RTB) and dynamic machine learning to drive campaigns that impact the actual business metrics. Using integrated post-install optimization frameworks like these, app marketers can evaluate the impact of different ad creatives, media channels, and other factors resulting in a significant improvement in campaign ROI.”
Zahi Boussiba
Co-Founder & CEO, Appsee
“By far the most exciting trend that I’m seeing is the transition over to qualitative analytics. App makers put so much time, energy, and money into bettering their apps. Their aim is to better retention, reduce crashes, monetize more effectively, and they need good analytics to get there. The traditional way has been to look at numbers – quantitative analytics.
The trend now is the use of qualitative analytics, which allow app makers to see “why” instead of just the “what.” Being able to watch videos of real user sessions along with seeing aggregated heat maps are game changers. Retention rates are up, crash rates are down, and qualitative analytics are simply revolutionizing how things are done in the app universe.”
Larry Brangwyn
Head of User Experience at PCA Predict
“In future, the increasing focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected devices means that there will be even more sensors and sources of rich data to draw from. As a result, we will get a much fuller picture of users and the context of their behaviour. The better that picture, the more relevant and useful we can be.
Users who switch devices to complete actions or tasks remain one of the trickiest groups to track. It’s quite common in a world where consumers have an average 3.64 connected devices to browse on a mobile on the way to work, evaluate and compare on your desktop at work and then buy using a tablet at home. An elegant solution to link guest users by their disparate devices is currently missing. This would be a game changer for personalising the online experience.”
Matthew Brogie
COO, Repsly
“At Repsly, the mobile app analytics that excite us the most are Engagement and Retention. The two are tightly related, and are both an excellent proxy for measuring the quality of our User Experience. If the UX is superb, engagement goes up, and if engagement goes up, retention rises right along with it. When we make any change to our user experience, we immediately focus on fluctuations in engagement metrics. If they go down at all, we dig into the changes we just made and start the debate over rolling back. If engagement rises, we pop a little bubbly knowing that retention will increase; then we get back to work.”
Stephen Caffrey
Co-Founder & CEO, Display.io
“After spending some time in Google’s Firebase console recently I’ve become excited about analytics again. Firebase brings a level of depth and maturity to developer analytics overall – its supports both OS, web and its still free!
From a feature level point of view the recent surge of analytics and attribution vendors supporting uninstall metrics is great as it give developers a key practical metric to drive their product and marketing decisions.”
Terence Channon
Managing Director, SaltMines Group
“I am really excited about true, intelligent personalization and customization of messaging to users based on their device and preferences. Previously, analytics and big data could be used to provide relevant offers to users based on buyer persona. The mobile device is such an individual item and experience that users define for themselves.
Proper use of analytics and messaging really makes the world of true 1-on-1 conversation between users and businesses a reality. Delaying a marketing message because we know the user has not been back to the store or that the user is out of town will make marketing messaging more like a conversation with a trusted friends rather than a marketing push.”
Sergei Dubograev
CEO & Co-founder of Pinxter Digital
“The smartphone has always been seen as a platform for apps and connecting with others but there still hasn’t been a strong emphasis on the smart phone actually being a censor. Your phone communicates with the car you drive, WiFi hot spots, hardware, and everything in your surrounding world.
Why is this exciting? Your phone understands what you drive, what you like and where you go. Though sounding creepy, developers can actually use this data to create extremely dynamic experiences that are tailored one on one inside of an application.
Most apps are an umbrella for all users with very small personalization but by utilizing these new data analyzation tools that connect with your offline world, you can now build a stronger relationship with consumers throughout their everyday life, not just when they use your app”
Nimrod Elias
CEO & Co-Founder, Tapreason
“I am really excited about the use of automation and Artificial Intelligence within mobile app analytics. Automation has had tremendous impacts on a range of industries, changing how our cars are manufactured and trades on Wall Street are executed, and is now improving how we connect with users of mobile applications.
Artificial Intelligence takes this a step further, continuously improving automations. Within mobile analytics, this means dynamic marketing platforms that synthesize thousands of data points in real-time. For example with TapReason, decision makers have at their disposal solutions that don’t just react to changing user behaviours, but predict when these moments will occur. Solutions that not only “uncover new insights,” but can act upon them automatically.”
Jeff Epstein
CEO, Ambassador
“Mobile attribution will become a must-have if you have a mobile presence. As businesses and marketers become more data-driven, they’ll need to better measure attribution to inform their customer acquisition strategies.”
Lauren Fellure
Head of Growth at SnapMobile
“What I’m most excited about is watching mobile analytics move from being siloed to being integrated with all other customer analytics and data. Mobile has become the first and everything platform for a lot of – if not most – customers, thus making mobile data and analytics more important than ever.
However, it is definitely not the only platform. In order for companies, from key executives to customer service reps, to best make decisions and interact with their customers, they need a holistic view of analytics from all customer-facing platforms. This does not exist today, but it is being addressed and hopefully will in the near future.”
Will Fraser
Co-Founder and CEO, Referral SaaSquatch
“I’m most excited to see the increasing sophistication of analytics around customer lifetime value with a view across devices, platforms and even the gap from the digital to real world.”
Robi Ganguly
CEO and Co-founder, Apptentive
“Something I’m excited about is that we’re seeing companies investing more in customer conversation analytics. Mobile product and marketing teams are doing more to reach out to their customers, gather their input, feedback and sentiment and turn it into real-time information streams for their entire team.”
Micah Gantman
VP of Strategy + BD, Tune
“We are excited to see the industry coming around to multi-touch attribution. It has almost become a tired subject at times, but the need for reconciliation and transparency in mobile marketing has forced the issue.
Both Facebook and Google are supporting the idea, and marketers are starting to think more about how multiple advertising partners may impact a consumer experience before downloading and engaging with an app.
Full reporting into multi-touch attribution reduces fraud by devaluing the last click, removes discrepancies by attributing to all parties that contribute, and ultimately reveals the secret sauce a marketer is looking for to drive more results.”
Mark Ghermezian
CEO & Co-Founder, Appboy
“Mobile analytics are becoming increasingly more personalized, and the implications of that for a marketer are massive. That’s what most excites me. Today’s fully integrated CRMs can take something inherently impersonal (massive amounts of data from a variety of sources) and recast it in a way that creates a vivid, humanized picture of a real person.
Cultivating and curating data to understand the nuances of a person’s daily life, routine, like and dislikes amounts to a hyper-personalized experience for your customers. To that end, coupling personalization with segmentation – which slices and dices customer information such as age and behaviour – has shown to increase conversion rates by up to 15%.”
Travis Givens
Digital Lead, Unique Influence
“One of the most exciting advancements in mobile app analytics is the ability to connect in-app data with marketing and advertising data, like we’ve been able to do for years on the web. It’s no mystery that when dealing with mobile apps, revenue can take a while to appear. Ask a UA manager for a mobile app what their payback window is and the answer is likely to be 90+ days for a game and up to 30 days for non-gaming apps.
This is where the recent advancements and trend toward cohort-based views is particularly exciting for mobile apps. With mobile app analytics, we now buy against a user’s true LTV based in historical data – not projections. This in turn allows us the flexibility and knowledge to buy against an increasingly complex marketplace to drive more revenue and eliminate waste effectively.”
Domingo Guerra
President & Founder of Appthority
“Mobile apps are the new security perimeter because every mobile app has the potential to steal or leak sensitive and private company information. Risky app behaviours, hidden actions and malicious malware code can breach company security systems and steal assets from employee mobile devices at any time.
We are excited to see the emergence of real-time mobile analytics that instantly and continuously determine the risks associated with APIs, URLs, 3rd party code frameworks, malware, and a host of malicious behaviours.
In particularly, we’re excited about innovations in extremely advanced mobile app analytics that identify, track, and alert for any apps making URL requests to known malicious destination addresses, or addresses that are deemed geographically undesirable by IT teams. This is just the beginning of mobile app analytics transformation for enterprises that we are beginning to observe.”
Siddharth Gupta
Co-Founder and CEO, Notify Visitors
“Personalised marketing based on the user behaviour and analytics will change the way marketing is done. It will enable businesses to deliver right message to the right customer at right time.”
Stuart Hall
Founder & Chief Bot, Appbot
“I’m excited about app reviews and the insights they give about users. Ratings and reviews are so important to the success of your mobile app. In my opinion they are the secret sauce that many developers ignore.”
Derric Haynie
Head of Growth, Rebrandly
“The coolest trend in Mobile App Analytics has got to be the ability to retarget users using deep links. What I’m saying is that you can track user activity in your app and monitor drop off locations. When they leave, you automatically send them ads on Facebook to get them right back to where they left off. It’s a great way to boost activation and retention and works great alongside email marketing efforts.”
John Jackson
Research Vice President, Mobile & Connected Platforms, IDC
“I’m most excited about what can be accomplished predictively. I view this as a logical next step forward from engagement-oriented analytics. The app is, after all, a container for services and the predominant place where brands, content owners, service providers will meet their customers. If we can predict, we can pro-act.”
Michael Jaconi
CEO, Button
“Companies are starting to look beyond the install wall with their mobile analytics – especially as it relates to commerce – and for us at Button this is the most exciting trend. With more sophisticated tracking, comes more sophisticated channels for mobile acquisition and reengagement.
Better in-app tracking, tracking of performance through the app stores, and ways to measure attribution and affiliation are becoming not just possible, but a priority. At Button, we’ve focused on helping unlock many of these new channels, with a more scalable partnership model for mobile. As a result, our customers are seeing immense benefits.”
Zain Jaffer
CEO & Co-Founder, Vungle
“As first adopters, mobile-gaming app advertisers are leading the charge for a whole host of brands when it comes to tracking performance back to ad and marketing spend. This is an incredibly exciting trend and we’re going to see this become the new normal.
The most successful mobile businesses are moving beyond a cost-per-install (CPI) model. Instead, they’re evolving into performance-driven marketing machines. Performance marketing is fast becoming standard practice, because the costs of acquiring new, high-value mobile users are skyrocketing.
To get a meaningful return on ad spend (ROAS), advertisers are learning that discipline to spend only on channels that are working is the key to success. They’re tracking long-term business KPIs back to their user acquisition channels, and mercilessly cutting the ones that don’t perform.
It’s what game app developers have been doing for years, and it’s no wonder they consistently have the top grossing apps. It’ll be interesting to see how other verticals embrace this approach.”
Jai Jaisimha
CEO at Appnique
“Here at Appnique we’re all about maximizing app marketers ROAS through Intelligent Audience Targeting Technology and expert campaign management, so we get excited by any analytics that give us and our clients insight into not just cost per install, but also data points around audience quality as measured by costs for a specific action (CPA)–like getting to a certain level in a game or spending a certain amount on in app purchases.
In our experience, how you target campaigns can directly affect audience quality – for example, some audiences cost less than others but monetize at a lower rate resulting in overall lower ROAS. There is definitely a trend towards refined targeting and a focus on quality metrics that we are very excited about!”
Oren Kaniel
CEO & Co-founder, Appsflyer
“While it’s not exactly surprising, it’s quite exciting to see mobile take the lead in terms of omnichannel marketing, as companies increasingly drive their advertising, marketing and CRM campaigns forward with a mobile-first approach.
The smartphone has become our primary and most personal device, and mobile apps are becoming the central hub for communications that also touch our desktops, tablets, smart TVs, VR headsets and, through the Internet of Things, even our household appliances, cars, vending machines and more.
The digital world is becoming more complex and sophisticated every day, and as this trend continues, app analytics will become even more crucial for understanding the modern consumer’s behaviours throughout the entire ecosystem.”
“For marketers, emerging app analytics – like our universal uninstall attribution – will be essential as mobile apps play a larger role and these omnichannel trends evolve. App analytics will continue helping marketers leverage new opportunities, identify how to attract users with high lifetime values, and maximize marketers’ return on the investment of their engagement activities across different channels.”
Paul Kemp
Host of The App Guy Podcast
“I am most excited about the trend towards artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is something a lot of apps are incorporating, and it’s really helping with the end-user experience.”
Simon Kendall
Head of Communications, Adjust
“What’s really exciting to see is the way that fraud detection and prevention has become a focus topic over the last six months. The level of awareness is one thing: new systems being launched, more people are talking about it at conferences, and more findings in terms of how we can go about preventing fraudulent traffic. What people are also starting to realize is that when we talk about fraud prevention, it’s not just about preventing people defrauding you and taking your money away. It’s also that fake traffic is screwing up your aggregate KPIs and analysis – which is the primary concern among people in the analytics space.
I feel like it’s something people have been aware of for a while, but coming into the daylight first now. I believe that’s partly because the scale of teams and budgets make it a bigger issue – 5 % of your ad budget being squirrelled away is different if your total budget is $10M rather than $100k. On top of that, people are going to be more willing to talk about fraud if they know that there’s someone who can present a solution.
From conferences and from the blogs we’re following, it really seems to have come into the spotlight over the last couple of months.”
Bhuvan Khanna
VP of Delivery, Webonise
“Location has been the poster child of mobile based marketing solutions for a while, but that is so 2010. What is more exciting is the trend of gathering relevant data around users’ behaviours.
App developers can reduce the distance between an “intent to act” and “taking an action” by combining data collected from conventional usage based analytics, demographic data, user personas and feedback gathered by one click surveys.
With these insights into our user’s behaviour we can do scheduled personalized pushes, and can reach out to them at the right time and be more effective in the targeting and segmentation of the actions we want them to perform and when.”
Jason Kneen
Founder at BouncingFish
“For me, real-time crash and exception analytics are extremely useful when testing both at a beta level and out there with end-users. With the vast array of devices and screens on Android and the growing list of different form-factors and resolutions on iOS, being able to gather data on any issues in near-to-real-time is incredibly important.
It provides us developers with vital information on the device, its OS type and version, app version and much more — so we can quickly pinpoint any issues, and/or have device information we can use to test with.”
John Koetsier
Mobile Economist at TUNE
“There are two trends in mobile analytics that I’m excited about.
The first is the continuing move from top-down big-data analytics that tell you everything about all the actions in your app and nothing about the people using it to bottom-up almost CRM-light analytics solutions that tell you about people, what they’re doing, who they likely are, and what they’re most interested in. Solutions like this are mobile marketing automation solutions or in-app marketing products, and they help app publishers get closer to building one-to-one relationships with the people who use their apps.
The second is the continuing trend to marry that data up with all the other data that you have. Even if you’re mobile-first, at size you’re going to be generating data about, by, and for your customers in other contexts than just your mobile app. In those cases — and if you’re enterprise-scale, retail, or a traditional brand — you need to be able to merge in-app data, sales data, marketing data, service and support data, and potentially other kinds of data into a single unified whole.”
Tomasz Kolinko
Founder, Motivapps and Appcodes
“Not a trend, but something I wish finally became available – some way of tracking which search phrases convert to paid users. There are some ways to do that now, but they are quite awkward still.”
Momchil Kyurkchiev
Co-Founder and CEO, Leanplum
“Mobile is marketers’ always-on-line to reach consumers. This incredibly personal device provides a goldmine of customer data, giving app managers an opportunity to reach their consumers with relevant and timely information. The way I see it, there are two trends when it comes to app analytics.
The first is consolidating your data to provide deeper, richer data. Even though many app managers have valuable data on all sorts of customer interactions, often it is siloed into different marketing solutions. Marketing campaign data should be in one place, to offer a more holistic view of the customer. This enables algorithms for smarter predictions, tailored to both marketer and user needs.
The second is seamlessly transitioning from data analysis to action. Working with a platform that automatically highlights areas of statistical significance in your campaigns helps you understand where you can improve in your next iteration. By following these tips — consolidating your data into one platform and locating opportunities of action — you’ll drive more engagement and ROI.”
Rob Lo Bue
Founder at Applingua
“For Applingua, app analytics based on location and installed user language is important. If a developer can discern where most of their revenue is being made outside the English speaking world, it may lead them to concentrate on a more international sales strategy or localize accordingly. As app localizers, we support intelligent decisions on which languages to choose, rather than a catch-all approach. Clear analytics can help developers decide which market to target and how to adapt their app to suit.”
Aubriana Lopez
Chief Mobile Strategist, Digital Element
“Attribution and analytics are an integral part of long-term app success, and the exciting opportunity in this business lies in the integration of new data. One trend that is proving to have merit is the use of location data, which can be obtained passively via IP geolocation.
We’ve all heard the Chevy Nova marketing tragedy (you know, trying to sell a car in Latin America whose name literally translates “It doesn’t go”), proving the importance of knowing your audience. Location is the looking glass that provides some major clarity about app users… or the lack thereof. The value of good location data is a no brainer as it shows app marketers where they are successful and where they can improve, providing context to paint a more colourful and understandable story- and that is a fad that doesn’t fade.”
Meike Maryska
Senior CRM Tech Lead, Delivery Hero
“I am excited about in-depth analytics centred around uninstalls. Examining the causes of uninstalls can play a vital role in user retention.
Tracking elements like user behaviour preceding uninstalls, uninstalls by device and by region can help identify patterns. We can use these patterns to modify our user engagement tactics as well as our app user experience. Tracking uninstalls by source of user acquisition can play a key role in weeding out sources that are consuming a lot of money without generating meaningful returns. Therefore, uninstall metrics can be key to obtaining profitable insights from several angles.”
Christopher Meares
Vice President, Analytics Consulting, MaassMedia
“The accuracy of the data collected when mobile app analytics solutions are implemented correctly is one of the most exciting features of mobile app analytics. On the web, we rely on cookies to identify unique visitors. That method is very misleading as it actually refers to unique browsers and cookie deletion rate can skew it even further. With mobile app analytics, all data is tied to a device and that unique device cannot be deleted. If a user uninstalls an app and reinstalls the same app, they are still seen as the same user. This allows for deeper and more accurate analysis especially around lifetime custoer value and retention analysis.”
Krunal Mehta
Head of Mobile Products, Moneycontrol.com
“I am excited about the increased focus on user retention and win-back related metrics like crash-free users, cohort analysis, uninstall analysis and unified user profiles. As our most active users use our mobile apps to access the content and tools, it is extremely important to offer them a crash-free and fast working app. At times, when we fail to offer an expected experience, users do uninstall.
Recording the reason for uninstall and having a unified profile of the user to identify him/ her through an email id or mobile number, makes it easy for us re-connect with the user and treat this as an opportunity to win-back”
Elad Natanson
Founder, Appnext
“In my eyes, the most exciting trend in mobile app analytics these days, is user moments. Understanding the moment happening to a certain user before installing a new app, using it or uninstalling it. We hear a lot of demand of app developers to better understand user engagement and out of mobile behaviour around it, what drove the user decision to try one and when will he re-use the app again. Products who will be able to supply that data, will drive a lot of value to the developers’ community and help making better re-engagement tools.”
Daniel Nathan
Co-founder & CEO, BidMotion
“There is a clear opportunity for mobile analytics companies to move towards mobile intelligence and find their way out of the potential threats of industry heavyweights Facebook and Google who are building their own tools.
The goal is no longer simply to track the user behaviour for analysis, but to give perspective to the massive amount of data remaining little exploited in the mobile industry. Mobile analytics will actually have to use machine learning and Big Data techniques to be relevant in an even more competitive market. These advanced data science technologies allow mobile analytics to tap further into vast data volumes to generate campaign insights and allow for more effective and efficient campaign optimization.
The real opportunity in mobile app analytics is to build technologies to make mobile marketers more efficient, more knowledgeable, to help them make wiser decisions. The mobile analytics companies who do embrace this technical approach will find themselves with a real added value on top of tracking and attributing events, they will make mobile marketers more efficient with an order of magnitude.”
Yaniv Nizan
CEO, SOOMLA
“I’m excited to see companies who monetize through in-app advertising getting more mature about their approach to data and seeking to gain in-depth understanding of their ad-revenue. This is really a combination of two trends:
1) The bigger companies who has a significant investment in BI and CRM systems are adding in-app ads as a monetization source and are looking for the same level of data they are used to.
2) The smaller companies who have always been ad-supported are getting more mature and looking to get more optimised through data. This is part of the market maturity trends and the projection that global advertising revenues will reach $200B in mobile media.”
Branimir Parashkevov
Co-Founder, Appzio
“As more and more signs show that mobile apps are going to be even more important for the eco-system the mobile app analytics companies will fight hard to step up their game.
The problem to be solved: on one side, there is plenty of information about all kind of quantifiable data, on the other, there is strong barrier in extracting meaningful information from this large pool.
What excites me the most are the opportunities for processing aggregated data in order to provide improved statistics about specific user’s behaviour. This would allow further ad- and sales- optimizations as well as improvements of the app-usage patterns. Whichever company solves this and helps with the app-data aggregation – it will get a huge advantage in the sphere and reap the benefits.”
Ran Rachlin
Co-founder & CEO, Ubertesters
“I’m most excited about the Internet-of-things (IoT). Its analytics is different than web or mobile analytics that we got used to. For the first time, we need to analyse millions of geographically distributed ‘devices’ (like TVs, Ovens or coffee machines) and not ‘computers’ that are connected to the Internet and can send/receive data. It means absolutely new requirements for Big Data analysis. It is not enough to just collect a lot of data from devices, but we need to make sense out of the data and do something that makes these devices better and more efficient.
The ability to track users’ behaviour, search preferences, movements and actions is influencing B2B and B2C fields and creates new data patterns for wholly new business models.
Also, the IoT is not only about lifestyle enhancement (ability to turn you’re A/C or dishwasher while on the road), but there is also the corporate side of IoT. The ability organizations will have to collect and analyse data from sensors on manufacturing equipment, weather stations, delivery trucks and more. So, we are looking at new ways to test devices (crowd testing is the only way to actually test in the field) and get proper analytics.”
Peter Reinhardt
CEO and Co-founder, Segment
“Mobile app analytics is splitting into tons of different pieces. Beyond traditional product analytics we’re seeing an explosion of vendors in the past few years offering new tools in mobile attribution analysis, deep-linking, visitor recording, in-app messages, push notifications, etc. The challenge is that every new tool offers fantastic new benefits, but comes with yet another SDK, and unavoidably leads to SDK bloat.
One of the things that most exciting to me is that we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel here. More and more of the data collection across these tools can be standardized, and the SDKs/data collection abstracted away into a single interface. This means that we’re getting close to the best of both worlds… amazing new tools, with incredible variety of focus across all the major mobile marketing functions (paid attribution, deep-linking, push notifications, in-app messages, etc.), and yet a slim SDK profile.”
Mark Robinson
Founder and CEO at deltaDNA
“It is becoming clear that buying a mobile analytics tool does not inevitably create intelligent and timely communications with online customers. At deltaDNA we are excited by exploiting predictive modelling and micro-segmentation to proactively understand and manage app users. Putting brains behind online marketing will give marketers the tools to build engagement in a way not seen before.”
Eliran Sapir
Founder and CEO at Apptopia
“We have always been wildly passionate about mobile analytics and we’re excited for the beginning of the next analytics revolution or the “third generation” as we call it internally.
The first generation was about proper measurement, the second generation about taking actions during an event or in absence of an event like sending a push notification, the third generation is the convergence of both its about data driven automation, essentially getting rid of the final bottle neck the app marketer. At Apptopia we’re excited to be at the nexus of this third generation and look forward to the on-coming revolution rather than the evolution of app analytics as we’ve experienced in the few years.”
Joel D. Selanikio
CEO and Co-founder, Magpi
“One of the most exciting trends in recent years for small companies like us is the proliferation of low-cost and even free tools for mobile analytics. As an example, we use Crashlytics, provided for free by Twitter, for our Android and iOS apps, and New Relic for our web applications.
This means that even though our users are in some of the most remote places on earth (e.g. the World Health Organization eradicating polio in Afghanistan), we’re notified of any crashes or glitches automatically and immediately. And that means that quite often by the time a user has reported a problem it has already been fixed.
Ten years ago, we would have had to pay big bucks for that kind of “situational awareness”, or use scarce resources to build it ourselves. Now, low-cost monitoring tools like New Relic and Fabric help us punch above our weight.”
Manav Sethi
Group Head- Marketing & Digital Platforms, ASKME Group
“We are keenly watching emerging trends around identity & attribution in mobile analytics. For almost all ecommerce companies, majority of transactions happen on mobile devices across browsers and apps. And it’s only going to grow upwards from here.
In new world order, marketing is the new sales! And that’s how attribution across channels, network, traffic, conversions and de-dup of identities across devices & browsers becomes imperative in mobile analytics. It not only impacts ROI but also helps create personalised experiences and hence customer retention & loyalty.”
Keith Shields
Partner, Designli.co
“We’re very excited about Fabric’s new announcement where they have launched “Branch,” allowing deep linking throughout your app. Previously, mobile app analytics allowed app owners to see how users were interacting with their app, but the data stopped there.
Identifying what marketing channels were the ones that were working and which ones weren’t was the real trick that had everyone stumped. With Fabric’s new announcement, though, we can now see where our clients’ users are coming from and use that data to help optimize their marketing campaigns.”
Onur Alp Soner
Co-Founder & CEO at Countly
“Over the years we have seen many mobile analytics services come and go, mainly due to the fact that they fail to truly address the needs of marketers and product managers. Even today most vendors focus on generic, marginally useful metrics and KPIs such as MAU, DAU, session length, etc.
The next and more valuable wave in analytics is the ability to predict app user behaviour, provide in-depth churn analysis, and make this information actionable in real-time via in-depth personalization. We are working together with our customers to build this next generation of analytics based on past user behaviour, and we believe that any truly serious analytics providers will need to refocus on this as well.”
Jeremy Stern
Analytics Architect, WillowTree
“We’re very excited to see more companies finally joining data from their mobile app analytics to their data from other channels. One of the largest entertainment companies in the U.S. saw their mobile app become the number one way consumers interacted with their brand digitally in 2015. However, until this year, they didn’t factor any of those interactions into their targeted marketing efforts. That’s a lot of important signals of interest and intent getting lost!
There’s a lot of great insights about your customers that you can learn from their app usage! I think as this information finally gets added to companies’ data warehouses, we’re going to be able to develop a much fuller omnichannel view of who our customers are and how to serve them best.”
Silvia Thom
Director – Product Management, Zalora
“I am excited how companies are emerging and providing a whole suite of products or going very deep in one area like Uninstall.io.
The most prominent example being Firebase from Google. We have had to stitch a lot of services together over the past 2 years to develop a good set up for our apps. Anyone, who will start developing an app today has a much broader variety to pick from which gives them a good head start!”
Sunil Thomas
Co-Founder and CEO, CleverTap
“I’m currently most excited about two trends in mobile app analytics:
- Becoming Customer Focused:
A single view of a customer is getting to be more and more important for product and marketing teams to understand their users better and react to them in timely, relevant and personalised ways.
There are a couple of things here:
a) Instead of aggregated page-view/sessions kind of metrics, mobile analytics today is all about people; and tracking behaviour for every individual’s journey and
b) It’s become a 360 degree view, where the touch points with a customer is not only restricted to mobile apps and websites, but also include social media, offline across point of sale devices and/or call centres as well as across multiple devices and channels for the same person
- Becoming Actionable in Real-time
There’s a lot of focus on making your analytics data actionable. Today’s always-on and personal mobile devices are forcing companies to be more timely and contextual with their actions. For example, reaching someone 20 minutes after they have added a product to their shopping cart but not purchased is much more likely to yield results as compared to reaching them the next day or the next week.”
Abinash Tripathy
Co-Founder & CEO, Helpshift
“Uninstall Tracking with full attribution is exciting as App developers can now really start to pin point reasons for churn which continues to be a huge problem for the ecosystem.”
Moshe Vaknin
Co-Founder and CEO, YouAppi
“The current trend in mobile app analytics that excites me is the growing focus on Post-Install Event Analytics. App developers are increasingly asking ‘What data do I need in order to generate the greatest Lifetime Customer Value?’ And the best way to find the most profitable users is by analysing the Post-Install Events of each app’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).”
After analysing and optimising thousands of mobile user acquisition campaigns based on KPI performance, YouAppi’s data scientists are able uncover the best KPIs for each app, and then monitor Post-Install Events to ensure that the right app users are found on time and within the specified budget. Thanks to Post-Install Event Analytics, the days of app developers just seeking installs are over.”
Rahul Varshneya
Co-founder, Arkenea, Inc
“The most important aspect of mobile app analytics that has even more relevance in today’s context is metrics related to user engagement. Product/market fit and growth are a result of a fantastic user engagement within the app. The focus is increasingly shifting from mere download numbers towards how many active users does a product have.”
Vincent Vitale
Co-Founder of Fount
“As more mobile apps continue to get made and the wearable market grows, the need for both real time app performance tracking and in depth analysis will grow among marketers, managers, and developers themselves. The focus will shift to big data and deeper analytics. The more data you have, the more you can analyse, and the better conclusions you can make. Watch out in a shift in regard to new data collection methods while simultaneously utilizing more methods that will lead to more insights for creating engaging and successful apps. ”
Kyle Wild
Co-founder and CEO at Keen IO
“The most exciting trend is the move beyond smartphone, to IoT systems. At Keen IO, we already process more IoT events than pure mobile events, from smart tractors to wind farms to the Mars Rovers. We expect this trend to continue.”
Dmitri Williams
CEO, Ninja Metrics
“I’m excited for two things in mobile app analytics. First, and no surprise from me, is the emergence of real social analytics. Truly understanding the social graph and leveraging it against real transactions is what we’ve always sought, and is now here. The first era of who has the most followers and posts was just a band aid, and could never be proven. Moving into proof and real transparency is crucial to trustworthy analytics.
Second, is the move toward real multitouch attribution. Last-click attribution is the state of the art, and it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. I see the same machine learning tools working at scale moving to this space as well. We’ll start to see what ads really matter, when and how much.”
[This post by Peter Banerjea first appeared on deepinsights.io and has been reproduced with permission.]
