Every app was created for a reason and with a specific goal in mind. Whether it was for business growth or an increase in net revenue, companies don’t spend thousands of dollars just to have an app out there on the market. They have to perform a continuous evaluation and analysis of its performance to ensure that the app is not only meeting their goals, but also delivering values to users. Today, we will see several awesome app analytics benefits – and why understanding your data is essential for positioning your app on the market and getting your return on investment.
What is App Analytics?
Before we dive into the biggest app analytics benefits for businesses, it is important to clear out what exactly app analytics is. It is much more than simply collecting data – it provides valuable insights into consumer behavior which can be applied across all your platforms and applications. And most importantly, it can help you understand your customers a little bit better.
App analytics provide data for different engagement and usage metrics such as:
- Your most popular app features;
- Daily, weekly, and monthly app users;
- Number of sessions;
- Number of active devices;
- Retention rate;
- Conversion rate (typically to paid plans);
- Evolution of your products KPIs (growing or decreasing?)
These metrics, among with many others, are extremely valuable for evaluating the impact of your app updates and changes. For example, if you make improvements on the onboarding experience for your active users, observing the behaviour of these metrics can help you determine whether the update was successful, or it didn’t meet your expectations.
In other cases, such as in progressive web apps which can be indexed by search engines, you can also observe your metrics to find out whether your SEO efforts are working out, and bringing the desired traffic.
Even for native mobile apps, keeping track of your metrics over a long period of time can help you understand the impact of your ASO Keyword research and overall ASO efforts.
Nowadays, the app analytics benefits are so valuable, important and powerful that businesses that actually pay attention to them are generating a significant competitive advantage in front of their competitors.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right into them:
Benefit 1: Improve Return on Investment
The first, and probably the most important on our list of app analytics benefits is ROI. Today’s hypercompetitive app market is merciless; and considering the fact that customers are more picky than ever when it comes to their digital experience, the key to remaining competitive is to have a good acquisition strategy with well calculated monetary goals that make sense for your business.
As we mentioned in the beginning, companies spend thousands of dollars on building an app – depending on its complexity and how advanced the features are, it can cost up to $500,000! Which doesn’t include the cost for maintenance, software updates, separate, development for different systems, and other things to keep in mind.
On top of that, we need to add the costs on Marketing to get your app visible in front of the right audience. Taking into account all this spending, it is absolutely essential for getting a good grip of your return on investment. One of the app analytics benefits is that it helps you measure how different channels perform and compare in different acquisition stages and strategies.
By looking at your analytics, you can determine what channels work the best for your business in terms of ROI, and you can more accurately adjust your marketing budget for better results.
Benefit 2: Understand your customers
Next on our list of app analytics benefits is getting to know your customers better so you can adapt your app experience to match their expectations.
By looking at metrics such as app downloads, active users of your app, average visit time, screen views per visit, as well as app retention and churn, you can get a good idea of what is their behavior on your app, and whether they are actively engaging with it.
In other words, how interested and invested are your users with your app? Are they using it frequently, or every once in a while? If they don’t use it enough, is it because they are not enjoying the experience, or because they simply don’t need an app like that?
For example, you can calculate the stickiness ratio of your app (Daily active users / monthly active users) to determine how often a user opens it on a monthly basis. You can leverage push notifications and frequent app updates to improve this ratio.
Observing the evolution of these metrics is essential for getting to know your customers, and applying key insights across all your platforms and applications. For example, if you see that the average number of sessions and time spent on the app increases after an update, it is a good indicator that it has improved the experience for your users.
3. Personalization
Next on our list of app analytics benefits is personalization. Collecting and analyzing valuable data can help you create individually targeted user experience that adapts to each customer.
A great example for this is Zalando’s native mobile app. Zalando is a German-based ecommerce company that sells clothing from different brands, and they are doing an excellent job personalizing the experience for each user.
The app remembers the pieces of clothing that you visited or liked in your previous sessions, and creates personalized sections so you can see them the moment you open your app again. It also enriches the collection with similar pieces of clothing that you might also like, according to Zalando’s algorithms.
You can also use your analytics data to send targeted push messages delivered only to specific audiences – studies have shown that it increases open rates by 4x, and boosts the average open rate from 1.5% (with generic messages ) to 5.9% (with specific, more personalized ones).
Undoubtedly, one of the most important app analytics benefits is that you can get to know your users, including those who have left the marketing funnel at some point so you can later convert them into a higher lifecycle stage. By analyzing in-app user behavior and profile data, you can obtain valuable insights that will help you design an effective marketing strategy for winning your users back.
A highly personalized strategy typically includes targeted messages and in-app experiences that resonate with the audience at the exact stage of their customer journey.
4. Measure your KPIs efficiently
Next on our list of app analytics benefits is the ability to accurately measure your goals and KPIs (key performance indicators). App analytics provide you with the necessary data and insights to determine whether you are actually meeting the objectives that you initially set for your app.
For example, if your goal was to get 10% more app downloads every month compared to the previous one, app analytics can give you the necessary data to track this app download evolution with precision. And, in the case that you are not achieving your goal, you can again use app analytics to get insights on what is preventing you from reaching the next milestone.
What is the reason why you are not getting the desired downloads? Is it because you are not investing enough in Marketing and other promotional activities? Or maybe your Marketing strategy isn’t effective? It could also be an update that you did and your audience didn’t like, so they stopped recommending you to their friends and family. App analytics is a great way to measure your goals and KPIs, and determine whether you are moving in the right direction with your application.
5. Get accurate data
Our list of app analytics benefits continues with the tools it gives you to collect accurate data. Many applications lose traction and experience a user drop-off because they are not listening to their customers and the valuable feedback they give companies after using their app.
App analytics provides exact patterns and feedback gained from customers. It can show you how they are using your app, and whether it provides value for them. If you pay close attention to this data and how it evolves over time, you can use it to your advantage and enhance app experience in terms of usability so that users find more value in it.
According to different studies, 1 in 4 users will abandon an app after only a single use because they didn’t enjoy the experience, didn’t find the app content valuable, or simply didn’t find it worthy for the amount of space it occupies on their phone. For this reason, getting accurate data and using it efficiently to improve your app are essential for increasing user retention over time.
After all, your job doesn’t end with simply creating an app – it requires continuous improvement and updates if you really want to provide value and develop a competitive advantage in front of competitors.
6. Optimize your Marketing strategy
Undoubtedly, one of the most important aspects of any application, whether we are talking about native mobile apps or progressive web apps, is how you are making it visible in front of your target audience. In other words, how are you promoting it? Are you using the right channels, and how effectively?
For this reason, next on our list of app analytics benefits is optimization – or how you can use analytics to improve and optimize your Marketing strategy.
Using app analytics, you can discover the channels that brought you the highest results – for example, which channel registered the most app downloads, or had the highest user retention after the first month. You can use this information to optimize your existing channels, and focus the budget on those that deliver the best results for your business and your app.
App analytics also helps you track conversion and sales data for ongoing campaigns so you can see what was your return on investment for these particular campaigns, and determine whether you should re-activate them again – or simply go with something else.
In other words, it can help you decide whether you are spending your money, time and efforts on the right acquisition channels. And the best part is – we are talking about actual data registered from real users, not a subjective opinion that can be interpreted one way or another. Real numbers are the best way to make the best decisions for your business.
Wrapping it up
After all these points, the app analytics benefits are more than clear – without collecting, analyzing and understanding your data, you wouldn’t be able to make continuous, well-measured improvements that will impact both your users and businesses in the best possible way. Data and analytics help you make better decisions that move you in the right direction and put you in front of your competitors.
For this reason, Beezer’s progressive web app builder is packed with powerful analytics tools that help you reap off all the app analytics benefits available for your app and your business. Don’t have an app yet? You can start today for free!
