The modern world is increasingly mobile-first, and by 2022, predictions estimate that 60% of India’s population will have smartphones. By 2034, the country is expected to leapfrog the U.S. to sit behind China, as the second-largest e-commerce market in the world. It’s little wonder that brands across the country are spending increasing time and resources into building their own apps. But once a mobile app is launched, it’s imperative that marketers start to understand app analytics.
Analytics gives you the power to analyze data, looking for patterns that drive insights on user behavior and app trends. From drilling down into how users are interacting with ads or combing through in-app behavior, analytics is the foundation for making smarter decisions on how to improve an app or marketing campaigns.
With these data points, marketers can optimize the user experience to improve conversion rates and gain all kinds of actionable information based on a better understanding of the app — and users’ behavior within it. There are three key ways to ensure your analytics help you reach your target audience:
- Cohort analysis
After a user first installs your app, the clock starts ticking on their ‘engagement lifespan’. This lifespan is important to analyze because it gives key insights that can be used to improve your app or to look backward at campaign performance. However, if you’re running lots of different campaigns, or making lots of changes to your app, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. Cohort analysis allows you to bunch users so you can see all the users that installed at the same time, lined up so the data can be compared – apples to apples. Removing issues around timelines allows you to see which improvement (and when) made an impact, a powerful tool for any app publisher.
- Event tracking
In the world of mobile marketing, event tracking is the backbone of your app analytics setup. Marketers can tailor their events to the specific conversion goals of their app. In real-time, an attribution provider aggregates this data and crunches KPIs for every defined event, providing valuable insights into user behavior that marketers need.
This is a powerful tool for marketers in any vertical. For gaming apps, brands can track things like level-ups, lives lost, coins earned, or any other gaming-specific event. If the analytics show that lots of users are uninstalling after reaching level 3, maybe that level needs to be modified to provide a more fun experience for the users. Similarly, a food delivery app might track signups and orders, making sure to offer a perfectly-timed discount code to ensure users keep coming back.
Another way event tracking can empower brands is by giving an insight into places that might need troubleshooting, for instance, a registration page that users find too complex or a check-out process that is too lengthy.
- Segmentation
Segmentation allows marketers to deliver the right message to the right customer, at the right time. Since every customer is different, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. By segmenting users into different audiences, marketers can then target them with slightly different messages or promotions, resulting in a higher chance of a conversion. There are two main philosophies surrounding user segmentation: attribute-based segmentation or behavior-based segmentation. Yoann Pavy, Head of Digital Marketing for peer-to-peer shopping app Depop, is an advocate of segmenting users into tribes based on interests or buying behaviors, a behavioral approach. An attribute approach might use identifiers specific to mobile marketing, such as device, browser, or OS. Both are powerful tools to ensure your message is getting to the right audience.
So why is it important to have an attribution provider on board?
The key benefit is that implementing a mobile app attribution SDK gives an app publisher the ability to see this data in real-time. The attribution partner enables them to learn where users are coming from, whether that’s from a paid campaign or if they organically installed the app. Once the user is in the app, marketers can set up custom tracking events so they can follow users through different phases of the user life cycle, giving them insights into how valuable users from a certain campaign were.
Tracking user behavior in this way allows mobile marketers to focus on the best-performing campaigns, and play to their strengths. This is vital because on average 80% of users don’t return after the first day of install. With this rich array of data, marketers can experiment, iterate and improve their marketing performance over time – backing it up with a data-driven approach. With more data about ad performance, they can use smart retargeting or build targeted user acquisition campaigns that gain the kind of user brands want.
In the future, I’m expecting to see more, if not all, brands put their app at the forefront of their relationship with customers. It makes sense: as the most personal and omnipresent channel, mobile gives marketers the easiest way to reach and understand consumers. We’re already seeing this approach take root, especially with mobile-first companies like e-grocery leader FreshToHome or financial product marketplace BankBazaar. As more and more verticals are disrupted by mobile-only players, apps will go from being a “nice to have” to the primary way to interact with customers. And as this happens, making sure your app marketing is as targeted and data-driven as possible will be a key point of differentiation for every enterprise in this highly competitive space.
Authored by Shubham Jha, Sales Manager India at Adjust.
