Mobile analytics is vital to understanding how your app is performing. Failure to obtain quality analytics will result in not being able to make improvements. Your app might be up against a lot of competition and one of the ways to win out is to have qualitative mobile analytics in front of you. Traditional analytics tools simply aren’t enough today.
The Downfall of Traditional Analytics (Quantitative Analytics)
The analytics will tell you all about the WHAT of your app. You will see charts and numbers showing the engagement rates. You will also see the sales funnel and find out where you might be losing people within your app.
All of the traditional analytics will tell you what you need to know to gain basic insight as to how your app is functioning. It will tell you what is wrong so that you can determine that something needs to be fixed.
The problem is that traditional analytics only skin the surface as to what is going on. It still requires you to do a lot of work to figure out what is wrong, why people aren’t interacting with the app the way that you have designed. This can be a time-consuming process.
While you’re in the process of testing and repairing your app, consumers are out there finding a better app to work with. By the time you’re done, they’ve moved on – and this means that you can’t rely on traditional analytics as the only source for tracking your app’s performance.
What Does Qualitative Analytics Offer?
Qualitative mobile analytics will show you everything that traditional analytics will show you and much more. In-app user behavior analytics will help you learn more about the user engagement. If users aren’t engaging with your app, it might have to do with your app’s layout or the browsing habits of your target audience.
Traditional analytics tell you WHAT happened in your app. Qualitative mobile analytics will tell you WHY that happened.
By using mobile app heatmaps you’ll see where users are tapping on each screen of your app. This will allow you to learn more about how users browse the app – and this kind of information will make it easier for you to improve conversion. If you see that everyone is tapping on one particular area and that’s when you are losing them, you know where to make the fix. If you were using traditional analytics, you would know that you are losing users, but wouldn’t be able to see exactly where and why.
Now imagine that your app crashed and you have no idea what the user did just before the crash. Traditional analytics tools will report you about the crash and give some details, but you need to spend hours to figure out what happened and how to reproduce the crash. This is the moment when deep qualitative analytics tools can help you. It offers you crash replays that will show you all the steps performed in the crashed session. You’ll see exactly what the user did that the app crashed.
Crashes will often cause users to leave your app – and when you can replay them to see the problem for yourself, it will allow you to fix the issue and build a better app for your users.
Improving Your App
In the end, your goal is to improve your app so that it does exactly what you promised it would do. There are plenty of businesses that release apps on a regular basis. If you want your apps to be used effectively, then you need to use analytics that will help you make improvements constantly.
Traditional analytics tools were fine when that was what was available. Qualitative analytics solutions have become available and they can make it easier to understand user behavior and engagement which will help you improve your apps.
