What is Mobile Analytics Tools? Factors, Classes, Category, Tools, Behavior Tool

  • Post last modified:19 May 2023
  • Reading time:16 mins read
  • Post category:Business Analytics
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What is Mobile Analytics Tools?

Mobile analytics tools are software platforms that help businesses and app developers collect, analyze, and interpret data from mobile devices in order to optimize app performance, user engagement, and business outcomes. These tools are designed to track and measure various aspects of mobile app usage, including app downloads, user behavior, retention, in-app purchases, and other key performance indicators.

“Advances in analytic technologies and business intelligence are allowing CIOs to go big, go fast, go deep, go cheap and go mobile with business data.” – www.cio.com

The fundamental task of the mobile analytics tool is similar to other digital analytical tools like Web analytics. They capture data, collect it, and help to generate reports that can be used meaningfully after processing.

The selection of an analytic tool is not an easy process because these tools are new and undergo rapid enhancements as compared to traditional web analytics tools. Companies frequently upgrade their existing analytical tools as well as launch new tools with new features. Mobile analytical tools have some technical limitations; all mobile analytical tools and not perform all the services, so must find out which tool can be beneficial for you.


Features of Mobile Analytics Tools

Mobile analytics tools typically offer a variety of features and capabilities, including:

  1. Data collection: Mobile analytics tools use software development kits (SDKs) and APIs to collect data on app usage, user behavior, and other key metrics.

  2. Data visualization: Mobile analytics tools provide visualizations and dashboards to help users quickly understand and interpret the data.

  3. Cohort analysis: This allows businesses to track the behavior of specific groups of users over time, such as users who installed the app in a particular month.

  4. Funnel analysis: This enables businesses to track user behavior through a series of steps, such as app installs, registration, and in-app purchases.

  5. A/B testing: This allows businesses to compare different versions of their app to see which performs better in terms of user engagement and retention.

  6. User segmentation: This enables businesses to group users based on common characteristics, such as location, device type, or user behavior.

  7. Customizable alerts: This enables businesses to set up alerts for specific events or metrics, such as a sudden drop in user engagement.

Factors to Consider when Choosing an Mobile Analytics Tool

Following are some points to be considered while selecting mobile analytics tools:

What is your analytical goal?

No single mobile analytics tool can fulfil all your needs; therefore, it is essential to set your analytical goal so that you can select the right tools. You can take the help of experts to make your goal in terms of the capabilities of the tools.

Analysis techniques

Various analysis techniques exist to analyse the information of mobile users’ behaviour. For example, through “packet sniffing”, an intruder can obtain important personal information of users from data packets; “image-based tagging” uses a query string to guess the activities of the user and “data collection scripts” analyses users’ requests.

Way of presentation

Information flows between a mobile device and the server according to the client-server architecture. Mobile analytics captures data as it passes through the mobile network. The data capture is done through a server that is different from the actual server. This server is placed between mobile devices and its actual server. This type of tracking generates a large amount of data in the form of log files. The reading of these log files is again a daunting task.

Now, the question is, “how is the information presented to you?” You must choose an analytical tool that best suits your requirements.


Two Classes of Mobile Analytics Tools

There are two classes of mobile analytics tools:

Internal mobile analytics tools

These refer to software that is provided by the SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors. It can be software installed and maintained by the IT department of any data center. Some examples of internal mobile analytics tools are Localytics and WebTrends.

External mobile analytics tools

These are services provided by third-party data vendors, which are responsible for collecting, manipulating, analysing, and generating reports for the customers from their proprietary systems. Some example of external mobile analytics tools are comScore and Groundtruth.


Mobile Analytics Tools

According to Aconitum Mobile (a software development company in the US), the top four mobile analytics tools (or packages) are as follows:

Localytics

This is a big marketing and analytics platform for mobile and web apps. Its developer is Localytics, in Boston. It supports cross-platform and Web-based applications. For more details, you can check out their website at www.localytics.com. Localytics supports push messaging, business analytics, and acquisition campaigns management. Localytics has a list of big customers like Microsoft, New York Times, ESPN, Soundcloud, and eBay.

Appsee

Appsee was founded by Zahi Boussiba and Yoni Douek, in 2012 based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It provides analytical services with features like conversion funnel analysis, heatmaps, and much more. For more details, you can check out their website at http://www.appsee.com.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great free service provided by Google. It is a cross-platform, Web-based application. It offers analytics services to mobile app and mobile developers. You can check out the tool at www.google.com/analytics.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a “business analytics service”. It is also a cross-platform and Web-based application. It can continually follow the user and mobile Web interactions and provide attractive tool offers to the user. For more information, you can visit the website at www.mixpanel.com.


Categories of Mobile Analytics Tools

Mobile analytics tools can be categorised as follows:

  • Location-based tracking tools
  • Real-time analytics tools
  • User behaviour tracking tools

Location-Based Tracking Tools

A location-based tracking tool stores information about the location of mobile devices (or the location of user). These tools are software applications for mobile devices, and they continuously monitor the location of the devices and manipulate information thus obtained in various ways.

For example, it can display the location of friends (persons in the contact list of your mobile phone), ATMs, cafés, hotels, and nearby police stations. The following are some location-based tracking tools:

  • Geoloqi: This tool is a platform for location-based services that was launched in 2010 by the founder Amber Case in the United States. This tool supports creation of location-based notes and time-limited private location sharing.

  • Placed: Placed provides a “ratings service” by measuring various types of information such as place visited and duration of visit. This is an efficient tool to explain offline consumer behaviour.

Real-Time Analytics Tools

“The 6.8 billion subscribers are approaching the 7.1 billion world population” (ITU). Figure 10.3 shows the growth of mobile phone users (in billions) with respect to years:

With the increase in the popularity of mobile phones and mobile Web, business organisations want to know more about the behaviour of the user. Sometimes, it becomes necessary for these organisations to analyse user behaviour in real-time so that they can be stay on the top position in this competitive scenario. Real-time analytics tools refer to software tools that analyse and report data in real-time.

The following are some real-time analytics tools that can analyse data in real-time:

  • Geckoboard: Geckoboard is a real-time dashboard that can collect, display, report, and share data that is impotent for you and your business in real-time. According to Damian Kimmelman, founder and CEO at Duedil, “Geckoboard simplifies the decision-making process. It’s hard to dispute something that’s right in front of you.”

  • Mixpanel: Mixpanel is a Web-based, cross-platform service. It is a business analytics service that tracks user interactions with mobile Web applications. It offers services to users on the basis of user behaviour. Mixpanel does all its activities in real-time. Suhail Doshi and Tim Trefren founded Mixpanel in 2009 in San Francisco, California.

User Behaviour Tracking Tools

User-behaviour tracking tool is a software tool that tracks user behaviour with any particular mobile application.

These behaviour reports can help organisations to improve their applications and services. You can get a lot of information about your users, such as:

  • Screens viewed in a session
  • Number of screens viewed in a session
  • Technical errors faced by the user
  • The frequency of the user using any particular app
  • Session’s life
  • Time taken in the loading of any app elements
  • Any specific action performed with the content, such as clicking of ads.

These reports provide an excellent way for an organisation to know how users use specific applications on their mobile phones. By customising the tracking settings, organisation can observe the behaviour of the user on any particular page (such as the product listing page), and use the information to fulfil their business objectives.


Behaviour Tracking Tools

The following are some popular behaviour-tracking tools:

TestFlight

Let’s suppose that a company has many testers, and they are spread over different countries (or locations). The company has a new app that it wants to test. How is it going to test the app? The solution is TestFlight. TestFlight is a free software platform.

Using TestFlight, a team of developers can use beta and internal iOS applications to manage the testing and feedback using the dashboard of TestFlight. The TestFlight SDK has a wide range of useful APIs to test application from various dimensions.

Mobile App Tracking

This tool tracks and analyses mobile app installations. It can report user engagement and Lifetime Value (LTV) beyond the installations. It is efficient in scaling mobile advertising campaigns. It can collect customer’s behaviour related to an ad just through tapping.

Article Source
  • Blokdijk, Gerard (2015). Mobile Analytics – Simple Steps to Win, Insights and Opportunities for Maxing Out Success. Complete Publishing.

  • Harriott, J. S., & Isson, J.P. (2018). Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from your data. Gildan Media.

  • Han, Sang Pil and Park, Sungho and Oh, Wonseok, Mobile App Analytics: A Multiple Discrete-Continuous Choice Framework (October 20, 2015). Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2676823


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