5 Amazing Mobile Analytics Services
Promoting and tracking your app’s stats through the various app stores can leave you feeling like you’ve just gotten off a roller-coaster. You may experience moments where your app reaches over 100 downloads on a certain day only to plummet out of the top paid apps the next. Could it be due to the holiday season, or maybe a blog mention sparked user curiosity? If you’re in it for the long haul, you’re going to need to find out what’s really going on behind the scenes. In other words, gaining insight and understanding mobile app trends both for app store sales and app store rankings is essential.
Just like through the web, email and social marketing, it’s unwise to make a quick judgment of what’s really happening with your mobile application without real time data to understand how consumers are using your mobile applications, as well as how applications are performing across different handsets.
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR
A recent study by Webtrends sees much of the focus in analytics over the next year being devoted to integration and segmentation, along with key insights in the social and mobile industries. Mobile applications will continue to explode in 2010 and 2011 as we’ve seen with the ramp-up towards mid-2009. Next year Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T expires and Google’s Android will accelerate exponentially as more droid phones will be brought into the market, such as the Nexus One. Developers will surge at the openness of the platform. This will pave the way to a whole new set of application analytics that will be generate significant buzz within the web analytics industry.
More recently, Google expanded their mobile reporting features in Google Analytics. To help developers, this launch includes features that make it easy to see how people are using specific parts of their iPhone and Android applications. The same Google Analytics reports that provide insights into website traffic and engagement are now available for mobile apps.
OUR TOP 5 MOBILE ANALYTICS SERVICES PICKS
Serious Indi developers and dev houses know that, in a gold rush you’re going to need the right tools to hit payday, otherwise you’ll be digging up fool’s gold. We’ve rounded up our top 5 best tools and services you should familiarize yourself with if you’re going to maintain the competitive edge. Most apps languish in obscurity, but popular apps tend to become super-popular. What side of the fence do you want to be on? Here are 5 mobile app analytics services you should familiarize yourself with to make your decision a little easier.
Heartbeat is everything that you wanted iTunesConnect to be, plus much more. Visualize your sales, get live usage stats, see your sales trends, view balances, keep track of payments and collect crash reports. Simply put: Heartbeat is the only tool you need to manage your entire AppStore business.
Cost: 30 day trial “No CC required at signup”
Premium packages range from $10/month – $80/month
Compatible with: iTunes Connect
Flurry Analytics provides accurate, real time data to developers about how consumers use their mobile applications, as well as how applications are performing across different handsets.
Cost: Free
Compatible with: iPhone, Android, Blackberry and JavaME
Pros:
Great looking dashboard
Quick and simple to integrate into an app
Complete graphs of user paths
Extremely fast data reporting (About 1 hour after initial install)
The Google Analytics Tracking for Mobile Apps module makes it easy for you to implement Google Analytics in your mobile app. The SDK can be downloaded and used on iPhone, iPod Touch and Android application platforms. Mobile app developers can tell Google Analytics what actions taken by users would trigger the analytics tracking. Google uses those triggers to determine views, session lengths, and bounce rates.
Meredith Papp, Product Marketing Manager for the mobile ads team, talks with Redfin about their experiences using new Google Analytics for mobile features.
Pinch Media has been mentioned by the web’s top guns such as GigaOm, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and others. Pinch Analytics goes beyond simple event counters to thoroughly track any action within your application, providing reports on unique users and total time spent. Their action framework handles thousands of unique actions – use as many as you like.
Compatible with: iPhone / iPod Touch
Cost: Basic version is Free.
Pros:
Data can be exported to CSV files
Exclusion of iPhone simulator from stats
Quick and simple to integrate into an app
appFigures imports reads the text-file reports that Apple provides developers through iTunes Connet and transforms them into structured data. Reports can be uploaded manually, by syncing with iTunes Connect, or automatically on a daily schedule using Auto Import. Receive Sales Reports by Email, app Rank Trending in Major App Stores. Overall a very honorable choice for your app analytic needs.
Compatible with: iTunes Connect
Cost: Basic version is Free.
Premium packages range from $4.99/month – $139/month
Pros:
Read reviews from all 77 App Stores in your language
Updated hourly
OVERALL TOP CHOICE – Google Analytics
It may require a little tweaking to set up the tracking rules according to your needs, (then again, that’s why we’re here) but the effort is well worth it. Tracking the complete flow of data, from traffic sources to your landing page, keywords content, conversion/download rates and following through with Google Analytics for mobile gives an in depth level of understanding needed to maintain the competitive edge.
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