While understanding all of the data surrounding your mobile site or app will help your business optimize and grow, there are some metrics that may be more critical in helping you understand consumer behavior.
- Compatibility
In Nigeria alone, over 82% of users who access the internet do so on mobile devices. That’s a lot of people, using phones from different manufacturers, different operating systems, and even different browsers. It, therefore, makes sense to prioritize a mobile-friendly website.
A webpage that displays as intended on one device or browser may come out distorted on others. From the chart below, mobile web traffic in Nigeria is still divided across different browsers. You have to make sure your website appears perfect on all of them if you don’t want to lose a share of your users or customers.
Device and operating system (OS) compatibility is also a major factor to consider when studying mobile analytics. With Android and iOS being the two largest mobile operating systems in Nigeria, it makes sense to have two versions of your app to account for both sets of users. Platforms like Google Analytics will also show you what OS your site users are originating from, and you can do a lot with this information. For one, it can help you diagnose if users in a particular operating system are having challenges using your app.
- Site visits and app installs
After ironing out any compatibility challenges facing your mobile site or app, the next metric to pay attention to is the number of people who visit your site or download your app. Visits and installs usually help you gauge the popularity of your website or app.
Most analytics tools also show you where the visits to your mobile site or installs of your app came from, and this is crucial in helping figure out a lot about your target audience. For example, if you know that a lot of people are discovering your brand via organic search engine results, then you may want to double down on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, or even start a pay-per-click (PPC)) the campaign, to capitalize on that native interest.
- Paths and user behaviour
How people interact with your site (when they click on a link) or your mobile app (when they install and launch it) will give you some of the most insightful information about your target audience. The most popular pages, for example, will provide you with a good indication of the top content that you may want to create more of.
Analyzing user paths is also essential for diagnosing any issues that may be present in your mobile site or app. One way to figure this out is checking which exit points – pages where users leave your website or app. In Google Analytics, you can find this in Behavior > Exit Pages. This data is crucial for discovering user experience issues such as broken links, distorted content, app crashes, and many more.
- User retention
Throughout the lifecycle of your website or app, there will be users who only visit once or download the app and never launch/use it. This is why measuring retention metrics such as new/returning users (for a mobile site) and daily active users (for an app) will get much more important insights than site visits, and app installs as time progresses.
Furthermore, while acquiring new users every month is great, you also want to make sure that your returning user base is growing. This is even more important if you have a news site, a blog, a forum, etc. – these are industries where you want people to visit your website or use your app daily.
- App permissions
The launch of the Android 11 changed the way mobile developers built apps and how users interacted with them. The update integrated app permissions into the OS, allowing users to dictate what segments and data of their device apps can or cannot access. iOS devices have a similar feature.
In this age of privacy, app permissions are a crucial factor in gauging the trustworthiness of your app among users. If people are comfortable with your brand and app, they are more likely to grant permissions such as push notifications, location access, and others that are relevant to your app.
- Crash reports
The diversity of operating systems, devices, and even app versions make crash analytics an essential metric to watch out for. Integrated tools like Google’s Firebase or Apple’s Xcode will give you detailed insights into what user actions (or lack thereof) caused a crash of your app, helping you figure out bugs and other technical anomalies harming the user experience.
- Custom events
As websites and apps vary, so do users and how they interact with these products. The good thing is that you can set up custom event tracking to help you measure metrics that may not be captured organically by the analytics platform you are using.
If you run a subscription-based service with both paid and free users, for example, you may want to distinguish between how the two sets of users interact with your app. Data like this can help you immensely in your marketing efforts aimed at growing revenue.
One challenge you’ll need to overcome is the technical know-how required to implement these custom metrics tracking, especially on mobile apps. In the end, whichever custom data you choose to track will depend on your brand and industry; a stock trading app, for example, would want to track the volume of trades and how much users are spending.
What the future holds for mobile analytics
The economy of Nigeria is such that it allows for mobile devices to dominate over desktop and tablet computers, as smartphones are a lot more affordable.
This is not a trend that is going to change anytime soon. As such, a mobile-first marketing strategy is not only a must; mobile analytics needs to be given a front-row seat.
Looking ahead, personalization based on analytics data will draw even more focus among marketers. As competition grows, consumers demand even better products/services that are ideal for them.
Personalization ensures that people get the ideal user experience right from the moment they launch your app or visit your site. Mobile analytics is crucial to getting here, and in the near future, we will be more informed about user behavior like never before. The continued integration of big data systems, regression analysis, and machine learning will unravel a new world for mobile analytics and help make predictions to enhance user experience, increase conversion & retention, and grow businesses.
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