With every app that you release you should include an analytics framework. It’s important for you to know how many people downloaded your app, how many are actually using it, how often they are using it and what they are using in it. You spend all this time developing killer features but do your users care? One of the most important strategies around apps is to constantly improve your product. Your app may not be a #1 app the first time you release it, but if you constantly improve the usability based on what users are doing in your app then it’ll start climb the charts and get better word of mouth. Focus on enhancements to the areas of your app that users like the most.
When you’re testing your app yourself and with your family and friends you get a little feedback, but until you have a user base of at least a thousand users it’s tough to know for sure, you don’t have enough data to conclude how most people will use your app. By tagging the right events in your app you can get a good sense of the funnel users are taking and optimize the users experience based on that data.
Analytics Tools
There are three major companies for App Analytics. The first is Omniture. It’s been around for a very long time and has been a best in class suite for the biggest websites. If you are working on an app for a top brand and their website is currently being tracked using Omniture, this is probably the best way to go since the investment has already been made. Omniture is a very expensive suite and typically only used by big business.Another popular way to track analytics in apps is using Google Mobile App Analytics. For many users they already have for web and mobile web analytics, it makes total sense to keep using the same tool they’re used to for in-app usage analytics. The best thing about it is it’s FREE!
The tool that I use in all of my personal apps and the one we’re going to focus on is Flurry Analytics. Flurry is a complete tool for your mobile app analytics. With Flurry, you can filter via segments (age, first session, usage, country, etc), app versions and dates. Because Flurry offers lots of other services (like ads), this tool is free yet provides a lot of analytics.
Here’s the kind of info you can find or use in the dashboards:
– Usage: active users, sessions, session lengths, frequency, retention, etc.
– Audience: interest of users(your other apps + category), personas (type of your users – defined by Flurry), demographic
– Events: define events, see user paths, create funnels
– Technical: devices, carriers, firmware versions, errors
Setting up Flurry Analytics
Follow the steps below to get started with Flurry:1. Visit www.flurry.com and sign up, don’t worry it’s FREE!
2. Click the “Applications Tab” then “Create a New Application” and Select the Platform your app is on (iPhone or iPad).
3. Enter the Name and Category your application will be submitted to within the App Store.
4. Make sure you copy the unique application key (API KEY), you’re going to need it soon.
5. Download the Flurry SDK.
6. Copy the Flurry Library (Flurry.h and libFlurry.a) files into your project.
7. Add the following code into your App Delegate.
#import "Flurry.h"
- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application
{
[Flurry startSession:@"YOUR_API_KEY"];
//your code
}
8. Start tagging the events within your application
[FlurryAnalytics logEvent:@"Start_Button_Pressed"];
You can track up to 300 Events for each application so track everything you can. Add the event tag above to every method you have in your project. You should be tracking every button pressed by the user, every page view, every completed stage, every ad clicked and every step to in-app purchases. Once you have that done, run your app a couple times and look within Flurry Reports in an hour or so to see if you’re capturing data. Once you launch your next app check back with Flurry to see how many active users are using your app, what kind of device they have, what iOS version and what country they are from. With all of this data plus all of the events you’ve tagged you will get a holistic view into how users are using your app, then you can optimize and continue to improve in your next update.
