10 Mistakes Developers Make When Instrumenting Mobile Analytics
How do you develop an app that is guaranteed to succeed? Easy – follow the data. By the end of 2020, the world would have accumulated over 50 trillion gigabytes of data, which is more than enough for you to analyze in order to create amazing apps.
That explains why mobile developers are investing heavily in mobile analytics. However, the results haven’t been great so far, but it’s not the data’s fault; people just aren’t instrumenting mobile analytics the right way.
If you want to succeed where others have failed, here are then things to watch out for:
- Not having a clear definition of success
Before you instrument mobile analytics, you need to know why you are doing it. How do you measure success as a developer? Is it by revenue, downloads, retention rate, or cult following?
Once you have this answer, you will know which metrics to track and which ones to ignore. It also helps to benchmark your expectations against other apps in your genre, as opposed to trying to follow the industry average.
- Chasing too many metrics
There are literally hundreds of metrics you can track with analytics. And if you are like the average developer, it means you might be using 3-5 mobile analytics tools. So, that’s hundreds of metrics multiplied by the number of tools.
How can you possibly track all of that and still retain qualitative data, and not go insane? You can’t!
Data is useful, but too much of it will leave you running in circles.
Once you ascertain your goals, focus on the handful of metrics that will actually help you measure your success. You will find that you only need to be tracking between 20 and 200 events, depending on the complexity of your app.
- Going too fast with your instrumentation
If you are tempted to instrument everything at once, please don’t. Sure, deadlines are looming, and the competition is growing, but you can’t rush success, and you certainly shouldn’t rush your instrumentation process.
You must take your time to apply and test your instrumentation in stages. That way, you can quickly identify what’s wrong. If you lump all of the data together at once and something isn’t working out, it will be a lot harder to identify the source.
- Not keeping your files organized
As you build your analytics, take the time to arrange them in documents. This makes it easier for other members of your team to understand and use the insights. Make the event names clear for anyone else accessing the dashboard.
Remember, not everyone on your team may be as technically gifted. But even if they are, labeling documents with the names of your childhood pets won’t help.
- Having confusing definitions of daily active users (DAU)
A daily active user should simply be a daily active user, but some developers have other ideas. And so, we find people that track a DAU as someone who completes a combination of activities e.g., the person logs in, plays the game, interacts with friends, and buys a new product.
The result will be misleading and possibly discouraging. When analyzing metrics, it is best to keep it simple to begin with and then add parameters as you get more downloads.
- Not knowing how to identify users
In order to know how many people are using your app, you need to be able to identify them accurately. This is often a lot harder than it sounds.
Let’s say you have a user that has your app on multiple devices, which is often the case. Do you count each device as a separate user? How about when a device is being used by different people – does that still count as one user?
It is essential to think about these things when assigning User IDs. We recommend using email addresses. Sure, even this isn’t perfect as some people might want to use different emails on different devices, but that is a negligible number.
- Instrumenting events in a loop
You will rarely have a reason to instrument events in a loop. Doing so while you are in the development phase is discouraged as it will yield a large quantity of mostly useless information.
- Monitoring every screen touch
Do you ever find yourself jumping for no reason when you are playing Subway Surfers or moving from side to side even when there is no obstacle? Or how about when you mistakenly touch something, or you’re trying to get something off your screen?
Trying to track data like that could give you an abundance of fake data.
Sure, you can argue that there is a just cause to monitor every single screen touch, but it is best to limit it to a particular screen area and focus instead on actual events.
- Putting your web and mobile data on one dashboard
People don’t use web apps and mobile apps the same way, so combining their data will be counterintuitive. The aim of the dashboard is it be able to look at the analytics quickly and then make changes as needed.
If you have both on one dashboard, you will first have to identify which one is underperforming or has an error, before you react. You might also mistakenly apply a one-size-fits-all “correction” and end up ruining the user experience for both.
- Choosing the wrong analytics tool
Finally, you really can’t go very far when you are using the wrong mobile app analytics tool. The reason some developers use as many as 15 SDKs is that they aren’t getting satisfactory results from each one.
Another common problem with analytics tools is that some are unnecessarily complicated, making it difficult to access the data. If you can’t understand the instrumentation process or can’t access the data once the app is live, you would have wasted precious time and resources.
Instrumenting mobile analytics should be simple
Using mobile analytics should be a straightforward process. While instrumenting analytics might be time-consuming, and justifiably so, accessing and acting on the data should be as easy as pie.
After all, what good is data you can’t use? If you are finding it difficult to use your current analytics tool, you should make a change before it’s too late.