How Mobile Analytics Work — the Ultimate FAQ

Annemarie Bufe

Published in

UXCam

6 min readAug 28, 2019

We answer your open questions about mobile analytics. Stop feeling lost. Find out how it all works.

Everyone knows that a successful mobile app takes effort.

Imagine knowing exactly in which direction you should take your app.

Mobile analytics solutions can help you to do so.

In this article, we answer questions such as:

What exactly are mobile analytics? Isn’t it enough just to sell your app? Do you really need mobile analytics? If yes, which tools are good and how can you implement them?

What Are Mobile Analytics?

Mobile analytics captures data from apps while the app is being used.

With this you can analyze the user behavior, track, replay and analyze the user journey and with this optimize your app.

I want to focus on two different kinds of mobile analytics:
quantitative and qualitative analytics.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Analytics

Quantitative analytics includes all information about quantities and numbers like app speed, error rates and daily Active Users. Graphs and Charts help to express themselves.

Qualitative instead defines information about qualities like emotions, user behavior and the user journey. Numbers can’t measure this information. The information is subjective.

What is UX Analytics?

Would you ever want to stop listening to feedback?

Well, without analyzing your mobile user experience you do exactly this. Qualitative and quantitative analytics give you a deep insight into the user behavior.

Why Do You Need Mobile Analytics?

Mobile analytics will give you an insight into the otherwise hidden behavior of your app users.

Without mobile analytics, companies can only guess if the users like their app or not. They design the app without getting to know if the users like it.

Moreover, they won’t get to know if the user likes the app or is frustrated. Direct user feedback is rare, only 1 out of 26 customers complain when they are unsatisfied, the rest churn without saying anything.

10 Eye-Opening Statistics about Frustrating User Experience

If your app doesn’t satisfy your users, it won’t survive in the highly competitive market of mobile apps!

User feedback is rare so you need a way to find out if your app is satisfying or not. This article explains the most common user frustration indicators to help you satisfy your users.

How to Identify User Frustration

How Do Mobile Analytics Work?

Analytics services act as a data processor. You have to integrate the SDK (Software Development Kit) of the service into your app.

This SDK collects data and sends it to the backend of the analytics provider, where it will be processed and converted into insights on a dashboard.

Mobile analytics tracks every user on your app. Each time a user interacts (e.g. clicks an element), the analytic tool records and saves this.

Moreover, they can track unresponsive gestures (e.g. clicking an element, but the app doesn’t response) too.

Normally the customer can decide which data should be recorded. Personal Identifiable Information can be excluded.

Mobile analytics solutions normally track:

Information about the user

Location
Visits (time, duration, interactions)
Device information (mobile device, operating system)

Session information

User
Location
Time and duration
Device information
Session replay and heatmap

Mobile App Heatmaps: How to Use Them

Sometimes it’s better to have a look at all users instead of just one. Touch Heatmaps are one of the best tools for getting inside your user’s head and understanding behavior patterns.

Do Mobile Analytics Comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the new EU regulation for data protection and privacy. It regulates how businesses and organisations have to handle information about their customers.

To analyze user data which complies with the GDPR you should keep some important points in mind: The mobile analytics tool works as a data processor.

You have the control over the data and with this you have to make sure that you don’t track the personal identifiable information of the users.

Mobile Analytics solutions make it possible to exclude the saving of this data and stay conform with the GDPR.

UXCam and GDPR Compliance

How can I start with mobile analytics?

There are a lot of solutions for mobile analytics.

All of them have their advantages and disadvantages.

Tip: A great analytics solution is our tool UXCam.

To find the right tool for you you need to be clear about what you want to track and analyze.

An app for building up communities probably wants to know how much time users spend on the app.

A banking or investment app is more interested in the number of logins or the amount of money the user invests.

You don’t need to be an expert when you want to start with mobile analytics. The implementation just needs some lines of code and a couple of minutes.

4 key things that matter to find the right analytics tool for you

Every mobile analytics tool has its advantages and disadvantages, the key is to find the one that fits best with your business objectives.

To help you with your decision, we’ve done extensive research and found the 8 best android analytics tools for mobile apps.

Android Analytics: Top 8 Tools 2019

How Can I Get The Most Out Of My Captured Data?

The combination of qualitative and quantitative mobile analytics helps you to get the best out of your data.

Here is a small example: You have an app published for Android and iOS.

Quantitative analytics shows that you have the same download rates on both but the time spent in the iOS App is much less.

With a quantitative analysis you can see that the app isn’t optimized for Android and you lose most of the users on the same screen.

Quantitative analytics shows you where you should focus. Qualitative analytics helps you to understand the numbers and improve them.

Moreover, one mobile analytics tool normally doesn’t cover everything you need and want to analyze.

For most of the mobile analytics tools you are able to integrate other tools, e.g. for tracking app crashes (Crashlytics) and events (Amplitude).

You can integrate these services with our analytics solution UXCam.

3re Party Integrations with UXCam

With a 3rd Party Integration you not just get the data from your mobile analytics tool but are also able to track more specific information about your users.

Thanks for reading — feel free to leave any more questions that you want to answer in the comments.

Any further questions? Feel free to comment. If you liked the article please leave some claps!