#mobileanalytics

App marketing is the new frontier in communicating with your prospects, customers and clients. A hugely important piece of that is in-app messaging, or, the messages you send to users while they are currently interacting with your mobile or web app. In-app messaging engages the users who are already active, capitalizing on their behavior and using attributes (such as location, gender, and device) to determine which users will take certain actions. 

Sessions are a basic unit of measurement for app engagement. Most app owners want their app to be so engaging, a user never puts it down. But, in order to engage with an app, a user has to launch it. Each launch counts as a session and looking at session lengths help app owners quickly understand if users are actually using their application. Session length is typically defined as the amount of time the app is in front of the user. There are exceptions: some apps (such as streaming audio apps) may also include time spent streaming in the background, and always-on apps (such as kiosks) may build timeouts into their session model.

Google Analytics offers you so much awesome stuff that you may wonder: “Why pay for an analytics tool if GA gives us all this for free?” Of course, the answer to this question depends on your business requirements and cannot be given in general. But still, there are some things that most paid tools offer which GA does not. And the more I have been working with different tools, the more I have come to understand that these things are really important.

Sampling is a common method in statistics. Think of how few people (rows) are needed to get valid electoral forecasts: In Germany, Emnid, one of the bigger opinion research institutes, usually asks between 1,800 and 3,000 people, a sample of just 0.003-0.005 percent of the population entitled to vote. That sounds ridiculous in comparison to the 15 to 60 or more percent you usually get in Google Analytics, but of course it depends on what you analyse and how representative your sample is. Emnid, for example, selects the people it interviews carefully to reflect the overall population as well as possible.

Both Google and Facebook have very well established franchises on mobile, but the market is still very fragmented. In fact, Google and Facebook combined probably command less than 25% of the total time spent by the average mobile consumer.

Shazam recently launched a tool to help marketers asses the effectiveness of their television advertising campaigns. Labeled the Shazam Engagement Rate (a very creative name), it’s used to show brands which people are leaning in and asking for more information. The Shazam Engagement Rate is defined as Shazam tag volume devided by the gross rating point for each of the airings of a spot. They’re hoping that they can begin to aggregate data on consumer behavior and use that data to inform their mobile strategy. They have been working for some time to revamp their mobile strategy and they’re hoping to make it easy for consumers to use as a TV companion app. And with a successful app like Shazam who knows what type of data they’ll be able to aggregate.