In the mobile business today, one of the main components of success is the monitoring of statistical data. Numerous mobile services allow you to literally keep your finger on the pulse of the player, track what he is interested in and what is not.
Matt Tubergen, Vice President of Taptica, told about how to work with such data correctly in his series of articles “Mobile Application Analytics from A to Z” on Pocket Gamer. Below we offer a translation of the first article on post-installations “Planning analytical solutions for post-installations”.
What is a post-installation?
Post-installation analytics is the analysis of data obtained after the application is installed. In other words, it is an analysis of user behavior in the application.
Price of information
Many market analysts rightly believe that the collected data itself is useless. They are valuable only in the quality of the decisions you have made by looking at them. In any case, it is important to understand that information is a valuable tool, since the decisions made are the result of their analysis.
Listen or ask?
There are two views on how to use the data correctly.
According to one of them, it is necessary to “listen” to the data. It is assumed that after you collect as much information as possible, you can “hear” how users behave in the application when studying the received data.
An alternative view boils down to the fact that first you need to think about what kind of information you are interested in, the answer to what specific questions you want to get. Starting from the formulated queries, you are no longer just monitoring the entire available data array, but only a certain layer. The queries can be completely different, for example, “Do users prefer feature X to feature Y after 10 activation?“.
None of the approaches can be called unambiguously good or unambiguously bad. They are both usable.
Questions before answers
Too often I hear things like “connect such and such analytics and you will be able to see everything.”
“Hearing” the data is important, of course, but it is equally important to formulate for yourself the questions that you would like to get answers to. The solution you choose for your product will depend on them. In addition, you will not need to scan the entire array of information received, which, in turn, will require a lot of time and human resources.
The questions can be very different, here are just some of them:
- What do I want players to do in the app?
- Where, when and why do users leave their apps?
- What are users doing in the app and why?
- What do regular users do in the game?
- How often do users use the app?
- How active users actively interact with the application compared to less active ones.
- What in the app leads the user to Action X?
- What is the conversion rate in the project after X days of use / X actions performed in the game?
In general, before you start working with data, understand for yourself which question you want to get an answer to. Then take the time to decide how the information you receive will help you improve the performance of the application. And go ahead!