Mobile app analytics is more than just collecting data. Mobile app owners are aware of the fact that the mobile industry is growing by leaps and bounds as more and more people use mobile apps and the internet on daily basis. So once an app is built and launched, how does an app owner make the most out of it and improve it further without the necessary data to guide them? This is where the importance of mobile app analytics comes into the picture.
App analytics provides metrics for user engagement, active devices, retention, and much more. It offers an understanding of the different ways in which users engage within the app, as well as the behaviors that contribute most to user retention. With all the defined metrics, app owners can evaluate the impact of app changes and updates by modifying experiences to understand what changes improve the engagement and provide beneficial insights like helping drive ROI, user retention engagement, conversion, and understanding the strength and weaknesses.
There are many mobile app analytic tools available in the market today. With these tools, you can analyze your mobile app performance, understand your consumer behavior, and optimize your business strategy accordingly.
In this blog, we will take you through some of the top tools available and list down the pros and cons of each. We have also covered the pricing and licensing associated with each tool.
- Firebase/Google Analytics
- Countly
- Localytics
- Flurry
- Mixpanel
Firebase/Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free evaluation tool that can be used to understand app usage and user engagement. It provides unlimited reporting on up to 500 unique events. The SDK automatically captures certain key events and custom events can be introduced according to the business model to understand the user base and monetize accordingly.
Firebase Analytics by Google helps understand how people use an app. Once the data is captured, it is available on a dashboard that provides detailed insights about the data received, which can further be integrated with many other Firebase features.
Pricing
- Most features of this tool are available for free
- Free spark plan which has generous limits for starters like free analytics, Crashlytics, etc.
- Pay-as-you-go Blaze plan
Pros
- Free for limited users and easier to integrate with Android apps
- Comprehensive and easy to use
- Leverages advanced technology in analytics
Cons
- While we appreciate the powerful features and customizations available in Firebase analytics, setting up the goals and conversions for a large project can be complicated for someone who doesn’t specialize in using the tool.
Countly
Countly offers real-time, open-source mobile analytics to keep tabs on product performance, user journeys, and behavior across mobile applications. It enables the analysis of billions of data points every day, be it on the cloud or on-premise.
Countly’s dashboard feature helps view and understand interactions with user profile, app usage analytics, important metrics and transactions using custom events, user-level data and customer actions for retentions, and funnels and revenue analytics. It is extensible via plugins as well.
Pricing
- Free/paid – Community/Enterprise editions
- Free Community edition can be used only for personal or internal purposes
- Enterprise edition is suited for commercial or non-commercial purposes
Pros
- Open-source and self-hosted, which makes it easy to offset costs of competing services companies
- A large number of SDKs provide fairly comprehensive platform support for mobile applications and general tracking, making it easy to create overall tracking of events
- Custom queries, access to data, and extensive customizability makes the platform fairly easy-to-use for any purpose of the user and market tracking
Cons
- Server requirements can be a bit high depending on the data-points setup strategy, which may not be a problem for startups with trial credits on cloud computing services.
Localytics
Localytics from Upland is a great analytics tool to track retention metrics. Localytics is a cloud-based analytics tool and marketing platform, helpful in targeting users from media, retail, travel, and other domains.
The retention feature generates a complete analysis showing reasons for drop-offs, reduced client retention, and low conversion rates. It also has a prediction creation feature that helps in knowing the conversion based on specific events.
Pricing
- Quotation based on the data consumed
Pros
- Focuses on marketing
- Push notification feature for a highly specific user segment
Cons
- Limited features for product analytics
Flurry
Another top mobile app analytics tool, Flurry, enables app developers to succeed in the app economy with real-time metrics. It is easy-to-use and effortlessly handles apps of any scale. To provide enhanced insights, Flurry can track up to 500 custom events and add parameters to custom events.
Additionally, Flurry offers a specific feature for companies to analyze consumer behavior through the data that is collected by the service providers.
Pricing
- Free analytics tool
Pros
- Focused on monetization and advertising
- Tracks different aspects of user acquisition, conversion, and retention
- Can be used for funnel analysis, user segmentation, event tracking, user journeys, and audience
Cons
- Only tracks mobile app analytics and does not work with webpages
- Tracks a user only when an app is launched and not installed
Mixpanel
Mixpanel tracks user interactions and allows generating custom reports. The analytics tool helps to assess actions from users by segmenting them and by creating funnels. Additionally, Mixpanel can display information on user interaction data. Funnels help in identifying the potential customers available.
Mixpanel allows users to dig deep into their data to predict customer actions. Using funnels, users can view customers who have followed up on their purchases and quit in the middle of the process to accurately know where the customer left during the follow-up. Retention reports show how customers see the usefulness of the applications. Users can take actions based on the knowledge gained from the reports and can send out alerts automatically to customers from their mobile devices.
Mixpanel is an exceptional asset for businesses looking to gain further knowledge of their current customer base.
Pricing
- Free – 100K monthly tracked users
- Growth plan – starting at $25 per month
- Enterprise plan – custom plans and pricing to suit your needs
Pros
- Cohort analysis
- Detailed event tracking
- Customizable dashboards
Cons
- Significant dev time for the setup
- No full CRM cycles
It’s important to remember that integrating a top-rated mobile analytics tool with your apps isn’t always the right step. You need to define the usage of the mobile analytics insights to select the best tool for your apps. It is unreasonable to invest heavily in complex mobile analytics tools when your company may require only basic tracking and user insights.
Still not sure which analytics tool is the best for your mobile apps? Talk to the experts at Nous Infosystems. Tell us your requirements and we’ll find the right mobile analytics tool for you.
