Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. own a smartphone but sometimes it seems like smartphones own them.
Smartphone users are glued to the small devices for everything from checking the news and their social feeds to researching products and services. The question for businesses in particular, however, is how much time are mobile users spending on their mobile properties (whether it's a mobile-optimized site, a responsive website or an app) and what actions are they taking on those digital channels?
Luckily, a variety of mobile analytics providers can provide some pretty detailed analysis that can help inform business decisions - both on and off the mobile Web. Here are some of the mobile analytics (and the providers who offer them) available today:
More than 170,000 developers have used Flurry to track nearly 550,000 apps. Integrating Flurry Analytics is easy and scalable to device and application type. What's more, Flurry Analytics works for both apps and the mobile Web. One of the many capabilities Flurry Analytics offers is the ability to understand the user path. In an app, for example, businesses can answer the question, "are your customers progressing as we hoped they would?" If not, more insightful questions can be asked, like "is the menu too tough to navigate." By exploring user paths, developers will be able to see how customers move through different Events - like Level 2 in a gaming app.
ClickTale is synonymous with website optimization and many of its most popular features are available for mobile websites. ClickTale Touch, for example, captures gestures that are unique to mobile such as tap, double-tap, zoom, pinch, scroll, swipe and title to understand the mobile user experience. CilckTale Touch also captures information in a mobile site and looks at metrics such as retention, conversion, demographics, revenue and more. Heatmaps and session playbacks are also part of the mobile suite from ClickTale.
Mixpanel offers some pretty awesome use-cases for mobile analytics. Its claim to fame is that "any question you can ask about your data, Mixpanel can answer." The types of questions Mixpanel gives as examples are: How many visitors that arrive from a banner ad, end up searching for and booking a room in Costa Rica? Do users of our mobile app share more videos via Facebook, Twitter, email or Google Plus?
While those are just sample questions, they are very detailed in the insights that a company can get from its mobile properties. What's more, the way a marketer or developer can ask the questions doesn't require any knowledge of SQL queries. Mixpanel states "analyzing your data is as easy as writing an email."
ClickTale, Mixpanel and Flurry Analytics are far from the only mobile Web analytics providers out there, but the level of detail these three providers give businesses is worth looking into.