Introduction
A fresh herd of apps is released on the app stores every day. Thanks to the sophistication of the app store algorithms, many of the apps are successful in reaching their target audience and gaining a considerable user base. However, not all developers know how to create a healthy mobile app culture, how users react to certain features, or what they like and dislike about an application. The problem with this is that you can’t just go on a wild goose chase and start adding features and making changes to your app, hoping to find something that will resonate with users.
You need data. The only way to figure out what your users want and how they will react to your app is by using analytics.
In this blog post, we will discuss what mobile app analytics is; how you can monitor the performance of your apps and platform; and how Maya’s robust suite of products can help improve your overall performance.
What is mobile app analytics and why you should care?
Mobile app analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data about how your app is being used by users and how effectively it performs. It’s a way to measure the performance of your mobile application and determine what’s working well, what isn’t and how you can improve it based on user behavior, usage, and retention.
There are 3 levels of app analytics to take into account: performance, usage, and marketing.
Performance mobile app analytics
Performance mobile app analytics examine key aspects of an app’s operation, including its stability and speed. The data may confirm which kinds of devices and carriers are most popular among your target audience, what versions of the app are more successful, as well as the users’ most common countries and languages.
Usage mobile app analytics
Usage analytics measure how users are interacting with your app. You can use this data to determine which features your users find the most useful, what pages take the longest time to load (and why), and where they drop off in their navigation of your app. It can generally help identify problems that need to be fixed or areas where your app needs more work.
Marketing mobile app analytics
Last but not least, you can use marketing app analytics to see what effect your campaigns are having on your app’s performance. Such information may include, but is not limited to: ad clicks, app installs, opens, or even in-app actions, like registrations and purchases. With marketing mobile app reporting, your teams can identify the key channels that work best for your target audience and optimize your ROAS, in terms of downloads, in-app conversions, etc.
A Few Words About Google Play Analytics
Why bother anyway?
Google Play is of course a major contributor to business mobile app distribution. This is proved by its 2 million apps & games, served to billions of users around the world, with over $120 billion in earnings for developers as of August 2022. For that reason, a business may find it beneficial to distribute its content using Google Play’s developer services and its distribution channel. By integrating with Google Play, you get access to a wealth of analytics and data that can help you optimize your distribution strategy. You can see how well your app is performing, understand what type of content works best with your audience, etc.
Mobile App Installs and Uninstalls – User Retention & Churn
Tracking mobile app installs and uninstalls helps businesses measure their applications’ success. It’s important to know how many users are installing and uninstalling your app, as well as the total number of active users. This data helps you understand your audience’s interests and goals, which can help you create new features or content. Moreover, knowing the number of app installs, aka how many users you have acquired, is an indication of how well your marketing efforts and campaigns are doing.
If you want to get more specific, you can track user retention and churn. User retention refers to the number of users who return after a specified period of time, while churn refers to users who stop using your mobile app. Both metrics provide valuable insight into how well your app is performing. For example, if users are leaving at a higher rate than they’re coming back (i.e., churn), then it might indicate that something needs fixing in order for them to use the app again.
App Reviews – The Voice of the User
Word-of-mouth is a major factor that influences our purchasing decisions, whether it refers to a store, a Netflix series, or even mobile apps. We trust the opinions of others because it helps us make more informed decisions. In the case of mobile apps, reviews are an essential source of feedback that you can use to improve your product. App stores provide users with the ability to rate and review apps as well as leave comments on each individual app page. This makes it easy for developers to see how their users feel about specific features or bugs they might have encountered while using their app.
As a business, it’s extremely important to keep track of all ratings and reviews, as well as any comments that users leave behind. You can use this information to ensure that your app is providing the best possible experience for your users and continue improving it over time. In addition to tracking user feedback, it’s also important for you as a developer to respond to any issues that users report. You should make it clear in your app store profile that you’re open to suggestions and welcome feedback from your users. This will help ensure that people know they can reach out if they have any concerns about the product or need assistance with something specific.
So it’s really important to have a holistic overview of your mobile app’s performance, based on measures and metrics that are relevant to your business goals. You should be able to use these metrics for more than just benchmarking against your competitors, but also as a way of monitoring the overall health of your app over time. For this purpose, you will definitely need the right toolkit —one that will help you build a strong foundation for measuring the success of your app, while also providing you with useful insights on how to improve it (aka – Maya!).
Maya Apps Report – Mobile App Insights 101
Dataset
In Maya’s Apps Report, we extract data from the Google Play Console dataset, which contains all necessary data and dimensions in a digestible format to easily unlock your app insights. You can inspect the Maya database schema here, as well as all the available measures to also create your own dashboards.
Setup
Connecting your Google Play account to Maya is quite an easy task. All you need is access to your Google Play Developer account and connect it using your Cloud Storage URI. You can find a detailed step-by-step guide on our documentation page.
Report Tabs
The Maya Apps Report right now contains 2 different pages (or tabs) for different reporting scopes: the Google Play Installs and the Google Play Reviews, while we are currently working on launching two additional pages, the Google Play Crashes and Google Play Subscriptions tabs.
Google Play Installs
On the first report tab, we examine Google Play data regarding app installs, broken down into certain dimensions for better analysis.
The report consists of a line-bar combo chart, where you can visualize up to 2 metrics in association with time. The report is dynamic, as you can change the metrics at hand using the dropdown menu.
The available metrics we take into account are:
- Active Device Installs
- App Versions
- Carriers
- Countries
- Daily Device Installs
- Daily Device Uninstalls
- Daily Device Upgrades
- Daily User Installs
- Daily User Uninstalls
- Devices
- Install Events
- Languages
- OS Versions
- Uninstall Events
- Update Events
Plus, you can view all data using different dimensions, based on the analysis you need to conduct. For example, you may analyze your total app installs and uninstalls per device model, operating system, or even the carrier that the users have. You can also view the data on any date level. This allows you to keep track of your app’s performance over time so that you can identify trends and patterns that may influence your marketing efforts.
The available dimensions include App Version, the Language setting of the user, Device (device brand and device model), telecommunications Carrier, and Android Operating System Version. Bear in mind that the dimensions used on this report cannot be used in combination with others like in other reports, as Google Play does not support it. Moreover, you may change your table view by navigating through the available dimension tabs.
Google Play Reviews
We proceed with the Google Play Reviews tab, where you can find your app reviews and ratings from Google Play. This dashboard will show you all reviews that were made by users who have installed your app on their device, along with their corresponding ratings, as well as your company’s interactions (e.g. review replies). You can also filter by language or device, in order to see a more detailed view. By reviews, we consider all rating events captured, whether they had a response or not.
As we saw in the case of the previous report page, here too we have a corresponding line-bar chart that we can use to plot review-related metrics across time. You can choose any metric from the metric dropdown. Moreover, the language and device dimensions can be used to compare or segment results.
The metrics dropdown menu includes:
- Reviews #
- Review Avg Hours to Answer
- Reviews Answered #
- Review Median Hours to Answer
- Avg Review rating
- Followup Reviews with Text #
- Reviews with Text #
- % of Reviews Answered
- % of Review Answer Follow Ups
You can click on the view of your choice to adjust and segment the main graph based on the selected dimension. By changing views, you will also update the table or matrix below, and visualize the reviews or the most significant metrics related to reviews. Available breakdowns are Date, Device, and Language.
By clicking on the Reviews tab of the matrix you can see all individual reviews along with their ratings, a response from the company agent (if applicable), and an average time frame for responses. This data gives you an overview of your company’s interactions with your app’s users and can help you to identify any issues that need addressing. You can also sort by most recent comments, in order to keep an eye on the latest feedback coming in.
Upcoming report pages
In addition to the Google Play Installs and Google Play Reviews pages, we are currently working on two more report tabs, using all the available information of the Google Play dataset. The pages are the Google Play Crashes and Google Play Subscriptions, so stay tuned!
Filter Pane
On every report tab, you will notice there’s a filter info panel to use in order to segment your data and monitor specific app packages (if you connected more than one mobile app to your Maya account), device categories, languages, countries, carriers, app versions, OS versions, etc. The filter pane is especially useful if you want to run reports on a specific device type or OS version. For example, if your company has a mobile app that malfunctions on older Samsung phones, you can use the filter pane to only show data from users with those phones in order to pinpoint the issue and fix it.
You can also set up custom reports with preselected filters to view segments of the data that interest you without having to filter each time. Simply save as a custom report with your selected name, duplicate the page, select filters, rename the page based on your selected filters, and save!
Frequently Asked Questions
Maya is a really useful tool to analyze your mobile application’s performance and stats. You can integrate all the apps that you monitor on Google Play Console on Maya, and get a fully automated business-ready report for your analysis.
Mobile app analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing how your app is being used, how effectively it performs, and what’s working well or not so well based on user behavior and retention.
You can view statistics for individual apps using both the Play Console and by creating your own Maya account to view the available Google Play measures for all of your apps, thanks to our newest Google Play integration! These two sources supplement each other, as a breakdown of data is unavailable inside the Play Console and some metrics are different but equally important for your analysis on both sources.