What You Need to Know about In-App Analytics

Do you know why your app isn’t working? You would have the answer to that question if you were using in-app analytics. As the name implies, in-app analytics are built into mobile applications. They provide developers with valuable information, such as why an app is malfunctioning, which features users love, and which features they completely ignore. In-app analytics are frequently becoming a part of enterprise apps. Read on to learn why you should consider implementing them.

The Importance of In-App Analytics

Developers generally rely on two tools to determine how well an app works before they deploy it: application performance monitoring and app testing.

Application performance monitoring measures how many resources an app utilizes, network latency, and other factors to determine whether the user experience passes muster. App testing takes place in a controlled environment with a subset of users. Developers create a variety of scenarios to see how well the app performs. Based on the results of the test, they’ll tweak the application.

So, why do developers need in-app analytics if they’ve got application performance monitoring and app testing at their disposal? In-app analytics provide a more complete picture than either of the aforementioned tools.

Let’s look at a real-life example: your CRM app crashes whenever you hit the “Add New Entry” button. In-app analytics can tell you exactly which part of the code to fix. This type of analytics can also help you solve problems unrelated to code. Because in-app analytics work in real time, they tell you precisely where in the app users are abandoning it. Maybe they’re giving up because they can’t find the right button. Perhaps they’ve gotten frustrated because the app is asking them to enter information again. Either way, data from in-app analytics pinpoints the issue.

The Barriers to In-App Analytics Implementation

Although in-app analytics sound quite attractive, they can be a difficult sell. While decision makers think it might be nice to have detailed, real-time information about how an app works, they might not see it as a good investment.

If developers haven’t created very many apps and still have the resources to monitor each app individually, then in-app analytics will remain a “nice to have.” However, when you’ve created a large number of apps (say, more than a dozen), monitoring each individually is no longer so easy. And updating apps becomes more difficult, too. Developers should release updates fairly frequently, and when you’ve got so many apps, it’s hard to keep track of what needs to be fixed and by when.

Another barrier is that some decision makers are intimidated by the idea of receiving that much data in real-time. Analytics software typically gives users quite a bit of information, and it can be a challenge to prioritize what matters and what’s less critical.

This attitude shouldn’t stop developers from implementing in-app analytics. Yes, you will receive a great deal of data from an analytics program. Yes, you will have to sort the wheat from the chaff. In the end, you’ll improve user experience tremendously, giving you high ROI.