4 Awesome Free Mobile Analytics Services

March 12th, 2016

by Anh Nguyen

COO & Co-Founder at Gummicube, Inc

One way developers can stay ahead of the competition in today's highly competitive business environment is by incorporating data-driven solutions into their mobile apps. Luckily, developers can access a whole host of free and premium mobile analytics tools. With that in mind, here is a look at four awesome free mobile analytics services.

Google Mobile App Analytics

Search giant Google has a mobile app analytics solution that developers can use to measure a wide range of metrics. Some of the key features available via the Google Analytics for Mobile Apps solution include Install Attribution, Mobile SDKs, Cross-Device Data, Event Tracking, Demographics & Remarketing, Google Tag Manager, as well as Lifetime Value and Retention Analysis. In addition, developers can import data into this data analytics solution from their CRM platforms. Developers can also integrate other Google products including AdMob, AdWords, Google Display Network, and Google Play into Google Analytics for Mobile Apps. Besides data ingestion and import, this product supports real-time data analytics and reporting. This includes Acquisition Reporting, Audience Reporting, Cohorts Reporting, Conversion Reporting, Custom Reporting, Ecommerce Reporting, and Reporting APIs. More importantly, Google's mobile data analytics tool allows businesses and marketers to use the data insights gleaned to improve their marketing campaigns via Alerts & Intelligence and Experiments. For instance, one can run A/B tests via Content Experiments in Google Tag Manager. To access and use this solution, Google recommends setting up an Analytics account. From your account, you can set up Google Tag Manager and Analytics SDK app properties.

Twitter Fabric

The social networking site Twitter offers a mobile data analytics solution aptly called Twitter Fabric Mobile Analytics. With this solution, developers and entrepreneurs can get real-time data on diverse metrics all within the same dashboard, meaning no more jumping from one dashboard to another. Twitter has even made it easier to track and measure mobile data metrics by providing developers with SDKs that address analytics issues ranging from verifying users, to generating revenue. These SDKs include Crash Reporting, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Identity, Growth, Monetization, Infrastructure, Payments, Optimization, UX Analysis, Maps, Realtime Signaling, and Game Analytics. Out of these, the mobile analytics module will be of interest to developers and entrepreneurs because it enables one to measure and quantify metrics including:

Daily active users
Daily new users
Daily active users by OS
Median session length
Sessions per active user
Monthly active users
Daily active user to monthly active user ratio (DAU/MAU ratio)
Active users right now
Daily users for top builds
Time in app per user
Percent crash-free users

To make it easier to use this mobile analytics solution, Twitter has integrated it with the Crashlytics kit. It is worth noting that Twitter analyzes the behavior of apps tied to this platform and alerts their owners or developers when they observe abnormal behavior.

Facebook Mobile SDK

According to Facebook, its Facebook Analytics for Apps enables users to measure all customer activity across devices. To start with, this solution has a feature called Events that you can use to view key trends related to your app. More importantly, you can view these trends by gender, age, country, platform, and language. Another key feature is "Funnels," which enables one to monitor accessibility problems especially when app users face difficulties accessing certain features, navigating in-app, or accessing specific content. The "Cohort" feature makes it easy to compare current performance metrics against historical data. As such, you can make tweaks to your app to improve the lifetime value of app users, retention rate, and repeat purchase rate. Finally, the "Segments" feature enables app owners to understand their customers better. This is because Segment consists of filters that one can use to investigate the behavior of a specific consumer demographic. Luckily, Facebook Analytics comes with several in-built graphs that enable users to display app user actions as charts.

Flurry Analytics

According to Flurry, its analytics solution supports all major mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and mobile web. One useful feature is Flurry User Acquisition Analytics (UAA), which enables app owners and marketers to monitor metrics such as install, clicks, and impressions for purposes of optimizing and maximizing marketing ROI. Furthermore, Flurry Analytics allows one to drill down into key metrics at the campaign level. You can also use Flurry UAA to customize user and campaign quality parameters. Another great feature is Crash Analytics that you can use to monitor and investigate app crash issues. Flurry Analytics will even estimate key app metrics such as the age and gender of app users even if you do not track these demographics. In general, you can use Flurry Analytics to segment app users, filter data according to selected segments, and analyze data to understand the performance of chosen segments.

Conclusion

Whether you are developing a mobile app to promote an upcoming event, promote a product/service, or improve brand reach, you should measure user actions via mobile data analytics. Some of the best free mobile analytics solutions available today include Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, Twitter Fabric Mobile Analytics, Facebook Analytics for Apps and Flurry Analytics.

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