In this guide we want to cover both app advertising analytics and app analytics companies. These two fuel mobile industry with information on mobile advertising efficiency and how mobile users interact with mobile apps. They are the key to understand how well a mobile ad campaign performs or mobile app works and what you can do to improve it, attract new users or customers and keep them loyal to the app.

From Google to Apple tracking apps and their performance is key to develop your app business. On both iOS and Android, there are thousands of data points available to examine to determine what to change, where maintenance is required and what actually works. When it comes to generating revenue via ad campaigns inside apps, measuring of a whole new set of data points becomes crucial and this is when you need app advertising analytics.

So which are the app analytics of app advertising companies you should know about? Which ones are free to try and how much does it cost to use? What’s the difference between impressions and sessions? This guide will go through what exactly app analytics is and how to choose the tools to analyze the data.

We’ve put together a review of all the various types of mobile app analytics and app advertising services including the types of metrics and data that they can track as well as company profiles and reviews. You can use this research to compare mobile app analytics providers and understand the market landscape and the key features and benefits of each of the various solutions.

Top App Analytics Tools:

So App Analytics tools can be divided into several macro categories, such as App marketing analytics, In-app analytics and App Performance analytics. Here is a brief description of each.

App marketing analytics (App store analytics)

It covers things like whether users find your app while browsing Apple’s app store or on other websites, the comparison between downloads and in-app purchases and much more besides. This is key to understanding how to monetize the application, increasing ROI and not losing customers.

With this type of analytics you can monitor and analyze KPIs of your mobile app marketing campaigns. It also allows you to keep tabs on your app competitors performance – app installs, rankings and revenue across multiple app stores. App Store analytics reports on how changes of app target keywords, description and other parts of an app marketing campaign influence an app store performance.

In-app analytics

These are everything a user does within the application. How do they behave within your app? Do they always go back to the homepage, or follow deep links? A key metric here is demographics: data you analyze on your users will inform the post-publishing development of your app and give useful insights; for example, the most frequent users of your apps need not coincide with the most valuable – so how do you turn one into the other?

App performance analytics

Strictly speaking these are in-app, but less concerned with the users and more so with the “machine” itself. Identifying pages that make an app crash, or devices on which the app slows to crawl, is the groundwork upon which all the analysis above rests. If your mobile application crashes whenever it’s opened on an iPhone Xs Max (but on no other model), all the marketing in the world is moot.

App advertising analytics

This type of analytics presents bread and butter of advertising. It helps you analyze and attribute digital marketing campaigns to impressions, ad clicks, subsequently to app installs, in-app behaviors, and a mobile in-store or offline sales boost. Among other metrics to measure are return on advertising spend and effectiveness of ad impressions.

As much as mobile analytics essential for planning, launching and analyzing results of a mobile advertising campaign, analysis of a mobile app performance is no less important for an app business growth and prosperity.

Information that each mobile app analytics tool provides can be described with a number of terms, let’s define some of them.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

KPI is a measurable value that reports on a mobile advertising campaign effectiveness or a mobile app performance.

User Churn Rate

It provides a ratio between the number of a mobile app users that continue to use an app after a certain period of time, usually a month, and the ones who have stopped. According to Localytics data, aggregated across multiple app categories, an average churn rate in 2016 was 36% for one month and only 20% for three.

Session Length

A time spent by a mobile app user with an app, before closing it or switching to another app. According to Opera Mediaworks, in 2016 an average app session length was 5 mins.

Daily Active User (DAU)

It measures the number of mobile users who open an app on a daily basis. This metric various significantly between mobile games and various categories of apps.

Monthly Active User (MAU)

It measures the number of mobile users who open an app on a monthly basis.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

This metric reports on how much revenue was an app generated per its user. Now, once we’ve defined basic terminology for mobile advertising and app analytics, let’s see what are your options to choose an effective and reputable analytics company to work with. With so many tools to choose from though, which should app marketer, mobile affiliate or media buyer opt for? We want to help all parties involved in mobile advertising and app marketing industries to navigate through this tricky and often confusing area, we’ve compiled a list of what we consider to be the best app analytics tools out there at the time of writing.

Now, when the most common used terms are defined, let’s dig into different kinds of analytics, starting with App marketing analytics.

What are App marketing analytics?

App marketing analytics supply app brands and developers with analytical data on mobile app marketing performance. Such tools report on how many times a mobile app was installed, opened, specific action within an app was taken.

The most brilliant app ever made would struggle to become famous these days. Globally, app downloads are decreasing and in 2015, there were around 1000 apps uploaded to the Apple App Store every day. How do you stand out from the crowd? The answer is advertising and marketing.

According to CMOS in their February 2016 survey:

Spending on marketing analytics … is expected to leap from 4.6 percent to almost 22 percent of marketing budgets in the next three years. Source: CMO Survey

Specifically, the proportion of total marketing budget dedicated to mobile analytics is expected to rise to 8.3% in the next three years.

Ad campaigns can include all sorts of aspects, from adverts to offers and cross-promotion, but to understand what works and what doesn’t, you also need marketing analytics. There are so many ad networks out there, and so many ad formats, that tracking which ones work and understanding why they do is crucial to getting a good return on investment. There are far more data points and metrics than the ones below, but we’ve listed a few major ones.

Marketing Analytics KPIs

Installs – not just how many times your app is installed, but the path that leads people to installing an app is just as important.

– not just how many times your app is installed, but the path that leads people to installing an app is just as important. Opens – when is your app opened? Is it following a particular deep link, or do users of another app have a high percentage of switching over to yours? At a particular time of day?

– when is your app opened? Is it following a particular deep link, or do users of another app have a high percentage of switching over to yours? At a particular time of day? Purchases – When people purchase something within your app (or when do they purchase the app itself).

– When people purchase something within your app (or when do they purchase the app itself). Registration – If the app requires a registration, its important to know why people decide to register and more importantly why the people that drop out do so.

– If the app requires a registration, its important to know why people decide to register and more importantly why the people that drop out do so. Content Viewed – Self explanatory, as it tells you what you should do more of.

– Self explanatory, as it tells you what you should do more of. Shares – On which platform and for what reason is a link to your app, or its content, shared?

– On which platform and for what reason is a link to your app, or its content, shared? Invites – Not only how many invites, but also who invites and who gets invited is key to reaching those demographics.

– Not only how many invites, but also who invites and who gets invited is key to reaching those demographics. Custom Events – These are metrics set by you, for example to find out when people have followed the “Customers who bought this also liked” button

The real difficulty here however is understanding what to do with all that data. Again according to the CMOS survey, the main reason preventing the use of more marketing analytics is a lack of process and knowledge of what to do with them.

A lot of the platforms we recommend below, however, offer ways of making sense of the data instead of just offering it to you.

Once you have a grip on all of these, you can tailor your marketing campaign accordingly. You could find out, for example, that the majority of people who access your app do so around bedtime, and thus push for more adverts being displayed at those particular hours.

What are In-app analytics?

What users do within your app is the tip of the iceberg for In-app analytics. The category can be broadly divided into three sections: device, user demographics and user behavior. In the first, things to look at can include what kind of device they are using and whether the model or OS version has any effect on their behaviour (for example, on a particular device the “buy” button on a page could be hidden behind another one). Within user demographics you have language, gender, location and also whether they’re new users or returning.

Finally, user behaviour is the biggest one to consider – how users behave within an application and how that leads (or doesn’t) to income and conversions. There are almost infinite things to track here such as where people click on an app, how long they spend on a page, which pages lead to higher conversions and why (it could be content, it could be product, it could be design).

In-App analytics KPIs

Type of device.

In-app behaviour: clicks, levels completed, purchases made.

Location, gender, age and language of users.

Whether user is new or returning.

Operating system.

Manufacturer.

Time of use.

These all inform how you can change an app for maximum ROI. In the case of games, are there specific levels or bosses that are making people exit the app? How often are they using certain feature, or if given a choice, how often are they picking one over the other? All this information is invaluable when understanding how your users interact with your application. A subset of this is A/B Analytics.

That’s where app analytics tools come in: they can provide app developers with an up-to-date information on a broad spectrum of different variables and bugs are one of the most important ones. For example, there can be a certain feature in your app that is road-block for your app users and this is what makes them to abandon your app, with a proper app analytics installed into your app, you can figure it out and solve the problem.

You can also learn about other essential variables via using app analytics tools such as: the revenue your app is generating, number installs your app is getting, in-app purchases, competitor rankings, and even how many times the app has crashed. Knowing as much as you can about your app means you can improve an overall user experience. A better user experience means people will talk about your app more favourably to others, they will use your app for a longer period of time, and you will have a higher chance of generating more recurrent revenue, particularly if in-app purchases are your primary income source.

A/B Analytics.

Presenting users one of two different options (whether they present differences in design or experience) and seeing which one works best. The issue is that while you can do this in-house, you will often need ways of doing it “live”, testing it on current users, without breaking the app or turning them away. A/B testing is key, but it is one part of a wider toolset, and thus the companies that supply it often do so alongside other tools as well.

Up next, the foundation of it all: app performance analytics.

What are App performance analytics?

This is the bedrock of optimising an app – without this set of statistics, it’s basically impossible to retain users because you won’t be looking at the most important metric of all: whether an app works or not. From uptime (how long an app is kept open) to crashes, responsiveness and resource usage, you need to know when your app works, slows down or fails; and you need to know it for every single device and operating system your users access your app from. Does your app perform better on a particular brand on phones than in others? You’ll want to know why. Further, your app may depend on third-party services in the cloud, and you’ll want to know exactly how these affect your app both when they are available and unavailable. These are just some of app performance KPIs.

App Performance KPIs

Carrier latency.

API latency.

Uptime.

Crashes.

Exceptions.

Errors.

Data Transactions.

These are well and truly crucial to know if an app doesn’t work, and how. You may find that opening a specific page on iOS crashes your app – if this is your sales page, you’re in trouble.

Now, on top of analytics that are related to an app technical performance and its interaction with users, is analytics that cover mobile app performance on a market. We’re talking about app advertising analytics.

What are App advertising analytics

Now, mobile analytics is the heart of any successful mobile advertising company operations and, by definition, it is what makes ROI calculation possible. Launching a mobile ad campaign, either mobile web or mobile app based, without robust mobile analytics in place is just a waste of resources. This is what makes mobile analytics companies uniquely positioned to be essential across mobile platforms.

According to Statista Digital Market Outlook, in 2017 the total global digital advertising review was $228 billion and it’s projected to reach $332 by 2021. Planning and executing advertising campaigns based on hard data is always makes sense, but when it’s about spending several hundred billion dollars a year it is simply must-do.

Digital advertising revenue worldwide, 2015-2021, in billions



Source: Statista

So no wonder that the global mobile analytics market is projected to reach $6 billion by 2024. And if we look at the distribution of mobile analytics companies worldwide, the majority of them is concentrated in North America, with Europe and Asia Pacific following with a significant gap and by 2024, according to Research Nester data, the market share will look like this:

Global Mobile Analytics Market Share by 2024, by region



Source: Research Nester

But what is app advertising analytics exactly? App advertising analytics extrapolates the data from advertising and marketing campaigns to help mobile marketers to better target their ads and understand the effectiveness of their spending. So for each different traffic source or type of creative, marketers can understand what’s working, and what’s not and optimize their campaigns accordingly.

In a similar vein to mobile advertising industry in general, app advertising analytics space is dominated by a few big players, like AppsFlyer, Kochava that are on the market 6-8 years. In fact these companies product lines go beyond just traffic attribution, covering in-app marketing and analytics, app store analytics, mobile fraud detection systems and more.

To get a good grasp on what App advertising analytics companies can do for your advertising needs, let’s bring up several important definitions.

App Advertising KPIs

CTR (click through ratio) – the ratio between the number of instances when an ad was displayed and clicked through.

CR (conversion ratio) – the ratio between the total number of people who interacted with an ad and took specific desired actions (install, purchase, etc.)

CPC (cost-per-click) – how much a single click on an ad inside an app costs

eCPM (effective cost-per-mile) – en effective cost of 1,000 ads displayed in an app

CPI (cost-per-install) – a cost of a single app copy installed

Quite a few of the tools in our list are free to use and most of the paid platforms have a free version available as well. There are other differences between the tools too, like what variables they measure about an app or mobile ad campaign, the freedom users have over using them, and their method of implementation.

So how should we go about selecting an app analytics platform?

How to select App analytics or App advertising analytics platform

As you’ll see in the list below, there’s quite a few analytics platforms out there, so it’s important to know how to choose which one is best for you. Here is a list of things to look for or ask yourself.

Pricing plan

The pricing plan is one of the key things to look at because a lot of platforms have different “tiers”, offering an increasing number of metrics, data points or features as you pay more. If your app won’t generate huge amounts of data or only requires a few metrics, then perhaps you don’t need to go for the “full features list” tier. Some platforms are free, while others have a free bracket as long as you stick to very basic features.

Key features

Some platforms offer a specific key feature on top of the basics, such as A/B testing, push notifications or a focus on metrics for games. While some features are universally provided by most platforms, these may not be. Find out what the platform’s unique selling point is and understand whether it is important to your app.

What does your app need?

Following on from the previous point – what kind of analytics do you need? If your app is going to be used within your enterprise only by a few people, performance analytics may be more important to you than user experience. If your app is highly original and standard analytics won’t give you much of an insight, customisable metrics may be for you.

Level of support

How much documentation does the platform offer? Do they have a 24/7 hotline or account managers to help you when things go wrong? If everything else is equal, this may be the deciding factor in your decision making process.

Size of SDK/implementation difficulty

Most of the platforms here come with a very easy implementation process, sometimes as little as a single line of code. Other SDKs or implementations can be bigger and more complicated, potentially even slowing your app down or affecting its performance. Ensure that the platform is fully compatible with your app and easy to use.

With these points in mind, we hope we have made it easier for you to choose from one of our selected App Analytics and App Advertising platforms. If you find these are not enough, you can always take a look through the Business of Apps Marketplace.



Top App analytics and Advertising analytics platforms

These are some of the best mobile advertising and app analytics tools you can find: they are not ranked in any particular order, but the selection was made on a number of factors including how powerful the tool is, whether it offers a new kind of metric or an insightful visualization, as well as covering the full range of data an app developer or marketer might need. If you decide you still haven’t quite found what you’re looking for you can always check out our directory of app analytics tools.

The one’s we’ve selected are:

List of app and mobile analytics companies