By Brandon Lopez, Product Marketing —
At first glance, it might seem like a good idea to take the same approach to measuring your mobile apps as you do for measuring your mobile website. After all, regardless of whether their using a native application or a mobile website, your customers' goals are the same. Consumers go to Zappos.com's mobile site to find a great pair of shoes or accessories. Same reason they use the Zappos iPhone app. Now we could debate which platform—mobile site versus mobile app—provides a better customer experience but that's a longer discussion and not the topic for today. My point is, if you're like most industry leaders, your customers are already engaging with your company via their mobile devices, but you're probably not measuring your mobile services very effectively. Truth be told, few companies do.
While part of this challenge lays in technology itself, a big part of the issue stems from the mobile strategy most companies adopt.
On the technology front, measuring native apps can be more difficult because it's not as easy to make instrumentation changes on the fly. You need to plan out well in advance what you'll measure and then tie those plans to your development cycles. If you don't update your native app frequently, it can be extremely difficult to make adjustments to what you're measuring. Ultimately, this hamstrings your ability to analyze mobile users and lessens your ability to improve the mobile feature-set you provide them.
At first glance, it might seem like a good idea to take the same approach to measuring your mobile apps as you do for measuring your mobile website. After all, regardless of whether their using a native application or a mobile website, your customers' goals are the same. Consumers go to Zappos.com's mobile site to find a great pair of shoes or accessories. Same reason they use the Zappos iPhone app. Now we could debate which platform—mobile site versus mobile app—provides a better customer experience but that's a longer discussion and not the topic for today. My point is, if you're like most industry leaders, your customers are already engaging with your company via their mobile devices, but you're probably not measuring your mobile services very effectively. Truth be told, few companies do.
While part of this challenge lays in technology itself, a big part of the issue stems from the mobile strategy most companies adopt.
On the technology front, measuring native apps can be more difficult because it's not as easy to make instrumentation changes on the fly. You need to plan out well in advance what you'll measure and then tie those plans to your development cycles. If you don't update your native app frequently, it can be extremely difficult to make adjustments to what you're measuring. Ultimately, this hamstrings your ability to analyze mobile users and lessens your ability to improve the mobile feature-set you provide them.
Mobile websites, on the other hand, have more flexibility when it comes to measurement. Your measurement changes aren't tied to the infrequent development cycles of native apps. That means you can adjust what you're measuring more easily and more often. Surprisingly, even with these lower barriers, many companies aren't even tracking mobile website activity—to say nothing of their native apps.
The reasons for these shortcomings in measurement can typically be found in corporate mobile strategies themselves. With the great app gold rush currently taking place, companies are racing to produce apps with little regard for their ultimate purpose. All too often, half-baked strategies are followed, such as "we need an iPhone app because our competitor has one" or "they are a great marketing vehicle so let's build one." Now don't get me wrong, in the absence of not having a mobile presence, these approaches can yield some results. But the operative word there is "some." Too often, those results lean more toward negative reviews and lost customers than the goals the companies initially had in mind. By and large, it's the companies that have incorporated measurement as a key piece of their mobile development strategies that are gaining a healthy return on their mobile investments.
Are you currently taking any steps to measure mobile apps or sites? If so, what are you measuring?
Comments