By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director of Product Marketing —
At the Mobile Shopping Summit in October, I sat in as a panelist with Josh Himwich, VP of e-commerce solutions at Quidsi, and Jeff Ulrich, Sr. Manager of Emerging Technologies at United Airlines, to discuss how companies can understand their mobile customers better through meaningful analytics. Here are the topics we covered:
At the Mobile Shopping Summit in October, I sat in as a panelist with Josh Himwich, VP of e-commerce solutions at Quidsi, and Jeff Ulrich, Sr. Manager of Emerging Technologies at United Airlines, to discuss how companies can understand their mobile customers better through meaningful analytics. Here are the topics we covered:
- How can a company decide where to devote its resources? Should it add features and functionality or expand to additional platforms?
- How do analytical needs change over the lifecycle of mobile services?
- What kind of information should a company collect about its mobile users? And how should this data be used?
- What type of metrics should a company track about its mobile users?
Collectively, we made several key points. First, traditional predictive analytics fall short in truly measuring and understanding the customer experience because they tell a company what is happening (e.g., X number of users visited a page, Y number of user left a page and the site has Z number of errors), but not why any of these things happened.
Understanding why helps a company to truly understand mobile user behavior and, in turn, how to optimize mobile channels accordingly. Without insights into a customer's behavior, a company is left with the time-consuming and painful task of performing a lot of "what if" analysis, re-tagging a mobile app or site and having to wait for a subsequent release before the new tags are deployed and information from the new tags can provide any meaningful insight. Meanwhile, it's possible that a lot of customers are frustrated and perhaps lost for good while a company is stuck in a world of analysis.
Third, analytics that are useful will change over time depending on where your company is in the mobile lifecycle. Here are the three key phases and suggested areas of measurement:
Understanding why helps a company to truly understand mobile user behavior and, in turn, how to optimize mobile channels accordingly. Without insights into a customer's behavior, a company is left with the time-consuming and painful task of performing a lot of "what if" analysis, re-tagging a mobile app or site and having to wait for a subsequent release before the new tags are deployed and information from the new tags can provide any meaningful insight. Meanwhile, it's possible that a lot of customers are frustrated and perhaps lost for good while a company is stuck in a world of analysis.
Third, analytics that are useful will change over time depending on where your company is in the mobile lifecycle. Here are the three key phases and suggested areas of measurement:
- Planning & Development of Mobile Offering(s): What are my user demographics (gender, geography, age)? How are users accessing my site today? (Which browser, OS, device type?)
- Deployment of Initial Mobile Offering: What is working well? Which mobile features are used the most? Where are users struggling? What is the business impact of customer struggle?
- Optimize the Mobile Offering: How can I improve conversion rates? User ratings? What should be fixed / removed / invested further? Should I expand to other mobile platforms? Which ones? Should I invest further into the mobile website?
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