Mobile: What's Important to Measure and Why

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —



To better understand their users, companies are getting mobile analytics up and running almost as fast as they submit their applications to the marketplace. As traffic in the mobile channel continues to grow (witness the amount of mobile sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Shipping Day), visibility into what's happening with your customers in this space becomes increasingly important. But is it enough to just apply typical website KPIs to your mobile application? While getting standard metrics—conversion rate, device information and session length—is certainly a good start, these metrics don't paint the whole picture of what's happening with your mobile users. Shopping on a desktop at work or home doesn't compare to shopping on-the-go with a smart phone. The usual metrics that are typically monitored to optimize a website only scratch the surface of the types of data points that are needed to make your mobile application successful.

Here are some additional things you should have insight into in order to make better decisions on making improvements to your mobile application:

• Device Gesture and User Behavior: Did your customer have to change the screen's orientation in order to see the full page of your mobile site or application? Did they have to pinch and zoom the screens to increase the view because the font size was too small? Which pages did they scroll up and down? How many times did a customer click the submit button on the checkout page in order to purchase something, or how many times did he have to enter the same data in a form field? When trying to get to the bottom of a conversion issue, it's important to know that your customer didn’t purchase something, but far more valuable to know that your customer tried several times to purchase something on their mobile or tablet and that your application had interaction issues.


• Network Reachability: Were your customers online and reachable while they were trying to complete something important, like a purchase on your mobile application? Were they on 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi or other while your application was trying to send important bits of data? Do you know if network connectivity issues negatively impacted your customers' experience on your mobile application? Figuring out where the points of failure are in transmitting data will help you make better decisions in how you want your application to work. You may decide that your application only needs to be online for certain cases and can remain offline for others, without disrupting your user's experience.


• Application Crashes: How many times did your mobile application crash on your customers? What devices were they on? What was your customer trying to do in your mobile application when it crashed? What was the network connectivity, battery level and memory usage when the application crash occurred? To find a fix, it's necessary to see the type of mobile application errors, but correlating that application error with device information, user experience and network data will help you better understand the myriad things that can go wrong with your mobile application, and ensure you make smart decisions in resolving the problems.

Want to learn more about the types of information you need to gain insights into your mobile web or application and how it can help you to create a delightful user interface, apps with fewer crashes and one that users will not only download but continue to use? Take the interactive tour of CX Mobile.