2016 Are You Ready?

MOBILE APP ANALYTICS TRENDS

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As January approaches, so does the opportunity to take a look at your marketing department and its efforts. The first month of the new year is all about foreshadowing, goal setting and strategizing to create a master marketing plan for 2016. In most companies, despite persistent financial pressures, marketing exec-utives are expecting to spend more money this year on digital efforts, and deciding where to invest promises to be an exercise in discretion. However, according to Forrester, the mobile mind shift will become increas-ingly more important in 2016. Compa-nies cannot afford not to treat mobile as core to their whole customer experi-ence. Investing in the appropriate technologies to deliver on consumers’ soaring expectations will be required. To effectively capitalize on the mobile app acceleration, you need to gain in-sight into how your consumers interact with your mobile offerings and anticipate what they want before they realize it themselves.

“The global mobile revolution—while still in its infancy—will acceler-ate next year. By the end of 2016, Forrester forecasts that 4.8 billion individuals globally will use a mobile phone. Smartphone sub-scribers will represent 46% of the global population.”

-Predictions 2016: The Mo-bile Revolution Accelerates,

Forrester, November 2015

2013

2015

7%

52%

2016 ?

This whitepaper points to how the mobile app revolution will play out across nine top mobile analytics trends that you need to be aware of in order to successfully evolve your customer culture, shape your mobile marketing processes and leapfrog your competition.

In 2013, only seven percent of respondents from 100 companies of 1,000 of more employees indicated their organization had a fully implemented mobile app strategy. In 2015, 52% of respondents claim to have a fully implemented strategy

- Mobile Maturity Survey, Red Hat, Inc., November 2015

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Consumer Mobile Expectations Will Soar1Mobile offers one of the most powerful contact points for organizations to connect with their audience.

When a consumer installs your app on their device, they now have you in their pocket all day long, everywhere they go. This provides an incredible opportunity to listen to your customers, engage with them and aggregate insights that allow you to delight them even more. Apps are capable of delivering improved user experiences, vibrant competitions and new market paradigms. The reality is that consumers now prefer apps, and expect them to deliver a faster, more superior experience to the web.

As a digital marketer, are you prepared to capitalize on this ever-growing opportunity?

Sixty-nine percent of marketers agree con-sumers are more accepting of behavioral targeting in mobile channels—but 84 per-cent said they do not automate personaliza-tion on mobile, even though they know that such personalization would achieve a 66 percent increase in mobile conversion rate from the average, according to Adobe’s 2015 Digital Marketing Survey Results. Mobile analytics captured from apps help your development team deliver even bet-ter apps in the future. Capturing real-time insights that reveal consumers’ behavior and decision-making processes results in improved user experiences.

“Mobile isn’t a channel. It’s a platform for interaction, engagement and sales that is quick-ly moving to rival the desktop. Every process should at least include the question, “How does mobile affect the end user?” Companies should strive for a more strategic approach with experiments and initiatives contributing to greater mobile maturity in every area.”

-Digital Marketing Survey Results, Adobe, July 2015

-The 2015 U.S. Mobile App Report, comScore, September 2015

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The Holistic Digital Marketing Approach2

In 2016 your mobile app strategy should no longer be a solitary entity in your marketing plan, but an extension of your overall marketing approach. It should be part of a cohesive brand vision that transverses all platforms, chan-nels and devices, forming a seamless, cross-channel integration.

“To treat mobile as a standalone silo is a mistake of structure. Like digital itself, mobile should be woven into the fabric of every marketing strategy and tactic and aligned to key business goals.”

-Digital Marketing Survey Results, Adobe, July 2015

As brands begin to strategically blur the lines between social, eCommerce, and apps, companies should use analytics insight to optimize their efforts and prevent any static or friction.

With mobile app stores’ revenue expect-ed to be upwards of 58 billion dollars in 2016, companies can’t afford to miss creating a fluid user experience that translates across platforms and devices.

So what is the best way to achieve this holistic brand marketing?—Feed your mobile analytics data back into your marketing strategy and product development.

Collecting data that provides a more cohesive vision of the content your users consume, their mobile behaviors, and their lifestyle decisions will generate insights on how to best serve and retain your customers through holistic marketing efforts.

- Worldwide Mobile App Revenue Forecast, Statista, 2015

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As end-of-the-year reports begin to roll in, trends show that in 2015, mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic for the first time and is expected to be the dominant source of traffic in the future.

The mobile revolution is fueled, in large part, by the ever-increasing use of smartphones. Forrester’s Predictions 2016: The Mobile Revolution Acceler-ates forecasts that by the end of 2016, 4.8 billion individuals globally will use a mobile phone, meaning smartphone subscribers will represent 46% of the total population.

In the coming year, the overwhelming number of apps will become less about the offered features, and more about how each app compliments, relates to, or enriches the user’s lifestyle. As mobile usage becomes further ingrati-ated into our culture the way that users spend time with their mobile devices becomes more streamlined—users expect to have a convenient and

App Aggregation Will Be All The Rage3 seamless mobile experience, and that means app aggregation.

“Consumers will continue to spend most of their time in only a few apps but will increasingly turn to aggre-gation apps and a handful of plat-forms to get the content and services they need. Because it will be more convenient to navigate a contextual stream on a single platform rather than hop among apps.”

-Predictions 2016: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates, Forrester,

November 2015

Merging various apps or features to stay ahead of the mobile movement could drastically alter your 3rd-party vendor and tagging implementations. Mobile analytics will become an integral part of governing and validating the data collection processes before, during, and after the inevitable cascade of app aggregation.

Mobile Marketing Strategies Must Mature4

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Given the undisputable evidence that consumers continue to clamour for winning mobile app experiences—and the steadily increasing amount of revenue touched by mobile app engagement—it is surprising that in 2015 only one third of digital marketers constructed a mobile strategy, according to Adobe’s 2015 Digital Marketing Survey Results.

Companies seeking to maintain, or gain, a competitive edge need to develop mature mobile marketing strategies. A key part of doing so is implementing and maintaining a mobile analytics plan that is aligned with your business goals.The Adobe Survey mentioned above

“Planned maturity organizations recognize the advantages of strategic planning for mobile and reap the rewards. They far outperform their peers, achieving a mobile conversion rate 12% better than the average”

-Digital Marketing Survey Results, Adobe, July 2015

also revealed that companies who have a mature mobile marketing strategy are “200% more likely to have mobile app analytics” in place to monitor and analyze their mobile data.

After applying a mobile analytics solution, verifying that the data you are collecting is accurate becomes critical. It will do your organization no good if you are collecting countless data sets on your consumers if those numbers are inaccurate due to issues with the analytics solutions’ implementations. A data quality assurance platform can check, test and validate these imple-mentations for you, ensuring that the mobile data you are using is accurate.

-State of Mobile Technology For Marketers, Forrester, 2014

Adaptation & Continuous Testing Prove Paramount 5

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The mobile environment is rapidly changing, and companies who want to keep up must achieve accurate, real-time insights and be agile enough to act upon them. Historically, however, less than a quarter of digital marketers have been able to accomplish this.

“Last year, only 23% of digital marketers planned to optimize their mobile experiences with A/B testing, multivariate testing or segmentation.”

-Digital Marketing Survey Results, Adobe, July 2015

The other 77% of marketing experts are missing out on key analytics practices that lead to the most effective marketing strategies.

As you build and extend your mobile engagement strategy, it is crucial to invest the needed time and budget into extending your mobile measurement capabilities. When you are continu-ously adapting to mobile trends and consistently testing implementations and processes, you can be confident in your analytics data to make informed decisions, anticipate opportunities and uncover potential risks.

If you can automate your testing processes, all the better. Automation cuts down on time-consuming analytics maintenance and has been shown to increase overall conversion.

“Automation of the testing process alone was shown to increase conversion by 15% for all respondents.”

-Digital Marketing Survey Results, Adobe, July 2015

Behavioral Cohorting Emerges6

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A form of predictive analytics, behav-ioral cohorting analyzes users by their collective actions and leverages their historical data to develop customer profile groupings. And in 2016, behavioral cohorting will enable targeted efforts to win your customers’ mobile moments.

Traditional cohort analytics groups consumers according to time-frames, usually determined by the first engagement with your brand. However, behavioral cohorting enables more precise targeting of current and potential customers, allowing brands

to address similar behavioral groups in more effective ways.

The more effectively you communicate with customers, the more likely you are to maintain their loyalty and continued engagement with your brand.

Previously, this method of customer retention has been expensive and time-consuming. However, rapid advancements made in simplifying these analytical infrastructures indicates that in 2016, behavioral cohorting will become increasingly accessible and utilized.

Some mobile analytics experts suggest there are three levels of metrics that should be considered in your mobile app strategy.

Level 1: Counters: These metrics provide a baseline of your app’s success with regards to engagement, retention and monetization. Metrics typically measured at this level include: MAUs (Monthly Active Us-ers), DAUs (Daily Active Uniques), page views and revenue.

Level 2: Identify Problems: These are the metrics that move you towards behavior cohorting by providing a high-level picture of user behavior. Knowing, for example how many actions users take per day, what actions are most common, what actions users are not taking, etc. can allow you to identify and locate issues and opportunities within your app. This insight also empowers you to to create different segments based on user behavior or demographic (i.e. active users vs. inactive, location and age).

Level 3: What Drives Growth: After analyzing this segmented behavior and assigning behavior-based co-horting, you can apply predictive analytics to influence those behaviors which correlate to lifetime value.

Source: 50 Mobile App Development Tips #24: Analyze Consumer Behavior, Amplitude Mobile Analytics & Optimizely, August 2015

Simpler, Less Expensive Interfaces Promote Efficiency7

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Since their conception, analytics interfaces have generally been complex and have required experienced engineers to develop, operate, and modify them, which can become very expensive and time-consuming.

However, trends show that in 2016, mobile analytics user interfaces will be simplified, enabling teams to personal-ize their most relative data into parameters as clear or complex as they need.

“Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple.”

-Business Magnate, Richard Branson

With the transition to mobile analytics gaining traction, now is the time to con-struct a simple user interface, before all the costs of developing and implement-ing a complex system prevents a more efficient mobile analytics process.

Another benefit of a simpler interface is that it is more accessible to non-ana-lytics professionals, such as employees from other teams, who need analytical data to make informed decisions to work toward your company’s overarch-ing strategic objectives.

Considering the complexity of the an-alytics user interface should be para-mount when choosing a mobile analyt-ics vendor to fit your needs. In addition, Forrester also recommends that you exercise caution when selecting an ana-lytics vendor:

“Shortlist mobile analytics vendors carefully. Few vendors offer a full suite of analytics solutions that yield actionable customer insights across all touchpoints. For example, mobile analytics solutions today offer few options for A/B testing. Once you have your shortlist, you’ll need to carefully choose the vendor that best meets your business re-quirements. There are many catego-ries and attributes in and for which the vendors all look the same. Be careful and ask questions. For de-velopers, there is an ever-expand-ing list of ISVs, frameworks, and services available for mobile mea-surement. The sheer number and variety of choices can be a bit over-whelming, but the options generally break down into a few manageable solutions.”

-Use Analytics To Create Mobile Best Practices, Forrester, May 2015

Data Visualization Replaces Spreadsheets8

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In addition to utilizing more simple in-terfaces to promote accessibility, mobile analytics vendors are also becoming no-ticeably focused on visual aesthetics in their reports, rather than simply offering raw information or functions.

2016 will see more abandonment of monotonous spreadsheets and an in-creased dressing up of digital data with interactive visualization tools.

These versatile tools promote a more comprehensive understanding of your online marketing data; from presenting visuals of an overarching generalization to a hands-on tour of narrow statistics that divulge and analyze user behaviors.

Visualization tools also further empower non-analytical employees to understand and interact with your organization’s mobile data, allowing for data-based decisions to be made across teams and throughout the whole company.

As empowering as visualization is, how-ever, it is only truly effective with accu-rate data.

Before creating your stunning reports, verify that you are presenting accurate data through the use of a mobile data quality assurance platform which scans your apps’ analytics implementations for inconsistencies or errors.

Mobile Security Becomes a Priority9

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Mobile apps are difficult to secure, a fact consumers are becoming increas-ingly aware of.

“The number of malicious mobile security attacks will at least double from 2015… While these breaches won’t significantly affect consumer behaviors, businesses will still have to invest more to meet the level of risk they are seeing on a daily basis.”

-Predictions 2016: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates, Forrester, No-

vember 2015

Consequently, in 2016, businesses must preemptively increase their mo-bile security measures exponentially to counter the steep incline of breeches in security on web and mobile data.

As 3rd-party mobile security measures increase drastically, their implementa-tion and functionality must be moni-tored and validated to ensure no con-sumer or company data is being leaked. Adoption of a mobile data quality plat-form monitors the 3rd-party vendors and the data they collect as well as alert you to potential threats.

- The State of Mobile Application Insecurity, Ponemon Institute, 2015

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2015 taught us that mobile is rapidly surpassing most forms of digital communication, but that most digital marketers are not prepared to make the transition. Most companies have yet to develop a mature strategy for the movement to mobile, a sound plan for cap-turing, analyzing and utilizing their consumers’ mobile data.

This white paper outlined some mobile analytics trends to help start your journey toward a fully-developed mobile strategy that will help you reach your customers more effectively during their mobile moments.

Take a free tour of AppAssurance™, ObservePoint’s new mobile app auditing solution.

AppAssurance™ is a data quality platform that monitors, tests and validates the integration of your mobile apps analytics solutions to ensure you are collecting accurate data to guide the decisions critical to your mobile success.

FREE MOBILE APP AUDIT

CONCLUSION

Co-Founder and CEO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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A digital marketing veteran, Rob Seolas has been a leader in the online marketing space for more than 15 years. With extensive experience in startups and private sales investments, Rob approaches digital marketing challenges with the passion and energy of a visionary leader.

It was this drive to address and answer compelling MarTech questions that led Rob to create ObservePoint with his co-founder, John Pestana in 2007.

ObservePoint is the premier website and marketing tag validation platform, helping data-informed companies trust their analytics numbers to better serve their customers through the application of best practices in tag auditing and validation. ObservePoint’s solution audits millions of pages globally every month to report data loss, inflation, and leakage to web analytics managers and stakeholders.

ROB SEOLAS