Mobile app analytics is a boon to mobile marketers in this competitive era, helping businesses to track user behaviour as well as app performance. Companies use analytics as a tool for business and marketplace exploration, and to expand the efficiency of their services and apps.
Businesses tend to measure everything as most business leaders believe that if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it. Analytics helps to measure and analyse numerous aspects, and is omnipresent now. In the era of ubiquitous computing, most activities are carried out by means of apps installed on handheld devices. The analysis of these apps plays a vital role in enabling marketers to gain important insights regarding customer behaviour, etc, for the growth of their business. Mobile app analytics tools evaluate the performance of the applications by tracking user behaviour. Finding an appropriate mobile app analytics tool is a challenging task for businesses.
Countly is one of the best choices for businesses looking for mobile analytics. It can be self-hosted or hosted on a private cloud. It can work on Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux and CentOS, and with software like Node.js and MongoDB. It needs at least 2 CPUs to perform well. It can aid tens of billions of hits per month on a scalable infrastructure. By default, it operates on real data. It consists of three kinds of open source components — standalone, jQuery and related components, and Node.js and related components. It consists of SDKs for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OS platforms. Contributors have provided many SDKs for different development environments, which include Phonegap, React Native, Icenium and Unity 3D. A simple SDK is enough to get data analytics if you have Internet connectivity.
Any device that is able to send HTTP requests can be part of analytics in Countly. The examples are smart TVs, set-top boxes, IP security cameras, etc.
Features and services
Countly has numerous features that make it useful for businesses in the current era. Some of the features are:
- It’s a real-time open source analytics app that can be hosted on your own servers.
- It can be extended in terms of functionalities via several plugins.
- Users can customise several events based on business requirements.
- It has a user retention feature.
- Customisation is possible in dashboards.
- Revenue analytics is available in the enterprise version.
- It enables drilling down of data.
- Funnels help in analysing the user flow through a mobile.
- Various parameters can be tracked — sessions, loyalty, carriers, offline activity, device type, platforms, etc.
- It features data export.
- It enables mobile app cohort analysis.
- It gives rich notifications.
- Has GDPR and HIPAA compliance.
- Enables crash and error management.
- Comes with advanced security features.
- Has efficient APIs.
Countly provides two main types of services to customers via its enterprise edition and the community edition. The enterprise edition is available for a 30-day free trial period, after which users have to pay for the services. It includes features such as:
- Premium Countly plugins
- On-premise or in the cloud services
- Granular data
- SLA (Service Level Agreement)
- Custom SDK and plugin development services
- Analytics consultancy
The community edition is free, though you need your own analytics service for it. It includes basic Countly plugins and aggregated data facilities.
Drilling down data
This is the most powerful feature of the enterprise edition of Countly. Figure 1 shows the different screens during the process of drilling down data.
Countly Drill offers a number of functionalities:
- Advanced segmentation of data by various filters, i.e., AND, OR and By.
- Visualisation of data by means of different graph types such as line, pie and bar.
- Drilling down the data based on the time horizon, i.e., hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
- Viewing the data based on different parameters; i.e., how many times an event occurred, how many users performed an event, and the average criterion.
- Offers session drills.
- Can build complex queries.
Cohorts
Cohorts is a very powerful plugin of Countly. It creates a group of users based on their behaviour. It adds a behavioural segmentation capability to existing reports, user profiles, funnels, retentions and flow data. It provides flexibility to create your own cohort by applying several conditions. You can also update it by providing several filters. Figure 2 shows how to add and modify cohorts in Countly.
Cohorts are regenerated automatically, so the list of customers in them is kept up to date. Cohorts help businesses in many of the following ways:
- Users in the same clusters with similar characteristics can be identified and their progress tracked.
- Various insights can be generated by combining the users of a cohort.
- A cohort is very vital to evaluate the life cycle of the mobile app.
- It helps to distinguish customers.
- It compares the performance between two or more groups.
- It helps in speedy decisions for the management of the business.
To sum up, mobile app analytics is indispensable for businesses, and helps them gain numerous insights that can boost business growth. Countly is one of the best open source tools that can help them with mobile data analytics.
