How to Boost Mobile App Growth with Behavior Analytics
You already know how crucial it is to obtain as many downloads as you can for your mobile app development services. However, what occurs once consumers download your app?
Do they go on to become customers who pay?
Do they interact with it or do they give up on it quickly?
Do they have trouble navigating your UI or are they able to find what they need?
You need a thorough understanding of how consumers engage with your app once they download it to create genuinely enjoyable user experiences. At that point, behavior analytics or user experience comes into play.
While behavior analytics focuses on “why” a user made a certain action, traditional analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel, concentrate on quantitative data around user events (e.g., 1000 screen views, 20% drop-offs) (e.g., why someone watched a screen, why someone dropped off).
Consider one instance.
Imagine that after inviting someone to your party, you find out that they departed without saying goodbye in a matter of minutes. Your other visitors provided you with similar information, but you have no idea why the individual departed.
You might have immediately learned that the guest was terrified of the party’s pet dogs if you had a CCTV camera to watch everyone arrive and learn about their experiences. Because of one of his interactions, he was afraid when he came and made the decision to go.
Knowing this, you planned your next party with a dog-friendly play area away from the partygoers. The individual returned and was the last to go from the gathering.
In this case, behavior analytics is what the CCTV camera tells you, and conventional analytics is what the information supplied by your guests does.
It can assist you in comprehending the subtleties of user behavior, particularly in relation to vexing user experiences.
According to PWC research of US customers, 32% of respondents claim they would stop supporting a business they adore after only one negative encounter.
You may conduct tests, customize experiences, and optimize your mobile app development using the data-backed insights from behavior analytics to guarantee a flawless user experience.
This post will introduce you to behavior analytics and explain how it may help you improve your app.
You’ll see actual company cases that have effectively used it and get pointers and advice on how to get started with this effective tool.
Now let’s get started and realize your mobile app’s full potential.
Behavior analytics tools for mobile apps
When a person uses your mobile app, behavior analytics monitors and examines their behaviors to learn more about their motives. Heatmaps and session recordings are the most widely used techniques for examining user activity in your mobile app development.
Ask your mobile app development company to employ these two techniques to provide qualitative information if you compare them to important user funnels in your application. Examine the session records of individuals who leave your sales funnel, for instance.
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Let’s examine these two aspects.
Session recordings
You may view a video replay of how a certain user group or all of your users interact with your app development services by using session recordings.
All user sessions and events—such as taps, screen views, screen changes, crashes, long presses, flings, scrolling, etc.—are recorded using a standard tool like the session records. Everything is connected to a single user profile, allowing you to examine each user trip separately throughout several sessions.
This makes it easier to spot locations where users could be spending too much time and friction points when they quit the program. With the data-backed observations you extract from session recordings, you may conduct A/B testing on mobile devices.
To support users and encourage upgrades, a SaaS software, for instance, may use session records to pinpoint areas where customers are having trouble with the upgrade subscription process. From there, it might make small adjustments to address these issues.
Let’s explore the session recordings benefits:
The advantages of recording sessions on mobile apps
Learn more about abandonment
Examine user experiences at the precise moment that consumers stop using the app development services. App crashes or unresponsiveness is one of the causes of cart abandonments. Watch the sessions that resulted in ANR problems and crashes.
Quickly fix user problems
Before your team can diagnose and replicate the problem, there are frequently back-and-forth emails sent to users. With the use of session records, you can quickly troubleshoot user sessions and find solutions without pressuring users to submit replication instructions.
Improve your UX research.
Session recordings may be used to further assist your user interviews or surveys by seeing what users encounter. It’s similar to seeing a buddy use an app while you take notes.
Collaboration and communication are made easier
Provide specific feedback on how customers are using the mobile app’s features, any obstacles they are facing, and what you need to do to make the product stickier, fix any errors, or make it easier to use. Obtain support from stakeholders and attach proofs of usage in addition to presenting the quantitative data.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps show the areas of an app screen where users are tapping or scrolling. It assists you in determining which sections of the program are being used and neglected.
To increase engagement and time spent on the mobile app development, a news app may, for instance, utilize a heatmap to determine which areas of the story readers are tapping the most. From there, it might add internal or external connections to the post.
Advantages of heatmaps for mobile apps
Recognize user focus
Learn quickly which areas of your app are most and least tapped by users. To determine it, you don’t have to configure anything or go into numerical data.
Boost CTA engagement
Examine how much more interaction users have with call-to-action buttons than with other screen components. For instance, you may observe that while there are a lot of taps on one little button on the screen, your CTA is not receiving as many touches. Changing the button locations would be a useful suggestion.
Testing of hypotheses
Encourage hypothesis testing if you want to rework your application. For instance, rearranging an app part’s order might boost engagement since users were previously not scrolling through the section. It is possible to confirm or refute this theory by examining the scroll map both before and after the modification.
UI decluttering
Determine which UI/UX design services parts of your program are crowded. To determine whether the user interface needs to be simplified, you may, for instance, utilize a heatmap to observe if users are pressing non-interactive items rather than interactive ones.
Utilizing behavior analytics’ capability, you may generate many, data-supported optimization suggestions for:
- Streamline the onboarding process for users
- Increase app retention and engagement.
- Boost in-app purchases and conversions.
- Fix and resolve issues more quickly
Next, let’s examine several well-known businesses and go more into these use cases.
In what ways might behavior analytics aid in mobile app optimization?
While every sector and mobile app development company within it has a different strategy for maximizing user experience, there are a few fundamental elements that are shared by all. Let’s talk about them now.
Streamline the onboarding process for users
The two most important phases of the customer experience are registration and onboarding. You can still make amends if a user has a negative experience later on in the journey, but if you make a mistake during onboarding, you won’t see them on your app ever again.
It is important to ensure that the user experience is seamless, expedient and guides them towards the primary objective of your mobile application development. Simply put, activation of the user.
You can pinpoint the areas of uncertainty and annoyance during onboarding with the help of heatmaps and session recordings. Then get rid of them for a smooth onboarding experience.
For instance, A social networking app’s statistics indicate that a lot of new users become confused by the onboarding screens and drop-offs. Users may want to use the program right away, but it requires you to follow every screen.
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However, it also has a skip option, which isn’t obvious on the onboarding screens. Session records show that a large number of users tap the screen irrationally, fail to perceive the button and end the session without continuing. Increasing the visibility of the “Skip” button on the onboarding screens may facilitate faster user navigation.
Increase app retention and engagement.
Your user has been successfully onboarded and enabled. What happens next? How do you make sure that users make use of your app’s features and come back every day to utilize them?
To improve your mobile app development services, you may either start with questions and use heatmaps and session recordings to answer them, or at the very least, formulate a hypothesis for a new experiment.
Queries like as:
- Do people even experiment with your features?
- Is one feature taking up too much of their time?
- Which characteristics do they disregard?
- Are they making use of a static component?
- How far down a screen are people scrolling?
- Are they focusing on the crucial areas you want them to see?
For instance, you may make use of the information if you observe that users are spending a lot of time on a specific feature. To boost user interaction, you might highlight it even more within the app or concentrate your marketing efforts on highlighting that function.
An app that was akin to Instagram in its early stages and only displayed user-generated material is another fictitious example. Even if they spend a lot of time on their feeds, users do not engage with the material. The postings’ dead taps suggest that people want to respond but are unable to. After seeing this behavior, the team added the ability to like, comment on, and save the post.
Boost in-app purchases and conversions.
To make sure people enjoy what you’ve created within the app, engagement is essential. But making money is what you want to do. Enabling in-app sales, membership upgrades, or ad revenue are ways that you might generate income.
You must make sure the customer can simply access purchasing alternatives, go through the purchase funnel, and make payments without difficulty.
You have to get this aspect right since it has the most impact on your bottom line.
Configuring your key funnels and determining which stage consumers leave the transaction are the greatest ways to assess this.
- Is this page the cart?
- Do customers anticipate anything from the checkout page?
- Is the form for checkout too lengthy?
- Where is the CTA placed?
- Could customers notice every available payment option?
After reviewing the quantitative data from your funnels, you might have more questions. However, heatmaps and session recordings could be able to help you with conversion rate optimization.
Let’s take an example where one issue your mobile app development may be facing is that it has millions of free users but a very low paid conversion rate. Upon research, it was discovered that a large number of users selected the upgrade option, selected a few text pieces that were not interactive, and then decided not to proceed with the update. This suggests that they may be waiting to upgrade in order to gather additional information.
It could be necessary to provide a trial version of the product or more thorough information about its advantages.
Fix and resolve issues more quickly
It takes time to regain your reputation on the Google Play Store and App Store. Users who frequently experience app crashes or not responding issues not only become irate but also visit the app store and leave a negative review with the lowest rating.
Fewer people find your app as a result, which negatively impacts your total app store optimization performance. You not only miss out on potential new users, but you also lose out on current ones.
It is critical to promptly address consumer concerns and provide speedy solutions in response to these evaluations. They feel significant to you and you earn their trust.
But what is a quick remedy for problems?
Reactive is the typical approach. One day you receive a negative review, to which you respond and attempt to address it by requesting further information via email.
Session recording tools allow you to replicate issues such as app crashes, anger taps, and non-responsive apps, as well as other stack trace problems, and take proactive measures to fix them before your users get in touch with you.
For instance, You release an updated software app development version with several new features, including a new search filter. You start receiving a lot of complaints about the app crashing as soon as you release the most recent version. To replicate the problem, you are everywhere. requesting screenshots from users, reviewing error logs, and other such actions.
How are behavior analytics used by well-known brands?
These are actual cases of well-known firms utilizing behavior analytics for mobile applications.
Costa Coffee
The parent company of the British coffee brand Costa Coffee is Coca-Cola.
Customers who register for the loyalty program using the Costa Coffee app spend nearly three times as much yearly as non-registered customers do, according to a case study by UXCam. That’s a staggering 173% increase in spending per user!
The group discovered that over 30% of newly downloaded app users stopped using it after installing and signing up for the reward program. Even though a quantitative analytics technique had been used to identify this problem, more data was still required to determine the reason behind the user drop-off. The figures by themselves were insufficient!
CricHeroes
With more than 17 million users, CricHeroes is the most popular Cricket app worldwide. Players can use analytics to track their performance and maintain score of matches.
The CricHeroes team sought to provide the greatest user experience and increase its user base, but one of their challenges was that they were unable to identify the areas where users were becoming stuck, according to Smartlook’s case study.
Making people communicate with one another was one of the main hurdles in terms of engagement. Automatic nudging in CricHeroes helps you to nudge users to communicate with one another.
The team found additional trigger points for messages when examining the user journeys through session records. Users were able to send 11% more messages on average after adding these additional points.
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BigBasket
The greatest online grocery delivery service in India, BigBasket offers both on-demand and subscription delivery options.
However, there is always room for improvement, and the design team at BigBasket encountered a few difficulties. They required a solution to assist them in better understanding their consumers because they had limited insights into user behavior and had gone through a five-day lengthy UAT procedure.
And heatmaps and session recordings for mobile apps came in handy for that! They may now test fast, perform UI/UX design research, and keep an eye on user behavior.
They have assisted the development team in reproducing crashes and app freezes, kept an eye on new feature upgrades, and located conversion bottlenecks.
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How to choose a behavior analytics tool for your app?
Achievement
How does the SDK affect the functionality of your app? Make sure the behavior analytics tool’s SDK is light and doesn’t cause sluggish app loading by closely examining it. Verify whether the SDK is causing your server queries to grow large.
Security & Privacy
Verify that the data of your users is secure and confidential. Verify that the platform abides with HIPAA, CCPA, and GDPR. Since the program works with sensitive data, you should be able to choose which parts of the session records to see or keep hidden while your data is safeguarded by industry-leading enterprise-grade encryption.
Experience Optimization Features
You need a platform to create insights about your app users’ behavior, facilitate team collaboration with custom workflows, prioritize insights for action, conduct experiments, and roll out new experiences if you want to have a comprehensive view of everything and run your experience optimization program efficiently.
Conclusion
Behavior analytics is a game-changer in the ever-evolving field of mobile app development, not merely a tool. With the help of practical insights, it gives developers the power to decide in ways that promote app growth. Including behavior analytics in development, processes will be essential to not only keeping current but also leading the way as the mobile app market develops.
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