Developing a Mobile Analytics Strategy

Would you invest in a stock if there were no way to track its valuation?  Owning the stock would be a blind venture:  no way to know if you should buy, sell—or if you’ve already lost your shirt.

Similarly, to make confident investments in a mobile products portfolio you need to establish clear measurement of progress against business objectives, proactively track performance, and create actionable insights to guide future product development.  

Mobile analytics enable you to execute on all these critical tasks.  And, according to MIT research, top performing companies tend to leverage analytics 5 times more than competitors.

Here are a few examples of how mobile analytics data enabled companies to directly improve business results:

• Comcast used analytics to improve its recruiting mobile app’s user experience and saw a dramatic impact on its overall recruiting results, with mobile applicants increasing by over 20% overall and mobile candidates completing their applications at a rate of over 50%
• Overstock.com used insights gained from Flurry’s mobile analytics to increase in-app purchases per user by 25%
• Airbnb improved conversion rates 5x using Mixpanel’s mobile analytics

Creating a mobile analytics strategy would seem to be a obvious part of every mobile product development effort.  However, it is often an after-thought at best.  Why?  

The simplest answer is that delivery teams focus on what’s needed to get an app to market, not how to manage business results.  But—much like managing a stock portfolio—it’s imperative to plan from the start how to measure, track and improve a mobile product over time.

Now, mobile analytics can be a complex topic.  There are a variety of vendor solutions, many of which are web-oriented solutions that have recently bolted on mobile capabilities rather than being truly fine-tuned for mobile.  (On the other hand, the traditional web analytics solutions more readily offer cross-channel insights, especially if your choice of mobile analytics tool is not integrated.)  In any case, among the mobile-focused vendors, while there is a lot of functional overlap, products are often targeted for specific business models or types of analysis.  

So, how to start?  Here we’ll explore three steps to creating and implementing a mobile analytics strategy.

Plan

Initially, there are three main categories of information you should focus on supporting:

• Business Measures of Success/KPIs.  Each product has a unique set of business outcome or success measures—these KPIs can include business results, technology performance, user behavior, and so on.  Whatever the business objective, make sure that the data required to calculate each KPI is accurately captured.  Also, know that KPIs may change over time as you gain insight and product matures.  Your objective is to ensure that all stakeholders can track the KPIs by which products’ contribution to the business is measured.
• Technology and Operational Monitoring.  Track technical aspects of product performance; for example, response time for a key operation, which devices are being used, app crash details, network connectivity, etc.  Your objective is to proactively surface defects and performance issues—before they are posted in a negative review or result in app deletion—that prevent users from enjoying an optimal experience.
• Engagement, Tracking User Behavior.  Prepare to listen for users’ signals about how and when they use the app, favored features, interactions and paths through the app.  Your objective is to connect the data points to surface insights on how to improve the aspects of user experience that are important to overall success.

In short, the data you track should support creation of information that either alerts you to issues to address or opportunities to explore.  This information will be historical (older than 24 hours), operational (today) or real-time.  

Plan to start simply:  Start small, test data accuracy and relevance, and iterate often—just like you’re doing with your mobile product as a whole.  Then assess the data and information you’re getting (or not getting) and optimize data being tracked—or even which tools are being used—to ensure you’re  generating actionable information.

Next, over time and as your analytics capabilities become more relevant and accurate, plan to generate insights from users’ cross-channel experiences, not just mobile.

Finally, ensure that everyone—including the development team—has access to the data so that they can suggest ways contribute to product improvement.

Select Tools

When should you select mobile analytics tools?  The answer is as soon as your product feature roadmap and supporting technology stack is established.  

As noted above, there are many mobile analytics tools available.  What’s more, mobile analytics tools are relatively new and immature.  So, what approach and which tool(s) to choose? 

Selection of the right analytics tools for your specific application can be a complicated task as vendors tend to be focused on various aspects of analytics; for example, app store analytics vs. crash data vs. defined user event analytics.

Here are some general principles to guide you:

• Start with what’s free and basic—a combination of Google Analytics and Flurry.  These two popular tools, along with the app store tools (if your app is in the public app stores), will provide a strong foundation.  Also, there are open source options, such as Countly, available.
• Understand your product’s category.  Don’t pick an analytics tool geared for mCommerce if your app is more focused on content delivery.  Also, assume that over time a blend of tools will be necessary to meet your specific needs.
• Understand your product roadmap.  Pick analytics tools that will grow with you—and that you can still afford—as you add features, users, platforms and/or countries.
• Look for features that enable you to clearly comprehend and quantify user behavior.  Two such features are   session playback, which lets you watch a simulation of actual users actions in your app, and heatmaps, which help you visualize which parts of your applications are highly utilized.
• Ensure that app architecture is designed to enable you to easily use multiple and/or switch mobile analytics tools as needed.
• Consider how you will track user activity across devices.  Tools like Google’s Universal Analytics track user paths across devices.

As you refine your selection of tools and approach, don’t forget to leverage enterprise data from operations, customer support, marketing or other relevant sources to build unique insights into your business and its customers.

Act

Beginning to collect product analytics data when your app goes live is missing a very valuable opportunity:  beta and/or pilot data.  A pre-release period using an early adopter group or a savvy user set (for example, through PreApps) can yield a significant amount of actionable analytic data.  

You may discover, for example, that real-world users don’t use your app the way you envisioned and you need to make navigational or usability changes, drop or add features, optimize technology performance or re-prioritize your roadmap—valuable insights that will make your general availability release more successful.

Analytics data is often your first alert—before user reviews or even a phone call from customer support—that something is amiss.  Consequently, when your app goes live establish a regular schedule to review analytics data.  If your app is customer/consumer facing you may choose to review salient data daily with a full weekly review, including carefully sifting through data to discern trends and user signals.  Make sure to provide all stakeholders with regular KPI reporting, as well as actionable insights you’ve developed.

Finally, make sure that the information generated from your mobile analytics is appropriately factored into continued product roadmap planning.  Objective data should play a significant role in feature prioritization (what to keep, improve or drop), evaluation of underlying technology performance, user experience design effectiveness, and quality to name just a few areas of influence.

Closing Thoughts

We believe that all enterprise mobile apps—whether for the employees, partners or customers/consumers—can significantly benefit from the insights enabled by mobile analytics.  We'd recommend that everyone plan to deliver durable value by developing and implementing a clear mobile analytics strategy for each mobile product in their portfolio.

Eight Reasons Why You Need Mobile Governance

Starting your enterprise mobile journey often appears deceptively easy.  

Someone identifies a business need for mobility, responds to a stakeholder’s interest or competition demands a mobile capability and then you either build or buy a solution.

What's the Worst that Could Happen?
However, companies quickly find that this ad hoc, tactical approach to enterprise mobility leads to a number of unfortunate results.  A few typical examples we see:

• The “brand injury” – User experience and brand representation is poor and creates any variety of off-message perceptions by employees, customers and/or partners.
• The “one-hit wonder” – No plan for product enhancement, not built for support and maintenance, architecture creates many risks such as privacy breeches, compliance problems, performance issues, etc.  See also “brand injury.”
• The “money pit” – Development approach is unsuited for meeting business objectives and much re-work, delays and technical debt result.  Or pursuing this project eats up budget for another more strategic project.  Executives regret they ever approved the work and mobile as a whole loses momentum.
• The “over-promise” – Inexperienced product teams are unable to meet business objectives due to technical challenges/delays, lack of stakeholder involvement, unrealistic expectations for success (or no defined success criteria), lack of user insight or inability to pivot based on actual results.
• The “stinker” – Skunk works project distracts key resources from valuable work, duplicates another initiative or is not aligned with the business, no effective leverage of best practices, infrastructure, existing code or business logic.  Who approved this?!  See also “one-hit wonder.”
• The “duplicate” – Someone decides that what’s needed is a mobile app that duplicates all the functionality of an existing web app or fat client app.  The app doesn’t address users’ “mobile moments” and is quickly on its way to life as shelf ware.  See also “brand injury” and “money pit.”

To avoid these common pitfalls, companies should make the investment not just in mobile development, but also in mobile governance.  

What exactly is mobile governance?  While mobile development is the execution of a specific release of a mobile product roadmap, mobile governance focuses on how to most effectively execute on all aspects of an organization’s mobile strategy, including management, measurement, best practices and standards—all with the objective of being best in class and achieving competitive advantage.

To better illustrate what mobile governance is and how it can help you be more effective, here are eight reasons why you need mobile governance:

Strategic Alignment and Focus

Making the right investments in mobile requires involving stakeholders from across the business, as well as key partners and customers.  This diverse group is best positioned to identify, organize, prioritize and fund mobile opportunities for the company as a whole and ensure alignment with overall business objectives and digital strategy.

To facilitate stakeholders’ priorities, the mobile governance team must socialize and manage mobile initiatives as a cohesive program made up of a number of product development efforts which will yield clear benefits.

Plan to periodically review prioritization—the competitive landscape and technology opportunities are highly fluid.

Business and Technical Oversight

Business oversight through the mobile governance team can prevent many of the negative scenarios described above.  Focus areas for business oversight include:

• Product portfolio management and product roadmap direction
• Legal and compliance
• Marketing and brand alignment
• Operational alignment, integration and readiness, including acceptance testing, pilot programs

Like business oversight, technical oversight has a major role to play in prevention of negative scenario development by providing clear guidance and support in the following areas:

• Support for and best use of enterprise mobile infrastructure
• Best practices for architecture and development, security
• User-centered design, adherence to platform standards
• Technical standards and approaches, preferred tools
• Quality management and testing methodologies, tools

Expectation Management

Like all nascent technologies, mobile is full of hype.  And, according to Forrester Research, even the most successful mobile applications take at least three major release cycles to find the right balance and meet business objectives; many must make a significant pivot after the first and/or second release.  Consequently, one of the most important functions of the mobile governance team is to set and manage expectations, including:

• Return on investment (ROI)—and when to typically expect it
• Total cost of ownership (TCO) for a product with many releases vs. a project
• Challenges and barriers to success.  Common example:  Immature or non-existent mobile infrastructure is a serious barrier to the best laid product plans and may require significant remediation and investment to enable the business to meet objectives for mobile initiatives
• Need for innovation and velocity.  Many sponsors expect they’ll just need one release this year—it’s the mobile governance team that needs to set enterprise expectations for competitive innovation and the development velocity to support it
• User expectations.  Much has been made of the “consumerization” of IT—and this applies particularly to mobile.  Product owners need direction on how to build the right experiences for different user groups.

Momentum

When it comes to building mobile capabilities for the enterprise and integrating mobile into overall digital strategy, companies often struggle to make progress—especially if they experience one or more the unfortunate scenarios described earlier.  

The mobile governance team must be well-positioned to drive enterprise visibility to and awareness of mobile initiatives.  By reaching the organization as a whole the mobile governance team can help drive collaboration among the many constituents required to design, build and maintain a successful mobile program.

Measurement and Reporting

The high percentage of mobile initiatives that have no or ill-defined success criteria would likely surprise you.  Or success criteria is defined but there’s no way to actually collect the supporting data.  At a higher level, mobile programs also need established measures of success and periodic reporting of results.

The mobile governance team must drive common measures of success for individual products.  Clear, regular and relevant communication of results by product teams will strengthen program momentum.  In addition, the mobile governance team should establish and report measurement of the mobile program as a whole.  

Finally, mobile governance should set standards for the use of mobile analytics and integration of mobile data into enterprise business intelligence to catalyze cross-channel insights.

Brand Protection

Design, quality and innovation signal brand vitality to employees, partners and customers.  One of the mobile governance team’s core tasks is to closely align with marketing to ensure:

• Product fit in overall brand strategy
• Brand guidelines are appropriately implemented
• User experience supports and enhances brand personality

Moreover, the mobile governance team must be a beacon that guides product teams in designing products that support brand cohesion.

Leverage and Scalability

Product teams tend to work in silos, especially if they are in separate business units or functional organizations.  This organizational fragmentation is difficult to oversee and often leads to inconsistent implementation of standards even when they exist.

One of the most important roles the mobile governance team can play is to enable organizational and technology leverage and scalability.  For example, coach product teams on best use of:

• Existing infrastructure services
• Common, reusable components and code
• Abstraction and configuration over custom or single-use code
• Skilled resources across products
• Agile methodology to achieve velocity

Equally valuable, the mobile governance team should foster cross-team sharing of experiences, lessons learned and how they implemented enterprise best practices.

Supportability

With product teams rightly focused on velocity, without oversight supportability is a frequent casualty.  And, as a result, products go into production that the organization is ill-equipped or prepared to support.

Consequently, the mobile governance team must establish application architecture standards for supportability, a clear process for support transition for various release types (major, minor, break/fix), and guidance for prioritization of common issues (new OS version support, device support, etc.).

In addition, the mobile governance team should set the enterprise standard for support tools such as EMM (enterprise mobile management, formerly mobile device management (MDM), MAM, and so on, to ensure operational support is effectively using tool capabilities to support the business.

Closing Thoughts

Clearly there are many persuasive reasons for organizations to consider implementing mobile governance.  However, mobile governance doesn’t have to start with a full Mobile Center of Excellence to be effective.  Start with a mobile "community of practice", grow toward a steering committee approach, and then, when your mobile product portfolio can support it, create a center of excellence.