Many companies design mobile specific sites for visitors accessing the website through smartphones and other mobile devices. Analytics of data from mobile and other devices differs from analytics of website data mainly in terms of metrics and tools used to measure the performance. Some data collection methods are similar to those used for websites: For example, tagging methods are very useful for both channels. Companies that develop mobile apps use software development kits (SDKs) that include web analytics tools. Mobile app developers add code with analytic functionality to mobile apps to capture app-related metrics data.
Metrics used to track performance usually include page views, number of visits, geographic data, and information related to mobile devices such as screen size, operating system, data service provider, and device model. Data collected is measured against the mobile channel objectives, targets for performance, and ROI. Some of the metrics specific to mobile apps include the following:
- Screen Views—Mobile apps do not have pages that are the same as mobile websites. Rather, content is displayed in multiple screens. The number of screen views for an app is equivalent to the number of page views for a mobile website.
- User IDs—Instead of using cookies, mobile apps tend to identify users via user IDs. This helps to understand the behavior of visitors individually, and data can be analyzed for these individuals for different versions of the mobile apps. The user IDs also help to analyze the customer experience across multiple applications.
- Offline Data—For some mobile apps, users do not always require an Internet connection to access the information. Mobile app developers can store the analytics data on the mobile device and only transfer the data to the server periodically.
