Art: Data driven optimization through mobile analytics

Mobile is driving the big transformation in today's world, across industries. This transformation is in the way organizations do business, the way consumers avail products and services and the way marketeers present their offers. Just to give you an idea of the importance of mobile:

• 80% people don't leave home without their mobile devices 
• In India, 72% of all website data actually comes from smart phones 
• Internet contributed 5% of GDP growth in India 
• In March 2015, for the first time ever in US, Comscore registered more people accessing internet through mobile only. The trend is only increasing 

Now before you decide to create your own mobile strategy and implement it, first step has to be to benchmark yourself, measure your current state. If you are serious about taking your business to the world of mobile aplications, it is highly recommended to use analytics solutions like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics to collect data, measure the efficacy of your platform and then take strategic decisions on the basis of the insights that you derive from your data.

As step 1, let's try to establish how behavior of people interacting with your mobile applications might be different from those who interact with normal websites (though the user might still be the same).

• Interactions: Mobile application users are expected to be more focused, their interactions are more transactional based, like bill pay, buy product, transfer funds, make a booking. Whereas website users are expected to be more inquisitive, they still in process of discovery of solution. 
• Entries/Exits: There are more exit points for people coming on normal websites, than mobile applications. Hence this would provide a better opportunity to deliver your message in absence of environmental noise. 
• Metrics: Since there are many behavioral differences between mobile application and website users, it's important to identify distinct success metrics for both. In case of websites you might need to focus on searches, product views, time spent on page/website, whereas for mobile applications it could be transactions per visit, events/goals per visit etc 

In addition to some of the points discussed above, for any digital platform it's imperative to understand the time after which people tend to leave your platform, drop out rates (you can have a very god picture of that through funnel reports), path traversed by your visitors, traffic sources etc.

Analytics solutions won't only help you quantify your performance and marketing strategy, but it would also help you to optimize:

• Design: Entry/Exit screens, Screen flow, accessibility issues within your platform like errors, crash reports etc, and other cosmetic features 
• Effort: Which on site tools need overhaul, where to deploy your time and resources to improve, which operating systems are driving the maximum traffic and conversion rate? 
• Strategy: Which traffic sources are sending most profitable customers? What could be best channel strategy for you in this multi-channel marketing world? 

The power of analytics depends upon the very question that you are going to ask your data. The more questions you ask, more answers you would get.

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