The Complete Mobile Analytics Guide: Challenges, Metrics, and Tools19 min read

Here’s some irony for you: The annual mobile ad spend surpasses the GDP of most countries, yet the majority of mobile apps struggle with a 1.2%-9.9% 30-day retention rate. The common offender? A lack of proper mobile analytics.

It’s difficult to drive engagement and retention without a structured approach to understanding user needs and behaviors.

Say someone leaves a negative review about your app on Twitter or LinkedIn. Do you have a system for checking if it’s a one-person issue or something that affects the rest of your users too?

If you roll out new features, how do you track their usage and correlate that with revenue growth?

And how do you identify the key drop-off points in your user journey to optimize conversion funnels?

In this article, we’ll cover the burning questions above, and more:

• The types of mobile app analytics.
• Common mobile app analytics challenges and solutions.
• Key performance metrics to track.
• The best tools for analyzing user behavior and improving mobile app experience.

What is mobile analytics?

Mobile analytics, or mobile app analytics, is the process of gathering data from app users to understand their behavior, track app performance, and measure business outcomes like retention and app profitability.

Mobile analytics provides insights in two forms: qualitative data, such as session replays; and quantitative data, like daily or monthly active user counts.

You’ll often need to combine both forms to gain a complete picture of the user experience. For instance, if your daily active users are dropping, a session replay might reveal it’s because users are struggling with your new interface.

Why are mobile analytics important?

Used effectively, mobile app analytics can help you:

• Attract better customers: By tracking user acquisition and retention over time, you’ll identify the marketing channels and strategies that bring your most engaged users. Armed with this information, you can optimize marketing spend and focus on strategies that deliver the best results.
• Improve UX: Metrics like crash rates, app load times, and screen flow analysis help you spot and address friction points in the user journey, leading to better engagement and retention.
• Increase revenue: Mobile analytics platforms provide insights to understand purchasing behavior, provide personalized marketing campaigns, and test pricing strategies. All these will help you improve free-to-paid conversion rates and boost revenue.

What are the types of mobile analytics?

There are four main types:

Choosing the right analytics to focus on depends on your current business goals. Let’s discuss each and what it helps you track:

1. Mobile advertising analytics

Global mobile advertising spend has increased 6X over the past decade and is expected to continue rising.

With more people vying for your target audience’s attention, you want to be sure you’re getting a good return on ad spend. This means tracking metrics like click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, attribution, and customer lifetime value.

These metrics will enable you to make more data-driven decisions and increase campaign effectiveness. For example, if your mobile analytics tool shows low conversion rates after prospects click on your ad creatives, you can examine further and improve your landing page or onboarding experience accordingly. This small update can lead to higher retention and better revenue.

2. App monetization analytics

Most mobile apps are available for free downloads and generate revenue through:

• In-app advertising for other companies.
• Premium in-app currency that costs actual money.
• One-time in-app purchases to unlock premium features.
• Streaming media rentals/subscriptions.

Regardless of the monetization model you choose, collecting behavioral data is crucial to understanding how users engage with your app and identifying opportunities to grow.

For example, if you rely on in-app advertising, analyzing user session length can help you optimize ad placement and frequency to maximize revenue without negatively impacting UX.

3. Performance analytics

Mobile app speed, stability, and reliability can significantly impact the user experience and retention rates.

Case in point: the majority of users expect your app to launch within 5 seconds. Anything longer than that will frustrate them and can even lead to abandonment.

Here are three core metrics to track when measuring performance:

• Crash rate: How often does your app terminate unexpectedly? Compare your iOS vs. Android crashes to see if there’s any significant difference. Regardless of the operating system, keep in mind that the industry average for crash-free sessions is above 99%.
• Load time and app responsiveness: These metrics measure how quickly your app starts and reacts to user actions. As mentioned, less than 5 seconds is the sweet spot.
• Network performance: Track API failures, latency, and slowdowns to identify and address any connectivity issues that hinder the user experience.

4. In-app engagement analytics

This mobile analytics type helps you understand overall user engagement. It provides the necessary insights to refine app design, optimize user flows, and reduce churn.

Aim to answer the following questions when tracking in-app engagement:

• Which screens do users spend the most time on?
• Where do users drop off within key flows (e.g., checkout, onboarding)?
• What are the most common user paths within the application?
• Which features drive the most user engagement and revenue?
• What is the average session length, and how does it correlate with user retention?

Unlock the Power of Mobile Analytics with Userpilot

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required

What are the challenges of mobile analytics?

Mobile app analytics is not without its challenges. This section will highlight some of the most common ones and how to overcome them:

1. Cross-platform tracking

If you have mobile and web apps, it will be a common occurrence for users to switch between both platforms or even use them simultaneously.

You might resort to having separate analytics tools for tracking interactions on your web and mobile apps, but this comes with three challenges:

• Fragmented data that makes it difficult to understand the overall customer journey.
• Inconsistent data and reporting, which leads to flawed decision-making.
• Increased complexity and cost.

The solution? Use an all-in-one platform that allows for cross-platform tracking.

Userpilot is a good example. In addition to multi-platform tracking, our software equips you to combine onboarding, in-app messaging, push notifications, and user feedback, all from a single platform.

2. User privacy and compliance

Violating regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) can lead to reduced app revenue, app store removal, and even loss of user trust.

So, it’s important to choose a mobile app analytics platform that respects user privacy laws and provides transparent data handling policies.

Again, you can’t go wrong choosing Userpilot. All customer information is fully encrypted, managed, and stored by SOC-compliant vendors such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.

When recording user sessions, Userpilot hides sensitive user data like passwords, bank details, and addresses, ensuring that you don’t collect any information that might compromise user security.

3. Technical limitations & integration issues

Many companies struggle to integrate third-party analytics tools with their app’s backend, leading to incomplete or siloed data.

Userpilot helps you solve this without developer support. It takes just a few minutes to install, and all the features run completely code-free.

As mentioned earlier, you don’t have to juggle multiple tools to gather comprehensive user data and make experience improvements. For instance, after identifying and fixing friction with the analytics function, you can use the engagement features to trigger push notifications or behavior-based in-app guides that notify users of changes and walk them through the new flow.

7 Important metrics to track to measure mobile app performance

There are tons of mobile app metrics, and trying to measure everything will drown you in a sea of data. Below are 7 of the most important metrics for evaluating and improving your app performance:

1. Crash rate

The mobile app crash rate is the percentage of app sessions that result in an unexpected termination or failure of the application.

Why it matters: Frequent crashes lead to user frustration, poor reviews, and high churn. When you track this metric regularly, you can spot and address issues in time to boost the user experience. Also, analyzing different crash reports can help you prioritize bug fixes based on the frequency and severity of crashes.

How to measure: Crash Rate = (Number of Crashes / Total Sessions) × 100.

2. User retention rate

The user retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue to engage with your mobile app over a specific period rather than abandoning it.

Why it matters: A high retention rate indicates that users find value in your app, while a low rate suggests you need to dig further and identify areas for product improvement.

How to measure: Retention Rate = (Users retained at the end of period / Users at the start) × 100.

3. In-app purchase conversion rate

This metric measures the percentage of users who complete an in-app purchase out of the total number of users who were presented with the opportunity to do so.

Why it matters: Your purchase conversion rate directly reflects your ability to turn users into paying customers. A consistently low rate indicates potential issues with pricing, product offerings, or the purchase flow.

How to measure: Conversion Rate = (Users who made a purchase / Total active users) × 100.

4. Average session duration

The average session duration tells you how long users spend actively engaged with your app during a typical session.

Why it matters: A longer session duration generally indicates higher user engagement. By analyzing how much time users spend on specific features and pages, you can identify aspects of your app that deliver more user satisfaction and focus on those.

Similarly, tracking your average session duration tells you when users are spending more time than necessary on specific pages, which often suggests that the flow is complex or confusing.

How to measure: Total time spent across sessions / Total number of sessions.

5. Daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU)

DAU counts the number of unique users who engage with your app within a 24-hour period, while MAU provides a snapshot of how many people are actively using the product on a monthly basis.

Why it matters: The daily-to-monthly active users ratio shows you how “sticky” or habit-forming your product is. Tracking this metric helps you keep track of product health and quickly respond to changes in user behavior. For example, a higher ratio after a new feature release is a sign that the feature resonates with users. Based on this insight, you can prioritize the new feature in your onboarding flow and help new users reach their aha! moments faster.

How to measure: Stickiness Ratio = (DAU / MAU) × 100.

6. Feature adoption rate

The feature adoption rate is the percentage of users who actively utilize specific features within a given period.

Why it matters: This metric helps you track whether users are engaging with new features. Low feature adoption rates can indicate either poor discoverability (users are unaware of the feature) or a lack of perceived value (users don’t understand the feature’s benefits). When adoption is low, investigate to determine which of these factors is contributing and why.

How to measure: Feature Adoption Rate = (Users engaging with feature / Total active users) × 100.

7. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures user loyalty by tracking the likelihood of users recommending your mobile app to others.

Why it matters: The net promoter score reveals your most loyal users and those at risk of churn. After collecting the data, you can proactively reach out to detractors (users who are unlikely to recommend your app), identify the reasons for their dissatisfaction, and determine if you can offer a resolution.

How to measure:

• NPS survey: Use a mobile analytics tool like Userpilot to build a survey that asks, “How likely are you to recommend this app?” or a slight variation of that question, but on a scale of 0-10 (standard NPS scale). Based on their scores, divide users into Promoters (9 or 10), Passives (7 or 8), and Detractors (0 to 6).
• Final NPS calculation: (% of Promoters) – (% of Detractors).

How? Trigger a follow-up question that allows users to express themselves further. It can be as simple as asking, “Why did you choose this score?” Also, analyze app reviews, support tickets, and social media mentions for further insights that users might not mention.

Track Mobile Analytics Data with Userpilot

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required

4 Top mobile analytics tools

The ideal mobile app analytics tool is one that is intuitive, easy to integrate, and delivers insights that are readily accessible to your entire team. Let’s consider some of the best in the market right now:

Overview: Mobile app analytics tools

Short on time? Here’s an eagle-eye view for a quick comparison:

1. Userpilot

Userpilot is a multi-channel product growth platform built for non-engineering teams.

It provides analytics features for tracking the user experience across web and mobile apps, as well as user onboarding and engagement features to help businesses optimize every stage of the user journey.

Best for: User engagement, onboarding, and re-engagement.

Key features:

• Intuitive implementation: Userpilot is designed for rapid deployment and ease of use. Everyone on your team can leverage its features without needing specialized technical training.

• Unified platform: Userpilot consolidates onboarding, engagement, notifications, and surveys into a single platform. This eliminates the need for multiple tools and helps you track accurate data.
• Centralized user data: Userpilot provides a unified dashboard for viewing customer information across web and mobile apps. This allows you to get granular with data and understand how user behavior differs across platforms. For example, your product marketers can measure campaign success seamlessly across devices without needing manual trackers.
• Advanced personalization: Userpilot empowers you to deliver personalized experiences based on user behavior, attributes, and language preferences. For example, you can create a single announcement carousel and translate it into multiple languages in minutes.

2. Pendo

Pendo is an experience management tool known for its advanced product analytics. Similar to Userpilot, it offers user onboarding and feedback features, though its feedback capabilities are primarily limited to NPS.

Best for: Deep analytics and AI-driven insights.

Key features:

• Cross-platform analytics: Pendo equips you to track user behavior across web and mobile apps. However, there’s little you can do with this data if you don’t want to use a third-party tool. For example, it doesn’t support multi-app funnel tracking that lets you compare user activities between different platforms. Also, its UI components (tooltips, pop-ups, guides) have limited customizations compared to the web version.
• Autocapture: Once installed, Pendo automatically starts tracking user behavior on your mobile app. You can tag specific features or pages to collect retroactive insights for better decision-making. However, note that the platform’s complex setup process might require technical expertise.
• Custom dashboards: Pendo allows you to create custom analytics dashboards to track only the metrics that interest you. Here’s an example:

3. Appcues

Appcues is an adoption tool that allows you to understand product usage and design engaging experiences for mobile and web apps. It provides better mobile content organization than Pendo, but the platform doesn’t support AI-powered content localization, so you may have to do it manually or stick to one language.

Best for: In-app experiences and feature adoption.

Key features:

• User segmentation: Appcues offers advanced segmentation capabilities to group users and gain detailed mobile analytics insights. For example, you could segment users based on feature usage or purchase history to personalize their experience and drive conversions.
• NPS analysis: Appcues provides features to build NPS surveys and track the results in real time. You can view the overall NPS score for specific user groups, categorize data into promoters, passives, and detractors for efficient follow-ups, analyze qualitative feedback to understand user sentiment, and maintain historical records to visualize NPS trends over time.
• Flow analytics: This feature lets you analyze user flows and identify drop-offs. For example, if you just triggered an account upgrade flow, you can track how many users saw it, what percentage took the action you wanted, and where others fell off.

4. Intercom

Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform. It offers limited user engagement tracking and analytics, but we added it because it’s one of the best for providing omnichannel support.

Best for: Messaging and user communication.

Key features:

• User analytics: The platform offers a KPI dashboard that lets you segment users, track specific attributes, analyze support interactions, and create custom charts for better data visualization.
• AI-powered customer support: Intercom equips you to build chatbots and deliver 24/7 proactive customer support. This will reduce user frustration and help you drive better engagement.
• Help center and content analytics: Intercom lets you create help centers that provide rich educational content for every stage of the user journey. You can track customer interactions with your help center content to know how engaging and satisfactory the content is:

Making mobile analytics work for you

Mobile analytics reveal more information about your users than you can ever find on social media or app store reviews. The more you understand your users’ unspoken frustrations (or excitements), the easier it becomes to optimize for increased engagement and revenue.

Ready to get started? Book a demo now and see how Userpilot can help you track mobile analytics data and deliver exciting experiences.

Unlock the Power of Mobile Analytics with Userpilot

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required