5 Mobile Analytics Tips To Drive Your Business

When you set out to build a mobile app, a well-planned strategy and solid development are a must and a neat design is paramount. But analytics is the key to measuring  execution and the value of all hard work you’ve put into building the app. As mobiles continue to penetrate every aspect of our lives, it is but natural that developers and marketers alike are constantly trying to measure user behaviour through app analytics. While the mobile app industry might be young, there are a number of platforms and services vying with each other to provide you with good app data.

Start using Analytics before your application is in the Appstore

There’s no use if you start thinking about analytics after your application has been accepted in the appstore. You can create a more robust, user-friendly version1 if you start analysing data during your application’s alpha and beta phases. You could use Testflight for example.

Users may not use your app the way you do

You’ve meticulously planned your app’s design, functionality and flow, but you still need to be able to think like the user. Get third party opinion by asking unbiased users to use your application. Put websites like Craigslist and heatma.ps which uses heatmaps to enable you to see which part of your application users interact with to good use.

Analyse market data to avoid mistakes of your competitors

While analytics providers may be a bit expensive, it is still worthwhile to see what other apps are doing in the market, their price and functionality. With this information, you can make decisions knowing how consumer preferences and application performances in your category.

Select KPIs that suit your target audience

There are a variety of apps for a variety of things. There are apps for education, testprep, epub, news, messaging, movies and entertainment. Each has a performance indicator of its own. User retention might be important for a particular application while purchase conversion would expectedly, be paramount for an ecommerce application. It is important to know what metric to focus on for your app.

Different providers for different apps

Again, this boils down to knowledge. You need to know which analytics provider caters to which vertical. Localytics and Platyomics are both analytics providers, but one caters to content delivery while the other is for mobile gaming.

As mobile users grow at a rapid pace, mobile analytics too would catch up. Which means you’ve got to keep pace as the scenario keeps changing.

5 Reasons Why You Should Have Gone Mobile By Now

A large number of users in today's world are using mobile apps to get the desired information and meet their daily needs. This has meant that businesses of all hues go mobile to attract customers. No matter what business you are into, having a mobile app helps to strengthen relations with clients and retain them. Having a mobile app for your business makes customers download and purchase your products or hire your services
.

In this article we look at the top 5 reasons why it’s time your business went mobile with a view to boost growth.

Visibility 

Customers these days use smartphones and tablets extensively. This has made businesses to have mobile apps of their own, to gain visibility. A mobile application makes your products & services available to the customers at any time of the hour. It is the most convenient way for mobile users to connect to your business and its offering.

Mobile apps thus enhance the visibility of businesses, help to attract more customers, and improve sales.

A new audience

Many users who are not your customers right now can come to know about your useful and feature-rich app and download them. A mobile application can widen your reach and interest more customers to select your products & services. It greatly helps in creating brand awareness and strengthening your brand among app users to draw new customers.

Marketing  

Mobile applications play an important role in directing your marketing efforts to the right direction. You can keep your customers updated with your latest products, new arrivals, discounts and more right at their fingertips. Push notifications continuously remind your customers of your products and services, encouraging them to buy regularly and even triggering impulse shopping.

Convenience 

Mobile apps offer convenience to customers in buying your products and services. Smartphone's users have access to your app even while on the move, thus making purchases from anywhere and at any time.

You can integrate your mobile app with your company's website to give latest information and updates of your business to customers. This ensures that your customers stay abreast with all your recent business activities.

This is a great way for your clients to stay in touch with your business, get a sense of belonging, put confidence in you, and choose your brand.

Competitive advantage 

In this cut-throat competitive market, businesses are always trying to attract more customers towards their offerings. Many businesses still do not use a mobile application or have not yet started to use it. This is where you can gain a competitive edge, keep your competitors behind, and enhance sales.

Going mobile? Choose Drupal

   
Since it was officially released, Drupal has been one of the most sought after languages for those who wish to build responsive web applications. Now as mobile devices open up new frontiers and step on to 24*7 interactions, it is imperative that Drupal reinvents itself to suit the needs of the changing times.

One of the oft-heard complaints against it is that it is incompatible for the small screen. If we make the small- and touch-screen experience more acceptable, everyone would want the freedom of using Drupal from anywhere-but-a-desk.

Mobile phones are personal devices: There is no other device that provides proximity, privacy and ease-of-use as much as a mobile phone. By restricting or dissuading users from interacting with Drupal on the go, one is limiting their connections to their needs.

For interactions called "just-in-time interactions"; user tasks are urgent and immediate. Speed is essential and waiting is not an option. Like the saying, "The best camera is the one you have with you." The same is true for computers. In the coming years people are going to be using Drupal from everywhere, whether we like it or not. Drupal 8 has to embrace this.

Attempting to build a mobile UI from the ground up is a large task with many facets. Design principles can help keep us on track, and give us a wider perspective. With global objectives we always have a good idea what "good" looks like.

Simple

Simplicity is Key to any language and any app that aims to connect with users.

Fast

This is an essential criterion be it a mobile or a desktop app. We need to keep in mind that no one likes to wait.

Consistency

We're designing a whole system of tools and objects. New situations will arrive that we won't expect; we can soften this pain by implementing framework components instead of one-shot solutions.We need to keep in mind that we’re not solving problems for individual pages.

New Toolbar

It’s alright if you can’t show all the menu items at once, what we need is some method of revealing them. What becomes really interesting is the thoughts on what else we could use the rest of the toolbar space for. Contextual actions include filter, add, delete, bulk edit and sort.

Finger Friendly

A thumb is more than a fat cursor. End of story.

Global Search

A global search function allows users who know they want to get there quickly..A nice, friendly, easy to use navigation tree is great but some users want to get around fast. This spotlight style feature is also a great safety net for new users who have lost their way in Drupal.

Swift And Its Impact On The Mobile Industry

           
There’s been a new excitement in the air in iOS developer circles. It is the arrival of Swift that is driving new developers to joy. The onset of Swift has meant that it is finally curtains down for the parent, Objective C. In this article, we look at the motives behind the switch to a new programming language and how it will affect the IT industry as a whole.

For those of you who didn’t know, Objective-C is ridiculously difficult to use. Most beginners who attempted to learn it and even developers familiar with its complexities breathed a huge sigh of relief at the announcement. It is clear that Apple wanted to make iOS accessible to a wider range of developers and it understood that sticking to Objective-C wouldn't work. However, it isn't exactly unfamiliar to existing developers because it uses the same LLVM compiler and runtime which means the code can live side-by-side in the same application. According to Apple, this will "unify the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language."

Apple's free e-book, The Swift Programming Language, offers a guide that goes deeper into the language and acts as a formal reference for any interested developer. Owing to its accessibility and its promise of adopting safe programming patterns and adding modern features to make programming easier, more flexible and fun, businesses looking to develop apps on iOS will soon have a wider pool of iOS and Mac OS X developers to choose from. This will help alleviate the stress of hiring qualified developers in a gradually shrinking talent pool. This increase in talent may also make developers' salaries accelerate at a slower rate.

Additionally, Swift utilizes several time saving features such as displaying outputs in real time and delivering instant feedback on errors. Developers are thus saved from having to create colossal amounts of code before seeing the results. Apple developers can also bid adieu to sifting through code line-by-line to find tiny errors whenever an issue arises. These benefits will result in huge cost reductions for corporations and may sway more of the IT industry's top innovators to developing for Apple.

Although it is too premature to say the effect of these will be seen immediately, the IT industry is certainly abuzz about Swift. It not only begins a new chapter in iOS development, but also makes iOS and Mac OS X development a more viable option in the years to come and its accessibility will most certainly work to Apple's advantage.