Anatoly Larin, Touch Instinct: «App Analytics gives us the data that previously we did not have"

co-founder Touch Instinct, Product director at WAYD Labs Anatoly Larin often publishes his thoughts about mobile analytics. recently, on the Medium He studied in detail the work of the new service App Analytics. "MakRadar" Anatoly contacted and recorded an interview with him.

We have already written earlier about the limitations that are imposed Apple. So, App Analytics collects data only to those users who have installed iOS 8, agreed to collect information, and set the privacy settings.

This leads to significant restrictions in terms of the reliability of App Analytics, however, the service in some cases really useful for developers and publishers.

- Do App Analytics is able to compete Flurry or Mixpanel and by what criteria?

- No, I can not. Apple are very sensitive to the personal data of users and, therefore, imposed restrictions. Data is transmitted only by those who agreed to do it. Therefore, the results of such analysts are incomplete, they generally can not be used. For example, there is a cohort analysis, no craters. App Analytics - this is one service among others, but it is in any case not replace any Mixpanel, nor Flurry.

- And why Apple released this service?

- I dont know. Maybe, Apple will ban then everyone else.

- If the developer or publisher wants to understand how its application feels, what indicators should be monitored in the first place?

- On this issue, there is a great article Oleg Yakubenko (leading analyst Zeptolab). There are two groups of metrics: the metric growth and product metrics. Metric growth looks, how many people download your app in the last month, how much money they bring, and so on. The second group - this is the product of the metric. How many of your users have downloaded the application remains in it at 1, 7, 30 days. How much comes to the first purchase, and so on. It is necessary to keep track of both of these groups for your application.

- How useful App Analytics in this case?

- In my opinion, the two App Analytics usage scenario can be identified. The first scenario - the calculation of the efficiency of the application page in the App Store. We can divide the number of units on the views and get the quality of the application page indicator in the App Store. Further, we can change the icon, screenshots and see how to change the conversion. Here, for example, look like the numbers on the example of our Follow Me application.

At the Follow Me app in the last 30 days the conversion was 96% (256/267). However, this is because the traffic mainly comes from the site radiofollow.me, The target audience is highly motivated.

The second scenario involves the use of Sources report: Top Websites. App Analytics shows which site was the installation of the application. Here you can find a lot of interesting things. For example, the publication of the application, which you never knew existed. See how many people came from Google search.

- As Apple sees from what source came the buyer?

- Apple stores referrer. For example, a review came out, the man went to the link, and Apple puts this passage in the report.

- Tell us about the report Sources: Top Campaigns. What can be understood with his help?

- Report of an interesting, but little use at the moment. For example, I wrote a post to Facebook. I can see how many users come from Facebook on the app's page in the App Store. But the fact that this track is already doing other services, such as AppsFlyer, Mobile App Tracking, and all advertising campaigns in Facebook, Google, «VKontakte» has sharpened to work with these Tracking systems.

- Let's summarize. What, in your opinion, the main value of App Analytics?

- App Analytics gives us the data that previously we did not. This is the data on the number of applications in the App Store Views and details of where passed to us on the App Store. Based on these data, we can estimate two important metrics: conversion of units with views and traffic from the search. This is the value the service at the moment.