Real-Time Analytics: How to discover product insights faster
The mobile app industry is a fast-paced world, and the state of mobile in 2019 shows no signs of slowing down. If you’re going to keep up with the rapid changes and challenges, you need to know what’s going on in your app at all times. That’s what real-time analytics tools can provide.
What is real-time analytics?
According to Gartner, real-time analytics means that the analysis happens within seconds after new data is received. Gartner differentiates between two kinds of of real-time analytics:
- On-demand real-time analytics waits for a user to request a query and only then provides the analytics results
- Continuous real-time analytics analyzes data continuously and sends alerts to users whenever certain events happen.
Powerful use cases of real-time analytics include:
- Monitor your app continuously and alert you to performance issues before more users are affected
- Alert you to sudden drops in retention and conversion rates before they endanger your revenue or reviews
- Provide data as soon as you release a new version, allowing you to fix problems and make adjustments fast
Why do you need real-time analytics?
Time is not on your side.
If something goes wrong in your app, you won’t have a lot of time to fix it before it starts causing real damage. When there’s a sudden change in the key metrics that you’re tracking, you need to know immediately. Real-time analytics can be your weapon against unexpected drops in retention, sudden bugs and crashes, and other crises. By getting real-time alerts and data on performance problems and usability issues in your app, you can address these issues before they hurt your company. You need your data to be as up-to-date as possible, and your analytics to be as accessible as possible, so you can pull open your dashboard at any time of day and know your app’s status.
You need to make good decisions fast.
Decision-making isn’t easy for any mobile app team. Apps aren’t predictable once you release them into the real world. You don’t necessarily know what tweaks to your app’s code or UI will have the results you want. Since you can’t know the future, you should at least know the present — and that’s why real-time analytics, that self-updates all the time, can help. These tools provide you not just with real-time data, but also with automatic, instant analysis of that data for whatever purposes you need, from attribution sources to conversion funnels. If your dashboards show the most up-to-date data, they’ll give you the power to make good decisions fast. You won’t have to resort to guesswork when you’re under stress.
You need to know what your users are doing right now.
Your mobile app users are complicated, and constantly behaving in weird, unexpected ways. The only way to catch up with them is to know what they’re doing in your app right now. That’s something only real-time analytics can provide, by constantly collecting user data and crunching the numbers to give you whatever insights you need.
What KPIs should you track with real-time analytics?
Some KPIs must be tracked in real time. Any delay in analyzing or reporting on these KPIs will render the analysis useless, because it’ll be too late to troubleshoot. Here are some of the KPIs that real-time analytics tracks best.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #1: Crashed Sessions
Where will you be when your app crashes? If the answer is anything but “at my computer, fixing it”, it’s the wrong answer. The question is, how will you know that something is crashing the app, and how can you find the source of the problem quickly and efficiently? A good crash strategy starts with real-time analytics tools, because they never sleep — they collect data all the time. They will alert you to the bug and give you all the data you need to find it and crush it the second you look at your dashboard: what screens are affected, how many users are affected, etc. The best analytics platforms integrate with the tools you’re already using to send you real-time alerts in whatever form you prefer: an email, an SMS, a Slack message, or a punch in the head (well, maybe someday).
Real-Time Analytics KPI #2: App Not Responding
ANRs (App Not Responding) are when the app is frozen and does not respond to any gestures or interactions, and they are some of the most annoying performance issues for app users. There can be multiple reasons for ANRs, and some of them may not even be the fault of the app itself, but you definitely want to be aware of them as they occur. Just like crashed sessions, you need to know that an ANR is happening to your users before too many of them are affected. Real-time analytics will alert you to the problem before it grows, and give you the data you need to create a fast but effective problem-solving strategy.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #3: Quick Abandons
If users launch the app and quit it less than 20 seconds later, that means you never even got a chance to show them what you’ve got. You’ll want to know when these quick abandons happen often, because it may be a performance or usability issue that’s bothering your users and needs to be addressed as fast as possible. Keeping an eye on quick abandons around the clock, especially after a new release, is a smart move if you want to keep app retention rates as high as possible.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #4: Unresponsive Gestures
Unresponsive gestures are usability issues that happen when users think the app should behave in a certain way, only it doesn’t. For example, if users repeatedly swipe left to back to the previous screen, but that navigation element was never implemented, they may drop off a funnel instead of converting. They can interrupt the user journey, cause drop-offs from funnels, and induce user frustration along with bad reviews. Unresponsive gestures to be treated the same as bugs: if your users are experiencing them, you need to quickly find the root of the problem and fix it.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #5: Churn Rate
Churn is never pretty, especially when numbers tend to be high in some verticals, but it’s one of the most important metrics you’ll track. Sudden increases in daily churn rate are crucial events you need to be aware of whenever they happen. If your daily churn rate is suddenly higher than normal, that may indicate that a new issue has come up that is scaring away your users. For example, be on the lookout for higher churn rate around new releases, to see if you need to improve the user journey. It’s important to dive deep into your real-time churn rate and assess if a certain geo, time of day, or day of the week directly impacts the overall rate. By seeing these spikes in real-time and getting alerts whenever they pass a certain benchmark that you pre-determine, you’ll be able to take a proactive approach to improving retention and reducing churn, instead of being caught by surprise.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #6: In-App Events
Your app probably contains certain key elements and events that directly relate to conversion and retention rates. If there’s a sudden drop or increase in the number of times these in-app events occur, you’ll want to know about it immediately. Real-time analytics will count the users and occurrences of specific events, and give you rapid updates on the status of your KPIs. That way, if the number isn’t what you want it to be, you’ll be able to make changes accordingly until you see an improvement. For example, an increase in events such as “cancel payment” or “logout” might be due to a UX issue. An increase in “killed” sessions might be due to a bug.
Real-Time Analytics KPI #7: Drop-off rate between conversion funnel steps
Conversion = revenue. If too many users are dropping off your conversion funnels, you’ll want to know right now, not only by looking at daily, weekly or monthly averages. With real-time analytics, you’ll be able to instantly see sudden increases in conversion funnel drop-off as soon as they happen, and recognize the specific stage or screen where the drop-off is happening. For example, conversion funnels for login or account creation, free to premium upgrades, and payment completion are important and often complex funnels you’ll want to track closely. Some tools, like Appsee, will even enable you to watch session recordings of these conversion funnel drop-offs and the events that led up to them.
Summary
Surprises are nice when they involve balloons and birthday cake, but they’re not so nice if they mean crashes and unhappy users. Real-time analytics tools help you avoid these unpleasant surprises, by letting you know whenever your KPIs fluctuate. They crunch the numbers for you day and night, keeping your data accessible and comprehensible whenever you need it. By using real-time analytics, you and your team can react intelligently and swiftly to any problem that may arise and build a smarter data analysis strategy.
