Mobile Analytics and impact on Digital Transformation

Mobile usage has surpassed the desktop usage a few years back and is fast becoming consumer’s preferred portal to the internet.

Always-on consumers spend more than 70% of their media consumption and screen time on mobile devices, and most of that time in smartphone apps.

Analyzing their behaviors, understanding their needs, complaints and proactively using that for revenue growth, is essential in today’s Digital Age.

Mobile analytics captures data from the mobile apps, websites, and web app visitors to help companies improve retention, engagement, and conversion.

Mobile analytics is similar to traditional web analytics (used for desktop browsers and applications) in that they identify unique visitors and record their behaviors.

Mobile analytics is generally split between mobile web and mobile apps. Mobile web refers to when individuals use their smartphones or tablets to view online content via a mobile browser. While mobile apps analytics works on the apps downloaded, installed and used for further insights.

Mobile analytics gives companies unparalleled insights into the otherwise hidden lives of users. It gives insights about what users engage with, who those users are, what brings them to the site or app, and why they leave.

How different departments are using Mobile analytics: 

• Marketing: Tracking campaign ROI, segmenting users, automating marketing
• UX/UI: Tracking consumer behaviors, measuring user experience

A typical mobile analytics platform should be able to:

• Offer a unified view of the customer: Track data across operating systems, devices, and platforms 
• Measure user engagement: For both standard and custom-defined events
• Segment users: Create groups based on location, device, demographics, behaviors, and more
• Offer dashboards: View data and surface insights with customizable reporting
•  A/B test: Test features and messaging for performance
• Send notifications: Alert administrators and engage users with behavior-based messaging

 There are three major types of mobile analytics:

• Advertising/Marketing Analytics – covers how many installs, opens, clicks, purchases, registrations, shares etc.
• In-App Analytics – covers type of device, location, event tracking, language etc
• Performance Analytics – covers app uptime, crashes, errors, responsiveness etc.

Marketing analytics enables you to allocate your ad spend to right customers.

In-app analytics helps you to understand your users are and their interactions with the app.

Performance analytics helps in keeping your apps stable and your customers happy.

Google Analytics is one of the free tool available and then there are multiple commercial products available for organizations to use.

Mobile Analytics can help you realize the entire user experience of your mobile app – from detection to download to engagement.  

Through actionable insights at each stage of the app lifecycle, marketers and developers can create an app experience that is more useful and be engaging for their users and improve overall marketing strategy.

The role of Analytics in Digital Transformation

Today every industry is talking about Digital Transformation and affected by technologies like the Internet of Things, Blockchain, Microservices and Cloud. Every company like Apple, Nike, and Nestle, better known for their brand products have now become Technology Company.

However, for every technology the powerhouse behind the success is Analytics.

Look at the latest trend of Internet of Things – Sensor technology can emit data every second or millisecond and with help of Cloud, storing this humongous data is like a piece of cake. 

Only storing this data is not going to add any value to the business, unless it is analyzed for actionable real-time insights. This is possible with a variety of analytics algorithms, which provide business value like predictive maintenance, optimized supply chain; smart equipment’s who order on your behalf and the list goes on.

Customer experience has become the most important driving factor of Digital Transformation. Companies like Amazon, Apple or Disney have embraced the power of analytics to understand their customers and provide unmatched customer experience.

As we move into 2018, digital is seen as core competency than innovation. Consumers are no longer satisfied when they are treated as a group of people but they expect hyper-personalized touchpoints. Advanced analytics embedded in each interaction, transaction, and process is driving the next wave of productivity and growth.

Businesses are using advanced analytics like Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and NLP for various insights.

The mobile first strategy has given business the ability to reach their customer anytime, anywhere, on any device. We cannot go for 1 hour without using an app on our smartphone. Tons of data is generated with this easy to use technology, whether we are using it to find a nearby restaurant, paying bills or navigating through the unknown city. Mobile analytics can help organizations understand their customer behaviour and increase monetization of apps and overall revenue.

Real-Time analytics helps to get the right products in front of the people looking for them or offering the right promotions to the people most likely to buy. For gaming companies, it helps in understanding which types of individuals are playing which game and crafting an individualized approach to reach them.

Digital Marketing is hugely benefited by Analytics due customer analytics, brand analytics, competition analytics and conversion analytics.

Today, why Analytics is playing important role in digital, is due to the amount and variety of data generated is skyrocketed.  Making forward-looking proactive decisions is possible via forecasting, optimization, predictive analytics and text mining.

Data is the new oil, but it is crude, and cannot really be used unless it is refined with analytics to bring the new gold nuggets.

User Experience Design - a key to Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is moving any company into the future. Well, this statement is true for Disney, Nestle, Apple, Amazon and other leaders as they focused mostly on the customer/user experience.

Digital Transformation is in almost every c-level magazine, blog and whitepaper and executives do not want someone comes in and disrupt their business.

If you want to reap the rewards of the digital revolution, a smooth, easy and positive user experience is vital.

People may not be getting technically proficient, but they have become more comfortable using their smartphones to download music, find the nearest movie theatre or pay for purchases. This raises the bar for user experience.

Today organizations are adopting Mobility, Analytics and Internet of Things for Digital. However, solutions, which are not intuitive, responsive and social, does not have a place in customer’s list. So it becomes appropriate for companies to get into the user experience space.

A UX design can supercharge productivity, add immense value to customer interactions, and help employees love their jobs.

It is extremely important to do an accurate analysis of users, their needs by conducting surveys, workshops to design the UX.

Here are six major criteria for UX design:

• Easy to find: How easy it is to find a site or application
• Ease of use: How easy it is to use the site or application, how easy to learn
• Easy to access: How easy it is to access the site or application, easy to understand, easy to reach
• Usefulness: How useful the features and functions are and they meet my needs
• Elements of desirability: Will make users like the product’s looks and feel and visual appeal
• Credibility: How much users trust the site or application, creating the overall brand experience

Overall UX design should have short navigation steps so users require very few clicks to get the information they want. It should be based on responsive web designs so application maintain full functionality, usability and appeal on different browsers and screens from desktop to laptops to tablets to smartphones.

Once you have applied these criteria it is also important to measure the results, for future course correction. One initial KPI is user adoption rates, which should be higher than 60%.

The great user interface makes the experience better, transactions easier, decision making simple and cuts down the operational costs. 

It is the deciding factor for keeping/loosing or successfully engaging a customer.

Top 5 Big Data use cases in Digital Age

Today data volumes are growing exponentially and it is coming from various sources like sensor data from the Internet of Things, log files, social media files like audio/video, call center call logs and all the organization internal data. 

An organization who harness this data and exploit it for their advantage are surviving the competition even from nontraditional players.

Big data has become the foundation for digital transformation.

Though the big data opportunity is growing rapidly, the top two big data challenges that organizations face are determining how to get value out of big data and defining a big data strategy.

Unless you acquire, store and retain the internal data from organization coupled with all the external data from call logs, audio/video files, customer surveys etc. there will be fewer chances of applying analytics on top of it.

Here are top 5 use cases businesses are deploying to get a competitive advantage.

1.   Customer 360-degree view: A lot of companies had problems integrating large bulk of customer data between various databases and warehouse systems. They are not completely sure of which key metrics to use for profiling customers. Hence creating customer 360-degree view became the foundation for customer analytics. It can capture all customer interactions which can be used for further analytics.

2.   Fraud detection and prevention: Financial crimes, fraudulent claims and data breaches are the most common challenges faced by organizations across various industries. Thanks to big data analytics and machine learning, today’s fraud prevention systems are much better at detecting criminal activity and preventing false positives. Today with help of Big Data platforms, banks can store all the historical data they have which can help in better fraud detection.

3.   Recommendation engines: In this digital age, every business is trying hyper-personalization using recommendation engines to give you a right offer at right time. organizations that haven't taken advantage of their big data in this way may lose customers to competitors or may lose out on upsell or cross-sell opportunities

4.   Sentiment Analysis: Today, it is important to know consumer emotions while they are interacting with your business and use that for improving customer satisfaction. Big data and social media channels together help in analyzing customer sentiments which gives organizations a clear picture of what they need to do to outperform their competitors. Disney, Nestle, Toyota is spending huge money and efforts on keeping their customer’s happy.

5.   Predictive and preventive maintenance: With internet of things and sensor technology data is captured from machines, equipment, and devices in real time. All the data is put to use for predicting the failures up front and reduce unplanned downtime and maintenance costs. Companies like GE are using Digital Twins in their wind farm to drive down the cost of electricity.

Big Data is nothing new today and companies are building data lakes to take advantage of storing and retaining any number of years’ worth of history.  

There are many more use cases but which other use cases you can think of that measure the success of an organization?