Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now, this week I
want to talk about "The Importance of Analytics"
Okay, so earlier this week I went to an event in London sponsored by Google and
a big venture capital firm and it was called the Mobile Growth Summit and what
they talked a lot about was User Acquisition. I filmed a little bit
before I went in. Here's just has a little bit before I went in.
Hey guys! So I'm in London at the moment. I'm in Tottenham Court Road. I'm at the
Google Headquarters.
I'm going to this Google event on how to bump up your app
users. I get invited to this thing sometimes and they're always pretty
cool, mainly because the swag is really good,
you get like another... Google is always very generous with the stuff that is in the goody bag,
but also I think last time I came to one for AdMob, it was a couple years ago and I met
like a lot of really good developers.
Developers like that got way more apps than I did at the
time, and I was like at that time I didn't know anybody else had more than I do, but of course they're out there
but you don't really get to mingle with them and it's always really
important. Anyway, I just want to do this really quick. Anything that I've learned
of course I want to tell you about anything that you know that I try out
and used to work well for me. I'll let you know. Okay, so basically what I was gonna
do is go in there and if I learn anything new I tell you all about it, but
to be honest with you, I was kind of disappointed with the whole event. It was
more geared towards large companies and it was geared towards the User
Acquisition and Cost Per Install type campaign. So one person even said, one of
the speaker's even said that in this day and age, you realistically
can't get any new users unless you pay for them. So and what they mean by pay
for them is running these Cost Per Install campaigns which are CPI
campaigns so that you run an ad and if somebody actually installs the
application then you pay like a dollar. So in order for this to work, you have to
figure out like the Lifetime Value of your customers or the LTV. So if
they...if over the course of the lifetime of that user they're worth say a
$1.50 then it makes sense that you're going to spend a dollar on them.
Now, I went through and find out the Lifetime Value of my users and it's like
11 cents. So it wasn't really that high and I kind of...when
something, to be honest with you I was a bit this point about the event because
like some of the companies there had ad budgets are like 50,000 a month
most of the people there were UA Specialist or User Acquisition
Specialist, so they worked for large companies only on User Acquisition. So I
went away kind of feeling like it was not really for me. I'm a small
developer and it's more for larger companies.
However, when I woke up the next morning I was thinking a little bit about what
they talked about and I thought about how that stuff could be applied. And one
of the things they talked about was with apps you have to track
everything that happens. So you have to be able to change things, test-change,
test-change which we talked about here also, right? But the
one thing I don't look at enough is the Analytics in our app. Now, if you have a
look at my screen here. Now, this is the Google Analytics for Ear Spy which is my
biggest app. Now I've had this in there since the beginning. That was one of the
things that was important, to put Analytics into the application so we can
see how things go.
It's kind of a good practice to be able to track certain things within the
application. However, I don't look at it very often. So to be honest I might as
well not even have it all.
I look more at downloads. I look at revenue and I look at ads and
stuff like that, but so the next morning I woke up. Yesterday morning I woke
up and I looked at this and and I started looking at not just this main
page here where all the users come from. I actually went down into behaviors and I
started looking at the screens. Now, in terms of making purchases
within Ear Spy,
I want them to go to one page which is called the Add_Features page so they
could go through and say I want to add mp3 recording or I want to add the extended
equalizer, that kind of stuff.
However, when I looked at this. Let me just put this back in the way I would
have saw it yesterday morning. You can see here there's the Main Page which
everybody hits 95%. Add_Feature page, it was only 1.95% of
people actually see it. So I started looking at this and no wonder
I don't get as many purchases. Most of my revenue comes from ads, not a lot from
purchases and sometimes people complain about the ads because they don't even
know... I don't even know if they know that they can remove them by making a small
purchase. So I started to look at things in terms of how the app
actually looks. So let me just show you some screenshots here of the application.
So this is what the app looked like prior to yesterday. So what I was
counting on is for... when the user opens the app, they see the
equalizer. They click the button equalizer here and up here in the upper right hand
corner is the menu action bar menu. So they go through, they click on it and
it opens up this menu here. So over here they got unlock feature which
is a way to get like an unlock code. If they tweet about it or like it on
Facebook. Save Configuration which saves the location of the equalizer. Load
Configuration which
loads up the previous saves and finally here Add Features which
is we kind of way down on the list and then more options which takes you to
like on Twitter, you know rate the app that kind of stuff. So
this is where I want people to go and you know I'm not entirely sure that
people are actually finding it because they they have to go through and find that
menu. They have to know the Android system. They have to know that those 3 dots are
the menu and actually do a little bit of poking around. Now a couple years
ago, we didn't even have that menu on there. We didn't have an action bar. We
relied on the menu button of the device itself, so people weren't finding
it. So you know this is... it's gonna make me seem really naive here. Now I
realize this, I seemed really naive because the fact that you know
that was not obvious to me.
So what I did yesterday morning in a flurry of activity, pushed
everything else back. Some very probably unhappy clients. I went through
and I change the interface and I added a button here on the front page. So here I
get an Add Features button so that if you're looking at it, it's very obvious
you click on that to add features. Also I went through and I checked, I
reorganize the menu, moved Add Features to the top because that's the thing that
they most want to happen and I remove the unlock features because
that's something that it's kind of nice but it's not important, right? So what I
want to do is I want people to enjoy using the app. The app should be...you know
completely run on its own, but it serves ads and all that kind of
stuff but I still want them to make a purchase.
Hopefully remove those ads or to add some of the extra features. So I released
this yesterday afternoon with these changes. Let me just show you. If I go through
here and I show you this one page here including yesterday.
We can see that we always have about 1500 views of that page. Yesterday we
doubled that and that was only with half a day, so it's starting to do a
little bit more how I wanted to work and the only reason I'm able to
make that work is because I have the Analytics in there, but again I've had
Analytics there for a long time and never really looked at it and I need to start
tagging some more things in there and start tracking how things, you know where
people are going, how they're finding that kind of stuff. I've also
done some changes on the Add Features page, right? just like a bunch of 5
buttons and they have to click on it and then see what the price is. So I just use the
API's and started showing the price on there, but the reason I'm bringing
this up is because I have Analytics. I have ignored Analytics. A lot
of people don't have Analytics at all and it's probably one of the most
important things you can have. Like if you have a website, you can tell where
people are hitting, where people are going but with an app, I mean
they're on people's phones all over the place. So the way to really
know what's going on and to know how people are behaving in the app is to put
proper Analytics in there. We use Google Analytics which is changing over to
Firebase, but we're going to go full into Firebases, loads of other
services out there like Flurry and I know there's other ones too but yeah
that's my point this week is
have a look at your app. Have a look at your Analytics. Maybe this week you can get
Analytics in some of your apps too, if you don't already have them. If you do have
them, start looking at the flow. If you've been as
naive as I have and start looking about are people going to where you want them
to go? And what can you do to test things, to see where
things go. So that's it for this week. I hope it's been helpful and I'll talk to
you next week!