The Importance of Analytics

The Key to understanding your customers’ needs

Mobile app analytics is a necessity in today’s digital world, as it helps an organisation to make projections and informed decisions when it comes to the product development strategy. With over 2 million apps available on the App Store and 3.15 million apps on Google Play Store, having a successful thought-through analytics strategy could be a key differentiation factor to set a brand apart from the competition. [1]

At mkodo, we believe that the focus on player experience should be at the very heart of any digital strategy and to understand the customers better, each business needs to have the data to guide them through this process. The goal is to turn the information collected into insights that will help to make informed decisions on how to adjust the user experience (UX) of a mobile app and highlight which functionality, or journeys should be continued to be invested in and which areas you need to improve.

For example, this can be applied to the essential journeys like registration, to track where in the process the players are likely to drop off because it takes them too long or the UX is not intuitive enough. For lottery apps, the key focus could be around ticket purchase journeys where analytics can help identify elements that are not used often to help remove unnecessary complexity and transform the purchase journey into a sleek process achieved with a few-clicks. Meanwhile, reviewing the interactions with the game play screen can help  improve the core journey for the casino and bingo players. For apps that offer multiple lottery, casino, slots or bingo games, understanding which titles bring in more revenue can help to make a decision to put them in a more easily accessible area of the app, or feature them prominently on the homepage in order to gain the best result. 

Your organisation can be collecting data about player behaviour, conversions and general app usage with the help of a variety of tools available on the market. Google Firebase is the most popular mobile analytics software development kit (SDK) with an 88% integration reach (as of March 2021) amongst all Android apps. [2] It is a free to use extensive solution that provides insight on app usage and customer engagement and could be a one-stop shop for most analytics requirements. Other tools that can be considered are AppsFlyer and Flurry for marketing analytics and attribution.

Here are a few examples of key use cases and benefits that can be gained with an effective analytics strategy:

• Find out which areas are harder for players to reach.

For example, an operator may find that moving a ‘how-to-play’ guide out of the sub-section in the navigation menu and incorporating it into the game-play view will offer players information at a correct point in their journey, instead of it being hidden away.

• Identify the screens where players are more likely to abandon a specific journey

For example, if players are dropping off on screen 2 out 5 of the registration process, it may be worth reconsidering the length of the journey or revisit the UX of that particular screen.

• Discover which part of a multi-step operation is failing when players experience errors

For example, operators may discover that players using a specific device are abandoning the ticket scanner feature on your lottery app after multiple unsuccessful attempts to scan the barcode.

• Collect extended information and generate deeper reports in certain areas

For example, may be worth considering investing into an enhanced ecommerce analytics product that offers a holistic measurement of interactions with the product across the entire purchase experience. [3]

Analytics Techniques:

• Adding Events - logging each screen the user navigates through with analytics events.
• User Properties - adding user properties that get associated with future events to segment the analytics data into different groups.
• Custom Events - Logging custom events when certain actions are performed by the users. For example, clicking a button.
• Parameters - Adding extra parameters with custom events to collect additional data when necessary. For example, a parameter can be a specific type of a promotion, or bonus that the player has opted-in to, or chose to redeem.
• Extensive Tracking - using extended analytics functionality (such as enhanced ecommerce analytics) to get a more complex targeted data set.

Having app analytics in place is a starting point that will help identify the best ways to spend your resources and achieve set goal. The key challenge is to find an effective way to gather and use the collected data to help your organisation understand its’ customers and how they interact with your mobile app products.

Sources:

[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/1729/app-stores/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035612/leading-mobile-app-analytics-sdks-android/

[3] https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ios/v5/enhanced-ecommerce