Ask yourself, what delights your users? Or, more specifically, what about your app engages them, and what makes them feel confused?

The only way to answer these questions is by running usability testing—the practice of analyzing your app’s design and functionality from the users’ perspective.

Usability testing can involve observing how users interact with your app, engaging a focus group to test your app in a controlled environment, or collecting user feedback directly. In fact, there are numerous ways to test the user experience within your app, including a few dozen tools for each method.

But how do you choose the best one?

To help you make an informed decision, we’ll walk you through the eight best mobile user-testing tools. Each of which employs various methodologies to provide product teams with actionable insight into app usability. 

Read on to discover:

• The most effective usability testing methods
• The 8 Best usability testing software solutions 
  • Smartlook
  • Maze
  • Optimizely
  • Lookback
  • UserTesting
  • Survicate
  • Global App Testing
  • Dynatrace

Mobile usability testing methods: choosing the right one to optimize the testing process

Your choice of tool depends on your testing tactics. If you haven’t selected a methodology, let’s look at the most common (and effective) usability testing techniques.

Quantitative usability testing

Quantitative usability testing involves gathering numerical data to evaluate and compare your mobile app with your internal benchmarks. To quantify user behavior, you may track metrics such as task completion rates, time on task, error rates, and click-through rates.

Best for: companies that already have a large user base and enough historical data to get statistically significant results.

Guerilla testing

Guerrilla testing is an informal usability testing method conducted in real-world situations with minimal resources. Testers approach random people and ask them to use a mobile app, observing their interactions and collecting feedback. 

Guerrilla testing is excellent for identifying top-level usability issues, uncovering unexpected user behavior, and gaining rapid feedback without the constraints of a formal lab environment.

Best for: testing new products before launch.

Session recording

Session recording involves capturing all user interactions with your mobile app and reviewing them as a video. This analysis lets you pinpoint user struggles, points of frustration, and the reasons behind drop-offs.

Smartlook, an app analytics tool, records all user sessions allowing you to filter, flag interactions, and leave notes when you find something particularly interesting.

Best for: an in-depth end-user experience analysis to identify optimization opportunities in a live product.

Observation

Direct observation is the practice of watching users interact with your mobile app in real time without guiding them through it. The primary goal is to comprehensively understand how users naturally interact with the app, uncovering their successes and challenges.

It’s like watching session replays but with the ability to interject and ask users to explain certain actions or feelings. The drawback is that you can only observe a limited number of sessions at a time. 

Best for: prototype testing or collecting user feedback before releasing new products or features.

User interviews and feedback collection

User interviews are one-on-one conversations with end-users to gather qualitative feedback about their experiences with your app.

Collecting feedback within your app may be easier than engaging users in one-on-one calls if you don’t have a loyal customer base yet. You can embed in-app surveys in your product flows and instantly collect users’ opinions on particular interactions.

Source: Survicate

Best for: backing quantitative insights with qualitative data. 

A/B testing

Although generally not considered a usability testing method, A/B testing can complement any of the above techniques, allowing you to drive even more insight into user preferences.

Best for: experimenting with multiple versions of an app.

So which one should you choose?

Select your usability testing method based on which development stage you’re currently working on. 

Have you just designed the functionality of your app? Then guerilla testing or observation are helpful techniques to begin with. 

Looking to optimize your product performance or release new features? Quantitative insights backed by session recordings and user feedback will give you a grasp on the user experience and help you pinpoint areas for improvement.

Best mobile usability testing tools compared

Smartlook: best for recording user behavior

Smartlook is a user experience testing tool that gives you a complete picture of your app’s usability. It’s a great alternative for unmoderated usability testing, combining the power of quantitative data analysis with detailed session recordings.

Use case: Say you’ve implemented a new feature and want to determine if the flow is intuitive enough for early adopters. Integrate Smartlook’s lightweight SDK into your mobile app to record user sessions and capture every interaction with your app and new features in particular.

When ready, create events to represent each stage (or screen) within the flow and create a new funnel. This funnel will represent how users navigate this new feature.

This allows you to collect quantitative insights into how many users interact with the feature and how many drop off. 

Examine drop-offs closely by looking into abandoned sessions via session recordings. To watch replays of all the users who left the flow, simply click the Play button underneath the relevant stage.

Session recordings in Smartlook

By looking into individual session replays, you’ll be able to see how real users experience your app interface and spot usability issues promptly. And you don’t necessarily have to focus on drop-offs—you can test your app’s usability by a particular audience segment by applying custom filters.

Key features:

• Quantitative data on user engagement uncovers metrics such as click-through rates, task completion rates, interactions with particular features (a.k.a. events), etc
• Session recordings capture user interactions with your app in real-time
• Rage clicks highlight design flaws by helping you spot frustrating interactions, such as clicking multiple times on design elements
• Anomalies detection automatically identifies unusual user behavior patterns. With anomalies monitoring turned on, Smartlook will alert you once trigger conditions are met 
• Heatmaps provide valuable insight into user attention, helping you optimize your app’s layout and placement of essential elements
• Mobile & web analytics make it possible to track user engagement across mobile apps and desktop websites

Cons:

• Suitable only for contextual testing. No functionality for controlled experiments
• Smartlook doesn’t offer sample audiences. You’ll be testing against your customer base

Pricing: Free for up to 3,000 monthly sessions and 10 trackable events. Paid plans start at $55/month. Sign up for a free, full-featured 30-day trial today.

“Smartlook provides invaluable insight into how users navigate our mobile app. We identified dozens of usability issues within the first few weeks of using Smartlook. The funnels feature is super useful and helped us understand how our paying customers interact with our app, including which paths and features they accessed, pre-conversion. The qualitative data generated from Smartlook is a valuable complement to our quantitative analytics.”

Verified User Review

Maze: best for prototype testing

Maze is a product discovery platform that covers many usability testing methods like prototype testing, card sorting, and tree testing.

Use case: Maze is a good choice for teams in the early product development stages. To start testing your prototype in Maze, you must create a new project and import your prototype from your design tool (Maze integrates with Figma and Sketch).

Next, outline specific tasks and scenarios you want users to perform within your prototype. Engage your audience or Invite participants who match your target audience to take the usability test. Maze allows you to set participant criteria, ensuring you gather feedback from your intended user demographic.

When the test is live, Maze will capture user actions, heatmaps, and navigation paths and provide you with quantitative metrics regarding your app’s usability.

Evaluating prototype test results in Maze

Key features:

• Wireframe and prototype testing allow you to validate your design usability before the app is live
• Card sorting is a practice of asking users to organize terms or features into categories, giving you a better understanding of their logic
• Tree testing involves evaluating your product terminology and architecture by putting it in front of users
• Live website usability testing enables you to run user research on live product flows
• Customer surveys collect user feedback regarding product experience
• AI-powered interview analysis automatically summarizes your Zoom interviews and creates shareable reports

Cons: 

• High-fidelity prototypes crash frequently, especially on mobile
• While Maze offers testers for product research, companies often complain about getting unreliable results from recruited participants

Pricing: Free for 1 study/month and a total of 7 questions or missions per study. Paid plans start at $99/month and unlock access to features like screen recordings and card sorting. Involving participants is only possible with a Team Plan, starting at $1,250.

Optimizely: best for A/B testing

Optimizely is a digital experience testing and optimization platform. It offers a wide range of tools for multivariate testing, A/B testing, etc.

Experimentation results by Optimizely

Use case: Optimizely integrates with Smartlook, allowing you to validate your A/B tests with user behavior insights like session recordings. While Optimizely uncovers the best-performing version of your app and gives you quantitative metrics, Smartlook’s qualitative insights will give you a better understanding of the actual user experience.

Key features:

• AI-powered personalization enables you to deliver a targeted and personalized experience to various audience segments before a full-scale roll-out
• Team collaboration is made easy thanks to Optimizely’s collaborative interface. It offers space for capturing ideas, assigning project tasks, and discussing outcomes
• A/B testing is a fundamental feature of Optimizely, enabling you to create and test two or more versions of a webpage or app screen
• Multivariate testing allows you to experiment with multiple element variations simultaneously

Cons:

• Optimizely requires a lot of training for new users
• Quantitative metrics don’t reflect the actual behaviors of app users. You need to integrate Optimizely with a third-party UX analytics tool to gain access to heatmaps and screen recordings

Pricing: Available upon request.

Lookback: best for real-time user insights

Lookback is an on-the-go research tool that helps product teams capture usability insights through one-on-one interviews and observation.

Use case: While Lookback is definitely helpful for validating your app’s UX design before release, it includes a popular use case— bringing teams together in research sessions. 

Invite product managers, designers, customer experience (CX) experts, and other teams to Lookback’s Observation Room to watch users interact with your app to ensure you’re on the same page regarding user pain points and key learning moments.

Collaborative user research in Lookback

Key features:

• Moderated and unmoderated tests give you the freedom to choose the method that works best for you. Set tasks for users to follow or observe as testers interact with your app during live sessions
• Face-to-face interviews uncover user perspectives that might be missed in questionnaires or online interactions
• Live team collaboration enables teams to observe user interactions in real time, share notes, and communicate seamlessly
• Timestamped notes serve as references for important interactions within the user testing process
• Eureka, an AI-powered assistant, transcribes and summarizes your sessions on the fly 

Cons:

• Testers may face trouble getting into sessions
• The platform doesn’t aggregate statistical data
• Running one-on-one sessions is time-consuming

Pricing: Lookback doesn’t include a free plan, only a 60-day free trial. Paid plans start at $25/month for 10 sessions/year.

UserTesting: best for AI-driven analysis

UserTesting is a UX research platform specializing in capturing human insight through videos.

Use case: UserTesting’s AI capabilities are much stronger than other user-testing alternatives on this list. If you’re having trouble understanding your users on a granular level, this AI-powered platform will process the data and provide you with nuanced insight.

AI-powered Sentiment Analysis in UserTesting

Key features:

• Interactive Path Flow aggregates user interactions into customer journeys, giving you a better grasp of quantitative data than other human insight platforms
• Click Maps highlight which screen elements people users engage with
• Sentiment Analysis automatically surfaces negative or positive emotion points in completed interview sessions
• Intent Path uncovers user intentions as they navigate through the app, including how they correlate with the goal of a given flow
• Instant Insight generates post-test results, highlighting anomalies and identifying similarities across sessions
• Contributor Network gives you access to a large pool of testers
• IA Testing supports various usability tests, including tree tests, card sorting, and prototype testing

Cons:

• Testers hired through the UserTesting platform often don’t pay as much attention to tests as product teams would like
• The mobile testing experience isn’t user-friendly because of the screen overlay and tasks

Pricing: Available upon request.

Survicate: best for in-app user feedback collection

Survicate is a survey tool that helps you enhance insights gained from usability testing.

Use case: It’s best to use customer feedback to back your key research data—not as an alternative solution. You can integrate Survicate with Smartlook to complement your session recordings and filter sessions by particular responses.

Filtering Smartlook session recordings by Survicate feedback

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop functionality for creating surveys, no coding required
• In-app surveys collect user feedback directly from your application
• Over 400 ready-to-use survey templates, from CSAT surveys to usability evaluations, with AI-assisted search and personalized recommendations
• Audience targeting directs surveys to custom user segments
• Event-based surveys trigger feedback collection based on specific user interactions or events within your app 
• Automated feedback collection through recurring surveys
• A wide range of native integrations with third-party tools

Cons:

• Lack of AI-powered feedback analysis capabilities
• Slightly more expensive than other survey tools

Pricing: Survicate offers a 10-day free trial. Paid plans start at $53/250 responses/month.

Global App Testing

Global App Testing is a usability testing platform for teams looking to outsource testing initiatives.

Use case: The key difference between Global App Testing and other testing platforms is reliability. Through Global App Testing, you can access a community of vetted professional testers with diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Due to its narrow focus on crowd testing, it’s most suitable during pre-launch or market expansion.

Key features:

• UX testing evaluates your app’s user experience from various angles, focusing on navigation, functionality, and overall design
• Bug detection aims to identify application errors through meticulous testing
• Open-ended questions can be used to collect additional feedback from testers regarding app usability

Cons:

• It isn’t designed for testing against your own audience

Pricing: Available upon request.

Dynatrace: best for real-time performance warnings

Dynatrace is a sophisticated software observability platform. While it primarily focuses on application performance tracking, it also supports digital experience monitoring on a granular level.

Use case: Dynatrace is great for observing an app’s responsiveness, loading time, and usability issues. The platform runs synthetic monitoring tests that simulate user interactions from different locations and devices to validate whether your application is fully functional and available to all users.

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring

Key features:

• Real user monitoring captures data regarding user behavior, allowing you to trace user sessions and click paths
• Session replays uncover exactly how users interact with your app
• Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions with applications under various conditions
• AI-powered root-cause analysis automatically points out reasons behind performance issues

Cons:

• On the expensive side
• Configuration can be time-consuming for inexperienced users

Pricing: Real user monitoring costs $0.0025/session, with synthetic monitoring for an additional cost of $0.001 per synthetic request.

Go beyond traditional remote usability testing with Smartlook

Mobile usability testing is crucial at each stage of the application development process. You’ll need different testing methodologies and tools at different stages to meet specific goals. Regardless of your tactic, it’s critical to remember to back your test results with real user insights.

Smartlook stands out from the competition thanks to its in-depth user behavior recording that lets you look beyond the metrics to see how users engage with your app. Smartlook gives you a 360-degree overview of your product usability by seamlessly combining quantitative data analysis with detailed session recordings.

Request a demo or start your free, full-featured 30-day trial today.

Adelina Karpenkova

is a freelance writer with a background in SaaS marketing. She loves discovering new product marketing strategies, gaining insights for product experts, and turning her knowledge into helpful content. When she's not writing, she plays tennis or knits cozy sweaters.

The post Master mobile user-testing: 8 best tools & alternatives appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

They’re easy to create and analyze, while also providing useful insights into where users click, scroll, and move their cursors. Their simplicity and versatility make them a popular choice for digital marketers, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, and product managers.

But despite their popularity, there are still several misconceptions about heatmaps. For example, many teams don’t consider the fact that large website changes shouldn’t be made based on heatmaps alone (due to their inherent limitations).

In this guide, you’ll learn how to create and use different types of heatmaps, while overcoming the most common pitfalls. 

Here’s everything we’ll cover below:

• How heat mapping works
• The 3 main types of heatmaps and how to use each one (with real-life examples)
• Heatmaps’ biggest limitations and how to overcome them

Before we dive in, note that we’ll be using Smartlook — our behavioral analytics platform — to show examples of heat mapping in action.

You can try Smartlook today with our full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. Our tool captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app and lets you create heatmaps, define events, build funnels, and watch session recordings. 

How heat mapping works

Heat mapping is a data visualization technique for representing numerical data in different colors and hues. The resulting heatmaps are much more user-friendly than the raw, complex data sets because they make it easy to understand which values are high or low compared to each other.

The heat mapping process is very versatile, which is why it can be applied in various use cases — from regular data analysis to medical research, financial modeling, weather analysis, population density monitoring, website and mobile app analytics, and more.

In this article, we’re focusing on website and mobile app analytics, so let’s start with a website heatmap example.

This particular heatmap shows what percentage of visitors reach each part of the page. Or in other words, visitors’ scrolling activity is the numerical data behind this color-coded representation.

The top part is bright red because that’s the area all visitors see immediately after landing on the page. Since visitors gradually drop off further down the page, the heatmap’s colors change from warmer to colder ones — from red and yellow to green, blue, and finally gray (which is typically the footer of a web page).

This visual representation is what makes heatmaps really intuitive and easy to interpret, which is why they’re so popular for tracking user behavior.

For example, the heatmap below contains colored areas, with bright red spots in the middle. Even if you haven’t seen a heatmap below, you can probably guess that the red spots represent more activity compared to the colder colors.

There are plenty of heatmap software tools out there that can help you generate similar heatmaps for your website or mobile app. 

While each tool has slight differences, the process of creating a heatmap typically follows these steps:

1. You set up the tool on your site or app by installing a code snippet.
2. The tool either starts collecting user behavior data automatically or asks you to manually pick which page or app screen you’d like it to track. For instance, we’ve designed Smartlook to collect all user interactions on your site or app by default. This ensures you aren’t missing important behavioral data or wasting time manually setting up data collection.
3. You tell the tool which page or app screen you want to generate a heatmap for. If the behavior data has already been collected, your heatmap will be generated instantly. If not, you’ll have to wait for a few days or weeks to capture enough data. This is also why automatic data collection makes the heat mapping process much easier.

The 3 main types of heatmaps and how to use each one (with real-life examples)

The term heatmap can actually refer to different types of heatmaps for analyzing user behavior. In fact, most heat mapping tools offer click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right).

In this section, we’ll show you how to make the most out of each one. But before we dive in, there are three best practices you need to consider, regardless of the type of heatmap you’re working with:

#1. Wait for at least 1000 views.

Heatmaps must gather 1,000 or more views before being reliable for behavior analysis. Below that level, it’s easy to make incorrect conclusions due to insufficient data. In general, the more information each heatmap collects, the more accurately it reflects the user experience.

#2. Filter your heatmap data.

Different types of users interact with your site or app in different ways. If you don’t filter your heatmap data, you risk making changes based on false assumptions about your user base. For example, you may not consider that desktop and mobile visitors see totally different elements above the fold. With Smartlook, you can filter heatmaps by users’ devices, locations, referrers, UTM tags, and much more. 

#3. Don’t make large changes based on heatmaps alone.

While heatmaps are a great starting point for analyzing user behavior, they can’t tell you why users do what they do or track behavior across different pages. That’s why you should make large website changes only after confirming your analysis with other analytics methods, as we’ll explore later.

Click maps

Click maps show you where users click (on desktop) or tap (on mobile devices). For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook click map for a web page.

The colored areas are where most clicks on the page occurred, with the red zones visualizing where most clicks were concentrated. You can also hover over any area and see the number of clicks in it.

Click maps are useful for:

• Understanding which call-to-action (CTA) elements users interact with. For instance, if you’re not sure whether visitors engage with your site’s “Free Trial” or “Book a demo” buttons, you can use a click map to quickly compare clicks on both buttons.
• Finding non-clickable elements that users are trying to click. These repeated clicks on non-interactive elements (called rage clicks) indicate confusion and frustration.

Move maps

Move maps show you where users move their cursors. Again, the bright red spots mark the areas with the most movement activity. 

Tracking mouse movements with these heatmaps can help you:

• Understand which parts of a landing page attract visitors’ attention. Studies have shown a correlation between mouse movements and eye gaze. That’s why many companies use mouse tracking as a cost-effective substitute to the more expensive eye tracking. 
• Find areas that distract or confuse visitors. If a move map shows frantic cursor activity in an area, it may be a sign that users are getting distracted or don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

Scroll maps

Scroll maps show what percentage of visitors reach each part of your page, as you can see below.

Scroll maps make it easier to determine if certain elements are placed correctly by:

• Showing you which part of a page most visitors see without scrolling (this is also called “above the fold”, borrowing a term from the newspaper industry). Since nearly all page visitors see the elements above the average fold, that’s the most valuable real estate on any given page. Make sure to put your essential value propositions, CTAs, and offers there.
• Showing you what percentage of visitors reach each part of a page. As you go further down a page, the number of visitors gradually decreases. Scroll maps show you exactly what percentage of visitors remains at each point, so you can decide where to place elements that don’t qualify for above the fold placement.

Now that you know how heatmaps work, let’s look at two examples of companies using them to solve real issues.

How Sewio improved their clickthrough rate by 276% with scroll maps and click maps

Sewio manufactures and sells real-time locating systems. The company’s marketing team wanted to learn more about how people interacted with their site’s homepage, so they set up Smartlook and started analyzing heatmaps.

Their scroll maps and clicks maps revealed two key issues:

• CTAs that were supposed to be above the fold actually appeared below the fold for many users.
• Almost no one clicked on the buttons that led to client success stories.

Armed with these insights, Sewio’s team was able to redesign the homepage in a way that aligned with the goals they had for their website. 

They moved their primary CTAs above the fold. They also updated the customer success stories section to make it more interesting and enticing for visitors.

Thanks to these changes, Sewio’s new homepage saw:

• A 276% increase in the clickthrough rate of the “Go to store” button.
• Over 3x more clicks on the links to client success stories.
• An increase in average time on page from 4:01 to 4:29.

How Hookle saved 2 weeks of development time with heatmap analysis

Hookle is a social media management app for Android and iOS. They’ve used Smartlook to improve their onboarding, provide better customer support, and verify their hypothesis faster.

Specifically, Hookle’s team relied on Smartlook’s heatmaps to learn how users interacted with the main element of their app — an interactive statistics chart. 

They wanted to understand how people interacted with the chart and find ways to add new elements to it. However, when they looked at the heatmap, they realized that people barely clicked on the chart.

This helped Hookle’s team save two weeks of development time they would’ve spent making the chart more interactive. As a result, they were able to focus their efforts on improving elements that were much more important to the user experience.

Heatmaps’ biggest limitations and how to overcome them

Despite their ease of use and fast insights, heatmaps have two serious limitations:

• Their information is usually obvious and non-actionable. The heatmap hotspots are often where you’d expect, so you don’t get much novel or actionable information. This makes it difficult to come up with ways to improve clickthrough rates, conversions, and other key metrics.
• They can’t track a user’s journey across your site or app. Heatmaps only show aggregate trends about a page or app screen. You can’t use them to analyze how users interact with elements that appear on multiple pages and you can’t put specific interactions, like button clicks or text inputs, in the context of the entire user journey.

That’s why in most cases, conclusions based on heatmaps shouldn’t be the only basis for making website or app changes. Instead, they should be treated as a starting point for understanding behavior and used in combination with the analytics tools we’ll discuss below.

Session recordings: Watch how users navigate your site or app from start to finish

Session recordings capture everything your users do while navigating your site or app — where they click, which pages they visit, which features they use, and so on.

You can use them to watch the journeys of individual users, instead of just focusing on aggregated information for a single page or app screen.

For example, check out the Smartlook session recording below:

The session replay video that takes up most of the screen shows how a user navigates an onboarding tutorial. Besides this ability to observe user behavior in detail, session recordings also capture valuable data about:

• The user’s device, location, and session duration (to the left of the video).
• Each event that was triggered during the session (under the video).

This makes session recordings a very versatile tool that can be used by lots of teams in various use cases. For example:

• Product teams can use them to analyze how users interact with their app and communicate their findings with others.
• Marketing teams can see which features users like and highlight them in their marketing campaigns.
• Customer support teams can see exactly how problems occur, without having to bother users for explanations.
• And much more.

To learn more about session recordings and their benefits, check out:

• Our guide to recording website visitors
• The top 8 session replay & visitor recording tools for fixing UX issues

Events: Track business-critical user actions

Events are user actions that can be tracked over time, like button clicks, text inputs, or page visits.

Event tracking is a crucial part of any web and mobile app analytics toolkit because it lets you:

• Quantify user behavior.
• Monitor crucial interactions, like clicks on your “Add to Cart”, “Book a Demo”, or “Pricing” buttons, successful purchases, and more.
• Understand how copy and design changes affect the occurrence of these business-critical interactions.

Smartlook offers different ways to track events, including selecting from a list or clicking directly on your site or app’s UI, as shown below. 

Smartlook also supports two additional use cases for event tracking: 

#1. Filtering session recordings.

In Smartlook, you can click the “Play” button next to each event to jump into all sessions where it was triggered. This functionality lets you see the full context behind certain events — what users did before and after performing them — to get a more nuanced view of the user journey.

#2. Finding rage clicks and JavaScript errors.

Smartlook automatically tracks rage clicks and JavaScript errors as events, so you can zero in on the sessions of users who experienced these issues. This is especially useful for developers struggling to understand how certain errors occurred.

Funnels: Analyze key user flows

Funnels are sequences of events users go through during multi-step flows, like onboarding tutorials, newsletter signups, or checkouts. 

Building and analyzing funnels shows you:

• How many users entered each flow.
• The flow’s overall conversion rate.
• The drop-offs between each step.

With Smartlook, you can build funnels by simply placing two or more events in the order your users follow. Since the user interaction data is already collected, the funnel visualization will appear instantly, like in the GIF below.

Smartlook also lets you combine funnel analysis with session recordings to see why users drop off. 

For example, the screenshot below shows an e-commerce checkout funnel with a 61.74% conversion rate:

This funnel consists of three events, which you can define in Smartlook without any coding:

• Event 1: Visitors click on the “Buy/upgrade package” button (you can select the button with our no-code event picker).
• Event 2: Visitors click on the “Pay Now” button (again, just use the event picker and select the “Pay Now” button).
• Event 3: Visitors land on the “Thank You” page (use the “Visited URL” standard event and enter the page URL).

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each step of the funnel, including the drop-offs. This takes you directly to the recordings of users who dropped off at a certain stage. As a result, you can instantly find session recordings that are guaranteed to show you a point of friction in your flows (as opposed to wasting hours sifting through irrelevant sessions).

In fact, AstroPay (one of our fintech clients) used a similar process to boost the conversion rate of one of their most important flows by 56%.

Try Smartlook’s heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels for free

You can see how Smartlook can benefit your business by booking a free live demo with our team.

Our tool can be used on all kinds of websites, including those built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify. Implementing Smartlook on a site is as easy as pasting a code snippet (directly or via Google Tag Manager). 

Smartlook also has SDKs for many mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines — including iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. We have detailed documentation to guide you through the implementation — but if you get stuck or have any questions, our Support team is ready and waiting.

Lastly, Smartlook integrates with A/B testing platforms (like Optimizely and Firebase A/B Testing), analytics tools (like Mixpanel and Google Analytics), and other popular SaaS solutions (like Jira and Slack).

Try Smartlook’s heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels today with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post Heat mapping: How to use heat maps for web & mobile analytics appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

We’ll begin by defining app user acquisition and then move on to key acquisition metrics.

What is mobile user acquisition?

Mobile user acquisition is an important aspect of mobile app marketing. It’s what brings new users to mobile apps and games, which is crucial for the growth and success of any business.  

The main goal of mobile user acquisition is to drive traffic to app store listings and encourage users to install and engage with apps or games. There are various strategies and tactics that can be used to achieve this, such as ASO, app store advertising, social media, influencer marketing, and email marketing, among others.

With growing competition in the app market, it’s essential to have a well-planned user acquisition strategy to stand out from the competition. However, to ensure your mobile acquisition strategy is effective, you’ll need to track key acquisition metrics. The sooner you identify your acquisition pain points, the sooner you can adjust your strategy and achieve your goals.

Here’s a list of the most essential mobile acquisition metrics that you need to pay attention to:

• App installs
• App store conversion rates
• Organic & non-organic install split
• App User Acquisition Costs
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Customer lifetime value (cLTV)
• Uninstall rate

Let’s take a more detailed look at each of these metrics.

1. App Installs

To see the growth rate of your acquisition numbers, you’ll need to consider one of the most essential metrics – your app’s install count across various platforms and channels. To attribute new users in a more convenient way, consider using an attribution provider to help distinguish organic downloads (users finding your app naturally) from paid downloads (users finding your app through ads or marketing).

You can see the install number in your app console (Google Play Console or App Store Connect) or use tools like App Radar to track the installs by source and country.

2. App store conversion rates

To pinpoint the stage of user experience that requires optimization, you’ll need to track your app store conversion rates. If your CVR from Impressions to Store Views is low, consider testing another set of keywords or your app icon and/or name. If you have a high CVR from impressions to Store Views but a low CVR from Store Views to installs, there’s a good chance your app store listing is not convincing enough. In this case, try a different set of screenshots and a more actionable preview video that showcases your app. You should also try optimizing your app description by highlighting benefits.

3. Organic & non-organic install split

To get a better understanding of how your app is being installed, it’s important to look at the split between paid and organic installs. This will help you identify which channels need to be optimized, including how you can make the most of your marketing budget.

You can calculate the split by dividing the total number of non-organic installs over a defined period by the total number of installs during the same period. To make your acquisition analysis even more accurate, calculate organic & non-organic installs split by different locations. This way, you can identify which channels work best on a specific local and put your effort into the emerging channels and countries.

4. App User Acquisition Cost

The cost of acquiring new users, also known as customer acquisition cost (CAC), is a key metric for measuring the success of your user acquisition campaigns. By calculating the CAC for each campaign, you can see which is the most effective in terms of cost efficiency. For example, if you spend $1,000 on user acquisition efforts for a Black Friday campaign and obtain 100 users, then your CAC is $10 per user.
Remember that your main goal as an app marketer is to keep your CAC as low as possible. One method of decreasing CAC is by obtaining users organically without relying on paid methods. But keep in mind that solely growing an app with organic marketing efforts takes much more time.

5. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

If you’re looking to acquire new customers through paid acquisition, you’ll want to focus on your return on ad spend (ROAS). This metric is calculated by dividing your total revenue by your attributed ad spend. For example, if an ad campaign costs $10 per paying customer and generates $15 in revenue per paying customer within 90 days, your 90-Day ROAS would be $5 per customer.
While a $5 90-Day ROAS may sound like an easy target to hit, it can actually be quite challenging to achieve. The ideal payback period and expected return depend on factors such as app category, business goals, and app marketing channel(s) involved.

6. Customer lifetime value (cLTV)

Custom lifetime value measures how much value each customer brings to your business. This metric is more relevant for subscription-based apps but can also be considered by other mobile app owners. In tracking this metric, you should be looking to either increase your cLTV over time (each individual user becomes more valuable to your business over time) or the number of new users (which balances out decreases in cLTV).
CLTV is calculated by multiplying your average revenue over a given period per customer (for example, monthly subscription cost) by how long users stay subscribed. For example, if your monthly subscription cost is $10, and users typically stay subscribed for 2 years, then the cLTV is $10 x 24 months = $240. By understanding cLTV, businesses can ensure they are making the most of their customer relationships and maximizing their profits.

7. Uninstall rate

When you compare your uninstall rate against other measures, you’ll get a quick indication of which acquisition channels are providing high-quality users. A high uninstall rate might mean that something is wrong with your app or onboarding process. It could also be an indication that your marketing efforts don’t match user expectations. In other words, you acquired users that tend to churn very quickly.
To calculate the uninstall rate, you need to divide the total number of uninstalls by the total number of installs over a set period of time. Also, be sure to analyze the uninstall rate by country. This will tell you where your strategy is working and where you acquired low-quality users.

Smartlook helps you fight high uninstall rates by providing insights into user behavior and allowing you to identify pain points and areas of improvement in your app.

Session recordings: Smartlook allows you to record and replay user sessions, giving you a firsthand look at how users interact with your app. This can help you identify any usability issues or areas where users may be experiencing frustration.

Heatmaps: These show you where users are clicking and scrolling in your app, allowing you to see which areas are getting the most attention and which are being ignored. This helps you optimize your design and layout for better user engagement.

Crash Reports: An app’s stability is closely related to high uninstall rates. It’s no secret that frequent crashes negatively affect the user experience. Smartlook Crash Reports allows you to view recordings of the moments leading up to a crash. Save countless hours of time with additional reproduction and reporting.

In short, by using Smartlook to gain insight into user behavior and identify pain points, you can make targeted adjustments to your app or website and reduce the likelihood of users uninstalling.

Takeaways

There are many different ways to measure how your mobile user acquisition strategy is performing. That said, don’t overwhelm yourself with dozens of numbers. With the right acquisition metrics in place, you can ensure that you don’t miss an opportunity to acquire more mobile users and grow your business.
Keeping track of these 7 metrics allows you to make adjustments to your mobile acquisition strategy as needed so you can achieve the best possible return on your investment. Track these metrics closely, and use them to maximize your user acquisition efforts to knock your mobile acquisition goals out of the park.

Iryna Lukashuk

Iryna is a marketing team lead at App Radar with 3+ years of experience in SaaS & B2B marketing. She's excited about her goal to provide the app marketing community with valuable and informative content that can help empower them in their profession

The post Top 7 metrics to measure your mobile user acquisition appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Smartlook solves this problem seamlessly with its Wireframe rendering mode. If you are already tired of the occlusion not working, try Smartlook.

Smartlook is a comprehensive analytics solution for mobile apps and websites that provides product managers, developers, UX designers, and marketers with unmatched user insights.

Feature Overview 

Session recordings

One of the primary benefits of using Smartlook for Flutter app analytics is that it allows team members to see how users interact with their app. Session recordings capture all user actions, such as taps, swipes, and scrolling, providing a better understanding of how an app is being used. 

Thanks to a wireframe mode that automatically hides all sensitive data, Smartlook is compliant by default.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps act as a visual representation of user activity within an app, highlighting the areas where users spend the most time and the features they interact with most. Product managers and UX designers can use this data to optimize their app’s layout and functionality, making it more user-friendly and efficient.

Event tracking 

Smartlook’s SDK automatically detects and tracks several types of events, including touches, navigation, and rage taps. Setting up and tracking events is easy as everything is automatically tracked from the moment you deploy the SDK, allowing you to get insights in a matter of minutes. As if that’s not enough, all events are paired with session recordings. 

Funnels 

Funnels represent the exact conversion steps users take while interacting with your mobile app. See exactly how many users move from one screen to the next, what issues prevent them from converting, and determine which screens are resulting in high exit rates and why. With Revenue Insights, you’ll know how much each funnel drop-off costs you in unrealized conversions.

A lightweight SDK optimized for Flutter apps

Smartlook’s SDK is equipped with an automatic data capture feature that takes the hassle out of collecting usage data. With advanced screen-capturing capabilities, you can effortlessly gain valuable insights into the user experience — no manual setup required. Smartlook’s Flutter SDK includes another powerful feature: automatic screen tagging. It detects and captures all app screens without requiring extra code, making monitoring simple and efficient. 

Smartlook’s Flutter SDK also addresses user privacy concerns with a wireframe recording mode. This is crucial for complying with personally identifiable information (PII) regulations and protecting user privacy.

The SDK is lightweight and stable and does not affect the performance of the application in any way.

Conclusion  

Smartlook is the best analytics tool for teams building apps on Flutter. Its various features and compliant-by-default approach to sensitive information allows users to gain valuable insights into user behavior and optimize their app’s performance and usability — all within a lightweight SDK that’s easy to implement.

To see how Smartlook can help your business (without setting it up), book a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive reviews 99% of the time.

If you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Vojtěch Šibor

is a Product Marketing Manager at Smartlook. Vojtech is a marketer with product blood running through his veins. He always knows about all the new features and what's coming up. Sometimes he talks about brand stuff and makes sure that the communication is consistent.

The post Smartlook: the best analytics solution for Flutter mobile apps appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

• How do customers on our most expensive plan use our newest feature?
• How do mobile users from the US navigate the onboarding tutorial compared to desktop ones?
• How do customers who found our site via Facebook ads behave compared to those brought in organically from Google?

User analytics is also a subset of product analytics since it relies on the data gathered during the product analytics process. 

But while product analytics focuses on how people interact with the product, user analytics goes a step further by combining behaviors (like in-app purchases) with individual characteristics (like demographic info) and business-specific properties (like customers’ pricing plans) to help you find your most valuable users.

Once you know who your top customers are, user analytics lets you analyze how they interact with your product and find ways to attract more of them.

In this guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about user analytics, including:

• The importance of user analytics for improving acquisition, product experience, and retention
• How to capture and analyze user analytics data: 4 key capabilities

Smartlook records the sessions of every single user in your app, shows you everything they do, and helps you uncover why they do it. Book a free demo with our team to see how Smartlook can help you build better products or start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

The importance of user analytics for improving acquisition, product experience, and retention

The biggest value of user analytics is the ability to uncover who your most valuable customers are and how they use your product. 

This information can be extremely valuable for many teams in various use cases. For example:

• Product managers can monitor how user behavior correlates with key metrics and KPIs, like engagement, churn, retention rates, and customer lifetime value (CLTV) for their most valuable customers. Product teams can also create detailed customer segments, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
• Marketers can analyze high-paying customer segments — their devices, what brought them to the site, which features they like, and so on. This helps them focus on certain channels and highlight product capabilities that can resonate with other similar customers.
• User experience (UX) designers and researchers can see how specific customers use the product in the wild. This gives them an unbiased way of looking at user behavior, as we discussed in our article on the top UX analytics tools. It also helps them validate or disprove the assumptions they have about each user persona.

Additionally, looking at the journeys of individual users can help you uncover actionable insights for improving your conversions, revenue, and retention. 

For example, say you analyze how high-paying customers navigate your onboarding tutorial and find a step that often causes friction and, in some cases, results in users abandoning the tutorial. Fixing that problem can result in more of your ideal customers becoming active users, which in turn leads to higher retention and CLTV.

How to capture and analyze user analytics data: 4 key capabilities

In order to perform user behavior analysis, you need a tool that can:

1. Segment users based on their behavior and characteristics.
2. Collect data at the individual level, instead of only aggregate, anonymized information, so you can zero in on the journeys of your most valuable user cohorts.

The four capabilities below can help you do both of these things.

Before we dive in, note that we’ll be using Smartlook — our product analytics & visual user insights platform — to demonstrate how each of these four capabilities works.

1. Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of grouping users together based on common properties and behaviors. 

Even the simplest product analytics tools allow you to segment users based on characteristics, like their device, country, and city. However, it’s essential to also add a behavior element to your segments, so you get a more accurate picture of your users.

Because segmentation is such a versatile capability, you can create all sorts of different segments depending on your product, like:

• European customers who bought your most expensive plan.
• First-time visitors from Canada who made an in-app purchase.
• Returning US users with Android devices who’ve made at least two purchases in the last month.

With Smartlook, you can save any combination of user behaviors and characteristics as a segment. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a segment of PC users from the Czech Republic who clicked on “Add to cart” over the last seven days. 

You can continuously monitor the behavior of this segment in your dashboard by clicking on “Save as segment”.

2. Event tracking

Event tracking is the ability to monitor specific user actions, like button clicks, page visits, text inputs, and so on. Like segmentation, events are fundamental to the user analytics process, because they let you add a behavioral element to your analysis.

That’s why Smartlook collects valuable product usage data automatically and lets you track useful events (like button clicks, page visits, and text inputs) without coding.

You can select which actions to track as events (called “defining an event”) by simply clicking on your product’s UI, as shown in the screenshot below.

Outside of the standard events, you can also:

• Define custom events via JavaScript to monitor pretty much any other user activities.
• Add properties to each event to further enrich your behavioral data, like the revenue property which helps you track potential and lost opportunities during the checkout process. 

Each event can also be broken down by specific properties. 

For example, the screenshot below shows an “Add to cart”event broken down by device and country.

This functionality is useful when you’re trying to understand how often different types of users trigger certain events.

3. Session recordings

User analytics tools have traditionally been focused on quantifying user behavior. This quantitative approach provides organizations with concrete stats and metrics about their users. 

However, it also has a big limitation — it doesn’t give you any context about the motivations behind users’ actions and doesn’t paint a complete picture of their journey. 

Fortunately, session recordings allow you to overcome this issue.

Session recording tools like Smartlook capture everything your users do, including where they click, which pages they visit, which features they use, how much time they spend with the product, and much more. 

For example, take a look at the Smartlook session recording below:

The session recording video shows a user navigating an onboarding tutorial. You can observe the user experience in detail, including which steps people skim through, which ones they focus on, and where they hesitate.

These qualitative product experience insights are accompanied by quantitative user data about:

• Each event that was triggered during the session (under the video).
• The user’s device, location, and session duration (to the left).

For the purposes of user analytics, you can also zero in on the recordings of individual users.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the “User information” section contains identifying details, like email and username.

If you configure our Identify API, you can jump straight into the session recordings of users based on one of these identifiers.

This capability allows product and marketing teams to watch how valuable customers interact with the product, which helps them:

• Understand which features attract their attention and which ones don’t.
• Inform the product development process with reliable insights.
• Come up with ideas for attracting other similar customers.

In fact, CricHeroes — the world’s largest cricket network — uses Smartlook’s session recordings and segmentation capabilities to get a deep understanding of the customer experience.

“With Smartlook, we can check and analyze data regarding different user segments for different features. This allows us to better predict the types of changes we can make with our current app features, including new features we can introduce to help achieve the metrics we have set for user engagement. When viewing recordings, I can see exactly how much time a user is spending on each step, where they click on a particular screen, where they’re not filling out details, and where they get stuck.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

4. Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is the process of monitoring how users navigate different flows in your product, like:

• Checkouts.
• Onboarding tutorials.
• Levels in a mobile game, and more.

In the context of user analytics, funnels help you understand how individual users navigate these flows and where they struggle. 

For example, with Smartlook, you can build a funnel by placing two or more events in the order you believe your users follow. Then, our tool automatically calculates the funnel’s conversion rate and the drop-offs between different steps, as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can click on the “Play” button under each step, including the drop-offs, to jump into the relevant session recordings. This is a massive advantage over traditional web analytics tools (like Google Analytics), which only show where users drop off but can’t help you uncover why.

Once you’ve built your funnels, Smartlook lets you zero in on how different customers navigate them. You can do this by breaking down each funnel by:

• Users’ locations (country, city, or state/region) and technologies (device, browser, and operating system).
• Customevent properties, like users’ pricing plans or how much they’ve spent with your business over the last year.

Lastly, if you use the revenue property when defining your events, Smartlook can calculate the total revenue of your funnels, as well as how much revenue you’re losing from funnel drop-offs.

Note: You can also set up our Anomaly Alerts and receive notifications in case of a sudden spike or drop-off in the conversion rates of your funnels.

Start finding user behavior insights with Smartlook today

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place.

Our tool records all user sessions on your website, web app, or native mobile app with a single code snippet. With all that behavior data automatically captured, you can analyze the entire user journey, monitor important actions and funnels, create detailed customer segments, and track key product metrics, like active users and retention. 

Additionally, Smartlook supports integrations with CRMs, analytics platforms, A/B testing tools, and other widely-used solutions, making it easy to fit our tool into your existing workflow.

To see how Smartlook can help your business (without setting it up), book a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive reviews 99% of the time. 

If you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

author Ondřej Machek

CTO

The post The ultimate user analytics guide for product, marketing, and UX teams appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

They have an identical approach to capturing behavior data by recording all user sessions on your app. Plus, they also have features like session recordings, heatmaps, and events that help you analyze how users interact with your app.

But despite the similarities, UXCam and Smartlook have fundamental differences that affect what you can do with each tool. 

In this article, we’re going to explore both tools’ features, use cases, and pricing, so you can make a well-informed decision. We’ll break down our comparison into three sections:

1. UXCam and Smartlook’s overlapping features

UXCam and Smartlook share some key features, including session recordings, heatmaps, events, and crash reports. We’ll discuss how these four features work and how they can benefit your business. 

2. UXCam vs Smartlook: Differences in features and use cases

The key difference we’ll explore stems from the fact that Smartlook is available for websites, web apps, and mobile apps, whereas UXCam can only be used on mobile apps. This affects how much of the customer journey you can actually capture and analyze.

3. How UXCam’s pricing compares to Smartlook’s

Both tools offer free plans, free trials, and personalized demos, and their pricing is suitable for businesses of all sizes. However, their pricing plans are different in terms of transparency and customization options, as you’ll learn in this section.

Smartlook brings rich product analytics & visual user insights for mobile apps and websites under one roof — without hiding the price tag. Book a free demo with our team or start analyzing your users’ experience with Smartlook’s full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

UXCam and Smartlook’s session recordings, heatmaps, and other overlapping features

UXCam and Smartlook both have features like session recordings, events, funnels, and crash reports. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analytics capabilities lets you:

• Analyze aggregate product usage data and metrics like daily active users, retention, and conversion rates.
• Track the occurrence of specific actions and the completion of important flows with events and conversion funnels.
• Watch how individual users interact with your product and uncover valuable product experience insights with session recordings.

In this section, we’re going to discuss these overlapping functionalities and how you can use them to make better product decisions. 

Note: Since UXCam is only available for mobile apps, we’ll be looking at the features below exclusively in the context of mobile analytics. 

Session recordings

Session recordings (also called session replays) capture users’ entire sessions in your mobile app — from the moment they open your app to the moment they close it. 

This lets you see everything users do, including where they tap, which screens they navigate to, and so on. For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook session recording of a user completing a checkout flow.

Besides the session replay video, both UXCam and Smartlook give you additional information about each user, like:

• A timeline of all the events they triggered (under the video).
• Their device, location, and previous sessions (to the left).

UXCam and Smartlook’s session recordings are private by default, so sensitive data like passwords or credit card information is never captured. You can also manually:

• Prevent the session recorder from recording certain screens.
• Mask or exclude elements from appearing in your session recordings (e.g., email fields or elements with users’ photos).
• Maintain privacy on all screens by default. Smartlook has Wireframe Rendering Modes, which replace all elements with abstract representations, while UXCam lets you blur screens (as shown below). In both cases, you can still see users’ interactions and analyze their behavior, without the risk of exposing personal data.

Lastly, both tools give you a similar set of filters to find the session recordings you need, including:

• Location filters like country and city.
• Behavior filters like triggered events or funnel stages.
• Technology filters like device model and operating system.

Further reading on this topic:

• How to set up mobile app tracking to analyze user behavior
• How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples
• 8 session replay & visitor recording tools for fixing UX issues (including Smartlook, FullStory, Hotjar, and more)

Heatmaps

Heatmaps give you a high-level overview of how users interact with each app screen. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook heatmap of a mobile game screen. 

The colored spots are areas where users tap, with the red color showing where most taps were concentrated.

UXCam and Smartlook (as well as most other heatmap tools) allow you to create heatmaps for each app screen. They also let you filter the heatmap data based on the device, date, country, and other criteria. 

UXCam supports a few more pre-set filters for its mobile heatmaps, like first and last gesture on a screen or in a session. 

For more details on this topic, check out our guide to reading a heatmap and getting actionable user experience (UX) insights.

Events

Events are user actions that you can monitor over time, like button taps, screen visits, navigation changes, and more. 

UXCam and Smartlook’s event tracking capabilities can help you quantify user behavior, evaluate the impact of certain changes, and much more. Both tools also capture some events automatically, which lets you skip the tedious event tracking setup in certain situations.

For example, Smartlook automatically captures two types of mobile app events:

1. User interaction events like finger touches, gestures, and focus on UI elements.
2. Analytics events that initialize an action in your app, like button clicks and navigation between screens.

You can also create custom events to track pretty much any other user interaction you want with either tool. The screenshot below shows two custom events that are triggered when users finish their search or forward a video.

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each event’s name. Clicking that takes you directly to all the session recordings where the event took place (this can also be done in UXCam).

Lastly, you can use the events you’re tracking to build funnels with either tool. Funnels are sequences of steps users take to complete a goal, like finishing a checkout process (shown in the screenshot below) or a level in a mobile game. 

Funnels are vital in many situations, so for more details, see our guide to improving conversions, retention & UX with funnel analysis.

Crash reporting

UXCam and Smartlook can automatically detect application crashes. This feature is called Crash Analytics in UXCam and Crash Reports in Smartlook.

For example, Smartlook’s reports give you information about the version of your app where each crash happened and the number of users that experienced it.

Both tools also show you the stack trace for each crash and let you jump into the session recordings that show how it occurred.

Combining the stack trace information with session recordings makes debugging much easier, as we explained in our article on the top 6 Crashlytics alternatives.

Lastly, UXCam’s Crash Analytics feature is available for iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native, while Smartlook’s Crash Reports are available for Android and iOS apps right now. However, we will expand this feature to other platforms, so refer to our documentation for the most up-to-date information. 

UXCam vs Smartlook: Differences in features and use cases

Despite their similarities, UXCam and Smartlook have essential differences, like their supported platforms and integrations.

These differences make Smartlook a more versatile tool because it can be employed in more use cases than UXCam. 

In the sections below, we’ll look at three of these use cases and discuss how Smartlook’s versatility gives it an edge over UXCam.

Use case #1: Analyze the entire customer journey across different platforms

Because Smartlook is available for websites, web apps, and mobile apps, you can use it to track the whole user journey, instead of only one aspect of it. 

For example, say you have a product that can be accessed via a website or through a native mobile app. Users may start certain flows on the website — like registrations, onboarding, or checkouts — but complete them on the native mobile app. 

This is a classic example of a cross-platform journey. With UXCam, you can get a good idea of the user’s mobile experience. You could then use an additional website analytics tool to understand how users interact with your site. 

However, this would give you an incorrect picture of the actual customer experience. 

First, your website analytics would show that the journey ends when visitors close the site. This is obviously wrong since they’re just jumping to a different platform.

Second, the mobile app analytics wouldn’t be able to tell you what interactions users had with your site before opening the app. As a result, you can’t understand the context of their actions, what they’re looking for, or how to improve their experience.

And third, you’d have to constantly toggle back and forth between different tools, which can be annoying and time-consuming.

That’s why Smartlook has a cross-platform analytics feature that lets you track these journeys in a combined web and mobile project. This feature, alongside our Identify API, automatically matches each user’s website and mobile app sessions and shows them in one place. 

For example, the screenshot below shows all the sessions in a customer’s cross-platform journey in chronological order. The mobile and desktop icons represent which platform each session took place on. 

As a result, you can get an accurate picture of the complete user journey, instead of dealing with siloed data that can lead you to invalid conclusions.

Use case #2: Integrate with other product, marketing, UX, customer support, and developer tools

Integrations let you incorporate tools into your workflow and help other teams benefit from their capabilities. This makes them a crucial functionality for any product analytics solution.

At the time of this writing, UXCam offers six built-in integrations — Segment, Amplitude, Crashlytics, Google Analytics (Firebase), Intercom, and Mixpanel. It’s possible to integrate UXCam with other tools as well, but each one must be set up with manual code changes.

Smartlook also has integrations with these six tools, along with many other SaaS solutions, including:

• Survicate. Survicate lets teams run different types of surveys. Thanks to our integration, you can watch the session recordings of participants who gave a specific answer to a survey question (e.g., watch users who answered “No” to a question like “Did you like the checkout experience?”). Product managers, marketers, and UX professionals can all benefit from Survicate and the additional context that Smartlook provides to the survey answers.
• Google Optimize. Google Optimize is a popular tool that helps marketers, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, and UX designers experiment with different versions of their website and see which ones convert better. By integrating Google Optimize with Smartlook, you can watch how users interact with each page variant you’re testing. This is crucial for validating the accuracy of your experiments, as we explained in our article on the top 10 A/B testing tools.
• Sentry. Sentry is a popular performance monitoring and error tracking tool for development and quality assurance (QA) teams. Smartlook provides a qualitative upgrade to Sentry’s data by letting you watch the sessions where certain issues occurred. This makes bug reproduction much easier.

Click here for a complete list of Smartlook’s integrations.

Use case #3: Automatically record users’ sessions without impacting their experience

Session recordings are a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior. However, they can also be taxing on users’ devices, leading to fast battery drainage, high network traffic, and potential app crashes — problems that can lead users to abandon your app. 

UXCam and Smartlook both offer options to mitigate these issues. For example, you can adjust each tool’s recording quality, reduce the frame rate, and have the recordings uploaded only when the device is connected to WiFi so no mobile data is wasted.

However, Smartlook has an additional feature that minimizes the impact on users’ devices by default — our Wireframe Rendering Modes.

As we mentioned earlier, when one of these modes is enabled, Smartlook draws an abstract representation of the content, instead of capturing the UI as users see it.

All user interactions are still clearly visible in these modes, but the UI isn’t captured in full detail. This automatically minimizes the impact on users’ devices, without you having to manually change the recording quality, frame rates, and other similar settings. 

How UXCam’s pricing compares to Smartlook’s

The final big difference between UXCam and Smartlook is their pricing. 

On the one hand, UXCam doesn’t have transparent pricing plans or an option to build a custom plan by yourself. You either have to complete a free trial or contact their team to get pricing details.

On the other hand, Smartlook offers transparent pricing and has more flexible and customizable plans. 

First, you can choose between two pre-made plans:

• Free
• Pro plan ($55/month)

Additionally, you can build a custom Startup or Business plan by clicking on the buttons below the price. This lets you choose a higher user session limit and longer data storage, without contacting our team and having to wait for a demo.

Lastly, you can also talk to our team about creating an Enterprise plan that’s tailor-made for you.

Analyze the complete customer journey with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show everything your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

Our tool can be used on:

• Mobile apps built with popular native mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, and more.
• Websites and web apps, including ones built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.

If you don’t want to spend time setting up Smartlook, you can see it in action by booking a free demo. Оur team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business at a convenient time for you.

You can also try Smartlook with a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required.

author Ondřej Machek

CTO

The post UXCam vs Smartlook: Features, use cases & pricing comparison appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

While they can both help you analyze user behavior on mobile and web apps, there are clear differences between the data they collect, the difficulty of their setup, and their potential use cases.

In this article, we’ll break down these differences, as well as both tools’ overlapping features. We’ll also discuss how Smartlook — our combined product analytics and visual user insights platform — can be a great alternative (or addition) to Heap and Mixpanel.

Before we dive into the details, here’s a quick overview of the key points to consider.

Setup process

• Heap and Smartlook capture every user session in your product with one code snippet and let you track events without coding. This makes their setup fast and simple. It also ensures you get useful behavior data within minutes of implementing either tool.
• Mixpanel has a manual setup that requires you to implement tracking for each event individually by writing code. This provides granular control over the event data you collect. However, it makes the setup much more time-consuming and reliant on constant developer assistance.

Key features

• Heap is a digital insights platform with both quantitative and qualitative analytics features. It comes with traditional product analytics features, like segmentation, funnels, and retention analysis. Plus, Heap recently added session replay to the platform, so it can now also collect qualitative data.
• Mixpanel is a traditional product analytics tool focused entirely on quantitative data. The platform has most of the quantitative analytics tools that Heap offers (e.g., funnels, segmentation, and retention). However, Mixpanel also has more advanced analytics capabilities, like its Impact and Signal Reports, which let you see how feature releases impact user behavior, and more.
• Like Heap, Smartlook also combines the power of quantitative and qualitative analytics. Our platform offers both session recordings and heatmaps. Plus, it has important quantitative analytics features, like event tracking, funnel analysis, Retention Tables, and more. Also, Smartlook can be integrated with Mixpanel, while Heap doesn’t have a Mixpanel integration.

Pricing

• All three platforms have free plans andfree trials.
• Heap is the only one of the three that doesn’t have transparent pricing, since you have to contact their sales team to get a quote.
• In contrast, Mixpanel and Smartlook have pre-made plans with transparent pricing, as well as an option to build custom plans. This makes them ideal for all kinds of businesses — from small startups to large organizations.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the difference between each tool and how they affect the kind of insights you can gain. 

Here’s what we’ll cover below:

• Overlapping features and use cases between Heap, Mixpanel, Smartlook
• Heap vs Mixpanel vs Smartlook: Setup process and key differentiators
• A comparison of Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook’s pricing

Smartlook is our product analytics and visual user insights platform with transparent pricing and an easy setup. Start analyzing and improving your users’ experience with our full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required), or book a demo with our team to see how Smartlook can benefit your business specifically. 

Overlapping features and use cases between Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook

Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook can all be used to analyze user behavior on websites, web apps, and native mobile apps. 

And, since they’re all product analytics tools, they share some features that pretty much all organizations need to build better products. Outside of minor differences in how these features look, their functionalities are almost identical. 

Here’s where Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook overlap:

1. Customizable dashboards. Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook all allow you to create multiple dashboards with different charts, reports, and insights. These dashboards are useful for monitoring important metrics and sharing them with others. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a Mixpanel dashboard.

2. Event tracking. The ability to track events — individual user actions like button clicks or text inputs — is fundamental for any product team. All three tools let you select which actions you want to monitor and track them as events (as shown in the Smartlook event tracking visualization below). The big difference is that Heap and Smartlook allow you to monitor events without coding, while Mixpanel requires you to write code in order to track events.

3. Funnel analysis. Heap, Mixpanel, and Smartlook all let you build funnels that map out important user flows, like ecommerce checkouts or SaaS onboarding tutorials. As with most other web analytics tools (like Amplitude or Kissmetrics), building funnels requires placing events in the order you believe your users follow. 

The screenshot below shows Heap’s funnel module.

4. Retention analysis. Heap has a retention module, Mixpanel has Retention Reports (shown in the screenshot below), and Smartlook offers Retention Tables. They all allow you to track whether a cohort of users who performed a certain action for the first time continue to do so over the following days, weeks, or months.

5. Segmentation. The process of grouping users based on events or properties (device, country, etc.) works slightly differently in Heap compared to Mixpanel and Smartlook. In Heap, there’s a dedicated “Segments” option (shown below). In Mixpanel and Smartlook, you start with a report or event, break them down by certain properties, and save that as a segment. The end result is the same — you can monitor how a specific user segment behaves over time.

6. Integrations. All three tools can be integrated with A/B testing solutions, analytics platforms, CRMs, and other widely-used tools. In fact, Mixpanel can even be integrated with Smartlook. This allows teams to go beyond the raw stats and metrics that Mixpanel provides and get the full context behind their users’ actions with Smartlook’s session recordings. The screenshot below shows how you can access a Smartlook session recording directly from Mixpanel’s UI.

Lastly, for a deep dive into the use cases of these six features, including real-life examples, check out our practical guide to product analytics.

Heap vs Mixpanel vs Smartlook: Setup process and key differentiators

Now that we’ve covered the overlapping capabilities, let’s discuss what makes each tool unique in terms of setup, features, and use cases.

Heap’s setup and differentiators

Heap is an analytics tool that works via autocapture. The autocapture method records user interactions — like clicks, text inputs, or page views — with a single code snippet.

This makes Heap’s setup easy because you don’t need to implement tracking for each event individually.

Instead, you add the tracking code and the platform automatically starts collecting product usage data. Then, you can use Heap’s versatile features to perform both quantitative and qualitative data analysis.

On that note, here are some important Heap features that we didn’t cover in the previous section:

• Journeys, which is a map of the paths users take through your product. This visual map automatically calculates conversion rates for each user path and sub-path. It’s also customizable, with Heap automatically suggesting different actions to add for a better understanding of the user journey.

• Illuminate, which is a data science layer that analyzes the data collected by Heap’s autocapture. The goal of this analysis is to provide automated insights in real time, like points of friction or opportunities for boosting your conversions. 
• Session replay, which is a new addition to Heap’s feature set. Session replays show you exactly how users navigate your product during their session. This makes them a great tool for empathizing with your users and uncovering the “why” behind their behavior. 

To learn more about session replays, check out our guide to recording website visitors.

• Data governance, which makes it easy to manage the large datasets generated by the autocapture approach. Heap offers a suite of data governance tools, all of which aim to keep your user data organized with consistent naming conventions, categories, event history, and more. Also, Heap Connect lets you easily send that data to a cloud data warehouse.

Mixpanel’s setup and differentiators

Unlike Heap, Mixpanel is a more traditional product analytics tool because it only collects quantitative data (i.e., no session recordings) and doesn’t capture user interactions automatically. 

Instead, Mixpanel relies on manually tracked events that have to be set up via code changes.

As a result:

1. Mixpanel is much more difficult to implement than Heap (and Smartlook). You need to plan which events you want to track, have your engineering team set up the tracking, and then test if everything’s working correctly. This process can often take months from start to finish. It’s also highly dependent on your engineering and data analytics teams. This high barrier to entry, plus the lack of qualitative analytics, often pushes teams to look for an alternative to Mixpanel.
2. You get more granular control over each event you collect. Again, that comes at the price of a more complicated setup.

After the implementation, Mixpanel lets you create different reports and organize them into dashboards, like this “Core Company KPIs” dashboard below:

You get to choose between four report types:

1. Insights Reports, which are useful for analyzing events, cohorts, and user profiles and visualizing the data in line, bar, pie, and other chart types.

2. Funnels Reports, which let you analyze how users navigate flows and where they drop off.

3. Retention Reports, which let you analyze user engagement over a period of time (as we showed earlier).

4. Flows Reports, whichidentify the most frequently taken paths to or from any event you select.

Outside of these reports, Mixpanel also offers two quantitative analytics features that Heap and Smartlook don’t — Signal and Impact analysis. 

Signal Analysis lets you find user actions that correlate with goals like in-app purchases or retention. Impact Analysis uncovers relationships between feature launches and user behavior.

Smartlook’s setup and differentiators

Smartlook is our combined product analytics and visual user insights platform. 

Like Heap, it also has a very simple setup — you install one code snippet and Smartlook automatically starts recording all user sessions in your product.

This means you can set up Smartlook and have valuable user behavior data within minutes.

Our platform brings together four key features.

1. Session recordings (or session replay), which show you exactly how users navigate your product, from the moment they open it to the moment they close it. As we said earlier, this lets you uncover why users do what they do. Plus, Smartlook helps you find relevant recordings fast with over 30+ filters and an Identify API for locating the sessions of specific users.

2. Heatmaps, which show you an overview of a typical user’s behavior on a page or screen. Smartlook supports three types of heatmaps — click maps, move maps, and scroll maps, all of which give you useful insights into your users’ behavior that you can’t get with Heap or Mixpanel.

3. Events, which are individual user actions that you monitor over time. Similar to Heap, Smartlook tracks user interactions with a single code snippet and lets you define events without coding. Plus, once you’ve started tracking an event, you can jump straight into all session recordings where it was triggered by clicking on the “Play” button under its name.

4. Funnels, which help you analyze your most important user flows, calculate conversion rates, and see where most drop-offs occur. And since Smartlook also has session recordings, you can quickly jump into the sessions of users who dropped off at a specific stage and find out why.

Besides these four key features, Smartlook offers Behavior Flows, Retention Tables, segmentation, and lots of other capabilities.

For more details on how to use Smartlook to improve your UX, conversions, and retention, check out:

• Our guide to tracking user activity on websites
• Our guide to setting up mobile app tracking to analyze user behavior

Heap vs Mixpanel vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

Finally, let’s run through each tool’s pricing — including free plans, trials, and paid options — to round out this comparison.

Heap: Non-transparent pricing

Heap offers four different plans — Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier.

The free plan is very generous, as it captures up to 10,000 monthly sessions.

However, there’s no publicly available pricing for the paid plans. To get pricing details, you need to contact Heap’s team or complete a free trial.

Note: Until recently, Heap had listed its cheapest paid plan (Growth) at $3600/year, with some sites like G2 still using that number. While the $3600 figure has been removed from Heap’s website, it was listed until recently so the starting price might still be in that ballpark.

Mixpanel: Transparent pricing based on tracked users

Unlike Heap, Mixpanel offers transparent pricing, based on your product’s monthly tracked users (MTUs). Your MTUs are the number of unique users with at least one event in the last month. 

Mixpanel’s free plan lets you track up to 100,000 MTUs, but has very limited features. If you go beyond that limit, or need to access Mixpanel’s advanced features, you can create custom plans, starting at $25/month.

For example, if your product has 15,000 MTUs, Mixpanel’s base pricing starts at $250/month on the monthly plan or $2100 on the annual one (but volume discounts are baked into the price as your MTUs grow).

Also, note that two of Mixpanel’s features — Data Pipelines and Group Analytics — are sold as separate add-ons, at 20% and 40% of your base plan, respectively. 

Data Pipelines let you export Mixpanel data directly to warehouses like Azure and Snowflake. Group Analytics lets you calculate metrics at the account or company level. With these features, Mixpanel is 20-60% more expensive than the initial price tag.

Smartlook: Transparent pricing based on user sessions

Like Mixpanel, Smartlook’s pricing is also transparent. The difference is that our plans are based on monthly user sessions, not tracked users.

The free plan lets you record up to 3,000 user sessions per month (no credit card required). The four key Smartlook features — session recordings, events, funnels, and heatmaps — are all available on this free plan.

Paid plans start at $55/month and come with a full-featured 30-day trial (again, no credit card required). They come with a higher monthly session limit, as well as longer historical data storage, more events, funnels, and other premium features.

You can also build custom plans based on how many monthly sessions you want to capture or an Ultimate Plan with custom limits for session recordings, events, funnels, and heatmaps.

Improve your product analytics tech stack with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all without hiding the price tag.

Our platform can be used on websites, web apps, and native iOS and Android mobile apps. Additionally, Smartlook integrates with several tools used by product managers, marketers, UX experts, and developers — like Google Analytics, Optimizely, Segment, Sentry, and more.

Many product teams find that Smartlook provides all the quantitative analytics capabilities they need, while the qualitative insights from session recordings empower other teams to understand user behavior.

But if you’re already using Mixpanel, Smartlook’s session recordings and heatmaps can give you the necessary context to understand user behavior. 

To learn how Smartlook can benefit your business without spending time setting it up, schedule a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive reviews 99% of the time. 

Lastly, you can also give Smartlook a go yourself with our full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required). 

Vojtěch Šibor

is a Product Marketing Manager at Smartlook. Vojtech is a marketer with product blood running through his veins. He always knows about all the new features and what's coming up. Sometimes he talks about brand stuff and makes sure that the communication is consistent.

The post Heap vs Mixpanel vs Smartlook: What can each tool do? appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What’s in it for you? 

• An indispensable skill that all support team managers should encourage team members to adopt
• 6 areas you should keep in mind when working on improving your team 
• Key takeaways and insights 

Let’s jump straight into it.

Communication: the most critical skill mastered by the best tech support teams

Most tech support managers want a high-performing team. But ask 10 people, and you’ll receive multiple definitions of what it means to be high-performing. 

With this in mind, let’s turn to a trusted source. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) defines high-performing teams as follows:

“High-performing teams tend to communicate more frequently in general and are significantly more likely to communicate with colleagues using the telephone than their less successful peers.”

HBR also found that “calls tend to strengthen relationships and prevent misunderstanding, contributing to more fruitful interactions among teammates.” In summary, HBR is saying that high-performing teams are those that have mastered the skill of communication.

Let’s look at what Jakub, a technical support team lead from Smartlook, says about technical support. 

I think that technical support is all about communicating — it’s what we do most of the time.

And to do our job properly, we need to have enough information, have the knowledge about the product, and have the tools and means to communicate properly.

So to be more detailed it’s about internal communication with the team and external communication with our clients.

Jakub Socháň

Technical Support Team Lead at Smartlook

Now, let’s break down what we mean by internal and external communication.

How to improve external communication: support teams and customer needs

The most common issue with external communication involves the different perceptions of a product. Both tech support agents and clients have different perspectives and knowledge about a product.

The client has their own perspective. They want to solve a problem but don’t have extensive knowledge about it. Support folk, on the other hand, have all the detailed knowledge about a product but don’t know what occurred on the client’s side.

These discrepancies hinder cooperation, dragging out the time it takes to resolve issues. In a perfect world, support agents could see exactly what occurred on the user’s end so they can act quickly.

Often, getting the required information is difficult — client explanations lack important details, they jump to conclusions, or there are inconsistencies in their reporting.

You can ask your clients to send you a video of a crash or problematic path. But I prefer to support myself with session recordings. They give me the full picture of what happened on the client’s side.

It’s like boom! — clear information about what the issues actually are.

Jakub Socháň

Technical Support Team Lead at Smartlook

In Jakub’s opinion, the most efficient remedy to the problem of miscommunication is through the use of session recordings. They shorten the response time and eliminate guesswork when solving a customer’s issue. As a result, troubleshooting is easy, and customer needs are met relatively quickly.

You can watch users’ sessions on your website, in a mobile app, or in your digital product. 

If your agents will watch session recordings, it will be easier for them to understand users, as well as:

• Discover bugs and pass them straightaway to dev teams
• Quickly find solutions to user problems (no back-and-forth with clients to ensure everyone’s on the same page)
• Visualize the exact user path that led to a problematic event 
• Educate clients regarding how to use a product in the best way possible

How SaaS companies benefit from understanding exactly what a user did before facing an issue

Hookle, a social media management tool, is a good example of how session recordings increased the efficiency of a customer support team.

First, they proactively watch real-time recordings. If they notice that a client can’t publish posts (which is a key feature of social media management software), they reach out and help them manage the issue.

The outcome? Positive customer feedback in the app store. This not only sheds a positive light on your company but also attracts new customers.

Interested in session recordings?

Check out our guide to learn everything about session recordings

Get your free guide

Help section — discover which topics are in high demand among your users

Say you’re managing a support team in a finance-related mobile app. Say one of your team members is reviewing session recordings and notices that a customer needs something specific. 

Let’s say a customer was searching for a support article that answers the search query: “how to change a business name and billing details?” 

As all the queries entered into the Help section search bar are text inputs, you can create an event to track them in detail. Set an event called “Event – typed text” and begin watching the session recordings of those who entered text into the Help section search bar.

If you spot repeated search topics that haven’t been addressed, it’s a chance to review the Help section and expand it. By doing so, you’ll create a solid Help section that addresses topics that are important to your users. 

There are 3 benefits of improving your help section with events:

• Customers can solve problems quickly on their own
• You’ll reduce the number of tickets your team receives, which will improve the efficiency of your team in general
• You’ll be able to present your executives with outstanding results 

Now, let’s jump to internal communications.

How to improve internal communications: support teams and cross-team cooperation

Your team is effective because it contains an array of talent. One agent is better at technical support, while another is more efficient in task management. 

Today, leaders are expected to tap into the potential of their team members, keeping them satisfied and, as a result, reducing employee turnover rates.

And with every team, internal communication is paramount. This includes communication inside your team and with other teams in your company — sales, product development teams, and more.

Despite technical support being referred to as “technical support,” they aren’t as technical as developers. That’s why as a team leader, you need to ensure open communication with the dev team.

This is especially important when a customer has a technical problem that needs to be passed on to a developer. Let’s say a customer is having an issue with a bug or a problem relating to a custom setup.

Smartlook’s tech support team works with session recordings. We send them to developers as an example of what the issue is. A picture is better than 1,000 words.

We’re a small team, and for us, timing is important. The faster we solve the issue for clients, the better. So sending a session recording with a bug to the dev team helps them understand what went wrong on our client’s side.

When the dev team understands everything straightaway, they don’t need extra explanation.

Jakub Socháň

Technical Support Team Lead at Smartlook

Smooth support team communication despite working shifts

Working as part of a support team involves working in shifts. As a result, sometimes a client’s issue is handled by more than one agent. In this case, handing over a case is easy — simply leave a note in the support tool.

The next agent doesn’t have to repeat the same questions to the customer as they’re not picking up from scratch. 

It’s just as simple as the picture above. Read more about how notes work in our Help section. 

Ok, that just about covers internal and external communication. Just remember, it’s a crucial skill for support teams that want to work faster and more efficiently and keep customers satisfied.

Always understand exactly what your users did before reaching out to your support team. Sign up for a free Smartlook account (no credit card required).

List of 5 skills a customer support team needs for smooth collaboration

We asked Jakub, Smartlook’s support team leader, about some other skills that help a support agent stand out.

Support agent skills:

• Smooth cross-team cooperation
• Advanced knowledge of a product 
• Well-defined processes
• Patience
• Space to execute

Sure, skills are crucial, but there are other areas that are often overlooked that demand your attention. In the next section, you’ll learn about 6 key areas to focus on to optimize your support team. 

What’s more, we’ll discuss the necessary tools that will help your support team get the job done.

Support team processes: 6 areas to optimize your support team’s efforts

Improving your technical support can seem overwhelming. So here are 6 areas that will help you work more effectively in the coming months.

1. Map and analyze your current processes

The first thing you should pay attention to is the state of your current processes. 

If this is the first time you’ve decided to analyze them, you can start by preparing a map. This kind of schema will help you gain a fresh perspective. If you’ve had one made previously, review the map to see if it needs refreshing. There are a few tools that can help you map processes, including Lucidchart, XMind, and Miro. 

When analyzing your processes, look for bottlenecks. Also, check to ensure that your agents aren’t doubling up on their efforts. 

Doubling up refers to two agents mistakenly working on the same ticket. For smooth collaboration on support tickets, try combining Smartlook with Jira or Zendesk. 

Be sure to keep an eye out for tedious, manual tasks that can be automated. Such an analysis will allow you to generate possible solutions. The most popular automation tools are Zapier, Make, Workato, and Tray.io. 

2. Get feedback from your agents

You can get a lot of information directly from your team. Ask them about what can be improved, where the bottlenecks are, and what issues they deal with daily.

They can show you a different perspective and shed some light on their challenges. Make sure to include their comments and suggestions when choosing a solution.

You can use Retrotool.io with your team to determine what works and what doesn’t.

Lastly, organize quarterly 360-degree feedback sessions so you can build a feedback culture with your support staff.

3. Review your support tech stack and toolbox 

Once you have analyzed the processes in your team and spoken with your subordinates, it’s time to review your toolbox.

For example, you can spot areas where tools can take some weight off your shoulders. Make sure you use them to their full potential. Focus not only on their features but also on automation and integration with others from your toolbox. 

This is also a good time to look out for alternatives that can have an impact on your workflow. Especially if the tool you’ve been using doesn’t meet your requirements anymore. 

Lastly, it’s good to talk with other teams regarding their toolboxes. This will help you find new ways to collaborate across teams and improve internal communication.  

Our tools of customer service include a chatbot (inside the product), Intercom (a live support tool), self-built CRM, Smartlook, Monday, and developer tools. This simple toolbox allows our support agents to work to their best potential and provide an omnichannel approach to solving each customer’s needs.

4. Be A leader that sets realistic goals

Improving your technical support team might seem like a tricky task. If you only focus on improving the efficiency of your team and don’t support your agents as a leader, your team won’t be performing at their best. 

You’ll be faced with distrust, high turnover rates, and general misalignment.

Instead, build a leadership culture that supports your support team. This includes training your leadership muscle and leading by example. If you’re the type of person that support agents want to follow, you’ll build trust with them easily. 

As a result, you’ll be able to set challenging goals for your team and have all hands on deck, no matter how tough the situation gets.

For more education about leadership skills, take a look at the following high-quality resources:

• Dare to Lead with Brené Brown
• Adam Grant’s LinkedIn profile 
• Simon Sinek’s InspireU

5. Analyze the changes

After implementing a new approach or tool, making changes to your onboarding process, or shortening your processes in general, be sure to pay attention to how it affects your agents’ work life. 

Assessing progress is crucial to understand what works and what doesn’t. Be sure to also pay attention to how customer problems are solved.

Focus on the crucial metrics of your projects. Look for changes in the following:

• Your team’s satisfaction
• The amount of time spent on support tickets
• Collaboration with other teams 

Remember to adjust your actions and draw insights for the future. This is especially true when reviewing your toolbox and performing process analysis. With a suitable set of tools and processes, you’ll be able to track changes and ensure your team works smoothly. 

6. Develop self-service support options

A good way to provide better technical support and streamline the workflow of your team is to create self-service support options. From well-prepared knowledge bases to community forums, there are just a few ways to provide users with new tools.

According to research, they actually expect you to do so. 71% of customers tried looking for solutions on the Internet yet gave up after 30 minutes without getting results. 

This puts an emphasis on the necessity to create an accessible resource. Doing so brings a wide range of benefits to both parties, according to Forrester. It creates lasting customer success, which translates into increased engagement, conversions, and revenue.

As mentioned, make a team effort to take good care of Help sections and FAQs. This will provide your customers with reliable advice and help them connect with your team when self-service options aren’t doing the trick.

Improving your support team and the user experience is an ongoing process

Improving your customer service team isn’t something you can simply put on your to-do list and mark as done. Focus on one change at a time, assess the results, and stay in touch with your support team. 

Key takeaways:

• Take pride in your communication skills and your team’s ability to communicate internally and externally. If your team can communicate well with users as well as with internal stakeholders, it’s a sign your team is working well together
• Help your team develop other essential skills. Build a trusting relationship with your subordinates and help them develop in their role
• Implement tools that make your support agents’ lives easier. This includes the following:
  • User insight analytic tools that eliminate shooting in the dark to pinpoint problems
  • Business messaging tools that allow you to chat with customers
  • Customer relationship management tools for verifying customer accounts
  • Browser developer tools to check technical issues
  • Intuitive ticketing systems that integrate well with other tools
• Optimize processes and make changes when required. Use common sense, and don’t make too many changes at once. And always keep the customer experience in mind

If you’d like to try out Smartlook in your team, start a full-featured, 30-day free trial (no credit card required).

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post How to improve your technical IT support team [updated] appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

The result? You end up gathering data for the sake of supporting your hypotheses. Nothing more, nothing less. As David Ogilvy famously said, “Most people use analytics the way a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination.”

To help you go beyond the surface-level advice regarding analytics for mobile apps, we’ve put together the following guide, which dives into everything wrong with the widely circulated advice, including what you should do instead.

You’ll leave with an in-depth understanding of how to gather data the right way, including which metrics to track and how to use your newfound insight to genuinely improve your app.

But before we get started, let’s begin by quickly recapping what mobile app analytics are and why it’s important to track them.

What are mobile app analytics?

Mobile app analytics are tools used to track and evaluate user behavior inside a mobile application.

They help you answer questions like how many people have downloaded your app? How are your users interacting with specific features? And where do folks get stuck and why?

Why are mobile app analytics important?

From helping you understand how people interact with your app to assisting in increasing download and user retention rates, there’s a lot that mobile analytics tracking offers.

Let’s break these benefits down:

• Understand your app’s performance. Mobile app analytics help evaluate how valuable your app is to users. Instead of reviewing broad indicators of app success, such as total downloads and Daily Active Users (DAUs), analytics go deeper, helping you create apps that stand out from the competition.
• Make informed business decisions across your organization. For example, product managers can use analytics-driven data to answer performance-related questions and, subsequently, improve user engagement, onboarding, and monetization metrics. Similarly, marketing teams can use the insights to create results-driving marketing campaigns, optimize ad spend, improve app store ranking, and more.
• Improve your mobile app’s performance by creating and optimizing features. Use analytics data to guide app development, including optimizing most-used features and user flows.

Mobile app analytics best practices: 8 proven tips (including mistakes to avoid as you track mobile analytics)

In this section, we’ll dig into 8 mobile analytics best practices, explaining how each practice is helpful and what most people get wrong.

Here’s a quick list of what we’ll cover: 

1. Track 3-4 primary metrics rather than attributing success or failure to one metric
2. Obsess over UX-related metrics on top of revenue metrics
3. Study cross-platform analytics instead of relying on mobile analytics alone
4. Track different metrics for different teams, not one set of companywide metrics
5. Make mobile analytics data accessible to all instead of closing it off to one team
6. Ask why and dig deeper instead of digesting mobile metrics at face value

You can start using Smartlook on your mobile app or game today by signing up for a free account (no credit card required). Once our SDK is set up, Smartlook automatically starts capturing session recordings and user events, so you can analyze your app’s users and find ways to improve their experience.

1. Track 3-4 primary metrics rather than attributing success or failure to one metric

A common mistake that teams make is relying on a north star metric. Doing so severely limits perceptions of app performance, skewing reality altogether.

For example, if you review Daily Active Users (DAUs) alone, it’s impossible to know how long they’ve been using your app.

Joshua Wood, Founder and CEO of Bloc, shares another example — counting unique users.

“This can be misleading because it doesn’t take into account how often those users are opening the app. If someone opens an app once and then never opens it again, that’s counted as a unique user, when in reality that person isn’t really using the app.”

The solution? Track 3-5 metrics. But try not to go over five as tracking numerous app metrics can quickly become overwhelming.

Doist’s Head of Android, Rastislav Vaško, makes the same point.

Now the question is, which metrics should you be monitoring? “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best way to monitor and study mobile app analytics will vary depending on the specific app and its goals,” Wood notes.

To get started, review your business goals. Are you looking to drive in-app purchases, or are you planning on improving user lifetime value? Select key performance indicators (KPIs) to track based on your goals. 

Wood also shares his thoughts regarding which metrics to track: “Some tips for monitoring and studying mobile app analytics include tracking user engagement (e.g. how often users open and use the app), analyzing crash reports, looking at which features are used most often by users, and tracking conversion rates (e.g. the percentage of users who complete a desired action within the app).”

2. Obsess over UX-related metrics on top of revenue metrics

Another way to limit your perspective is by obsessing over tracking money metrics, such as how many in-app purchases were made, etc. This narrows your focus and doesn’t answer a key question: how useful do users find your features?

Intercom started its mobile app analytics journey on the same note. Like most SaaS companies, they focused on financial metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and conversion rate (how many free users converted into paid users).

Over time, they realized the flaw in this approach and went on to track UX-related metrics on top of revenue metrics. This helped their team understand their app’s actual performance.

Nick Odlum, Analytics Manager at Intercom explains, “Without additional metrics focusing on user experience, the analytics team will miss out on crucial inputs to decisions the product team is making.”  

Smartlook’s CTO, Ondra Machek, also favors studying UX-related analytics. However, Machek notes that it’s also common to focus heavily on crashes and Application Not Responding (ANR) metrics. “[But] while monitoring crashes is important, a crash-free app does not guarantee success,” Machek says.

Like Odlum, Machek also insists on monitoring in-app user behavior. “It is important to understand the user behavior and friction that people face and not only focus on outright technical problems.”

To make sure you’re arming your product team with the data they need, collaborate with them to identify helpful metrics. Don’t forget to regularly check on them to learn which data is helping them make better decisions.

3. Study cross-platform analytics instead of relying on mobile analytics alone

For some businesses, relying on mobile analytics alone can be misleading. This is especially true for eCommerce companies, where buyers often switch between mobile apps and websites throughout the purchasing process.

The solution? Cross-platform analytics. These give you the big picture when it comes to reviewing the customer journey in its entirety. In turn, this helps you identify where users get stuck, which elements or features drive conversions, etc.

This doesn’t mean you need to jump from tool to tool to map user behavior across your website, app, and other devices. A single, powerful analytics tool like Smartlook can help track user behavior across platforms, saving you from data silos and the struggle of constantly switching between tools.

With Smartlook, all you need to do is create a combined mobile and web project to monitor website and mobile app sessions with the same dashboard.

From here, Smartlook’s Identify API leverages a user’s identifying characteristics, such as their username or email, to track their sessions across platforms.

You can then analyze cross-platform behavior by doing the following:

• Watching session recordings. These show you how users interact with your website and app: when they move from one platform to another, how long their sessions are, and what they’re interacting with.

• Using funnels to calculate conversion rates. These help you analyze the user journey across platforms so you can find out where users drop off and at which step in the funnel they’re converting. 

4. Track different metrics for different teams, not one set of companywide metrics

Another misunderstood best practice regarding mobile app analytics involves tracking one set of metrics for everyone across an organization.

The question is, how can metrics that are relevant to the product team be useful to the marketing team? They really can’t be. And even though different teams are bound by a company mission, they all contribute to it differently. That’s why it’s essential to track a specific set of metrics for different teams — so you can empower them with the data that’s specifically useful to them.

Again, collaborating with teams on which metrics will be most relevant to them is key.  Vaško recommends asking each team the following question: “What do you need to know?”

Once you have an answer, “only then think about what to measure to answer that question,” recommends Vaško. “Also, question your metric. If you’re, [for example], measuring clicks on buttons in a row, how much does the order influence the results?”

5. Make mobile analytics data accessible to all instead of closing it off to one team

Equally important to tracking different sets of team-specific metrics is making sure product analytics are accessible to all — whether they can read code or not.

Fortunately, a mobile app analytics platform like Smartlook makes it easy to read data thanks to its visually engaging, readable dashboards.

Considering how important data accessibility is in today’s world, be sure to consider it as one of the leading factors when selecting a mobile app analytics tool. Even if your team is small, it’s best to plan ahead.

Luis A, Senior Product Designer at Doist, advises the following.

6. Ask why and dig deeper instead of digesting mobile metrics at face value

More prevailing advice regarding best practices for mobile analytics involves solely focusing on which key metrics to track. In reality,  mobile app analytics is not only about monitoring metrics but rather about how to correctly use them to inform app development.

This brings us to human bias — often neglected in discussions about interpreting data, even though it significantly impacts them.

Psychological biases or logical fallacies refer to unconsciously looking for data that validates your presumptions. The result? A biased approach to tracking and monitoring app analytics. This is limiting as you only infer data to your benefit instead of letting it guide your decisions.

Educating yourself about possible biases that may impact your judgment is one way to protect yourself against them. Here are a handful of biases to be aware of:

• Confirmation bias. This is when you seek, interpret, or recall data to confirm your hypothesis or existing belief instead of considering alternative possibilities
• Narrative fallacy. Creating stories to explain data points without exploring what causes something in-depth. It also often leads to making causal inferences, which involves assuming something will happen again in the future because it happened in the past 
• Backfire effect. This bias involves not believing or doubting the credibility of facts or data when they don’t align with your beliefs
• Bandwagon effect. This refers to believing or doing things just because others are doing it (for example, interpreting data in a way that others do)

An inquisitive mindset is another way to overcome potential bias. Always be sure to ask yourself “why” as you analyze data. This will keep you on your toes at all times. 

7. Track behavioral data in addition to numerical data

Another common mistake that people make when setting up mobile analytics is only taking numerical data into consideration.

The truth is that numerical data is one-dimensional and often guides you in making biased decisions. Although it helps identify a problem, it rarely helps identify the root.

In contrast, pairing mobile app metrics analysis with behavioral data gives you a complete picture of what the problem is, what’s likely causing it, and how it impacts users.

Here’s how you can gather behavioral data:

• Regularly talk to your users

Dan Wolchonok, the Head of Data at Reforge, writes, “Talk to your existing high-intensity users and your infrequent users. They are a goldmine of information.”

Schedule one-on-one chats with users to understand which features they use the most, how they use them, what blockers they struggle with, and so on. Qualitative data like this saves you from bias-based decision-making.

• Watch user in-app interactions  

Session recordings and heatmaps help with this. Session recordings are recorded episodes of user interaction within your app. Heatmaps, on the other hand, offer a visualization of how users interact with one screen. They show you how far users scroll, the buttons they click on, and the screens they swipe.

Heatmaps and session recordings help you understand user engagement, including which features they use the most, the most effective CTAs, points of friction, and more. Smartlook’s product marketing manager, Vojtěch Šibor, recommends watching session recordings to solve technical issues.

Application instability affects not only the user experience but also the store’s rating and ASO rank, as every product manager knows. The fact that you can work with crashes and resolve them faster by watching ‘crashed sessions’ and save time with mapping and documentation is still quite a new approach for product managers

Vojtěch Šibor

Product Marketing Manager at Smartlook

Despite their usefulness, our CTO, Ondra Machek, notes: “Even though it is 2022, the benefits of actually seeing the app in the hands of users are not widely known, and there is a lot of evangelization to be done. I wish more people know that session recording is not an arcane thing on the mobile side of things, and it is not that hard to implement.”

8. Always be mindful of consent when collecting mobile data 

Lastly, when it comes to best practices regarding mobile analytics, consent to collect mobile user data such as email addresses, name and surname, location data, and more are often ignored, leading to legal scuffles.

As a result, businesses run the risk of losing user trust if they don’t respect user privacy. Be aware that different countries have different privacy laws — some stricter than others — making privacy-related matters even more confusing.

Remember that you always need mobile user consent whether you’re using Google Analytics or any other analytics platform to gather data. You’ll also need user permission if your app uses third-party cookies to share data with another third-party company.

The easiest solution to all of this? Use a privacy-friendly mobile app analytics tool. These tools can help you do the following:

• Obfuscate visual elements containing private information, such as password boxes
• Collect data via a wireframe mode that guarantees end users remain anonymous and masks sensitive fields in session recordings
• Store data in a safe cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services in the US and Europe

Lastly, a good analytics tool should only track user data across your apps and websites. 

Smartlook is an analytics platform that can help with the above. 

Mobile app analytics best practices in a nutshell

Mobile analytics help improve everything — from user experience to app marketing strategy. By tracking the right KPIs and continuously studying user behavior, you can even reduce the uninstall and churn rate. 

The key to nailing analytics for mobile apps centers around the following foundational principles: 

• Collaborate on what data to track (both qualitative and quantitative) for each team instead of picking and monitoring a handful of KPIs yourself 
• Make data accessible using a mobile analytics tool that lays it out in an easy-to-understand manner 
• Question all the data you gather. Ask ‘why’ so you don’t fall prey to common psychological biases

Most of all, make sure you use app analytics software that is compliant with user privacy laws. 

Thankfully, Smartlook helps you track in-app and cross-platform behavior and analyze crash reports. It also makes data accessible to all teams — all within the boundaries of user privacy. 

Using the quantitative and qualitative data you gather, you can easily improve your app’s UX, user retention rates, conversion rates, and average amount of revenue. 

Upgrade your mobile app analysis with Smartlook

Smartlook can be used on all kinds of native iOS and Android mobile apps, that are built with various frameworks and engines — including React Native, Cordova, Flutter, Ionic, Unity, and more. We have detailed documentation to guide you through the implementation, but if you need any assistance, our Support team is ready and waiting.

Schedule a Smartlook demo or start your free, full-featured 30-day trial today.

 

Masooma Memon

is a freelance writer for SaaS and a rookie bullet journalist. When she’s not writing, she’s either reading a fantasy novel or shortlisting an idea to discuss in her newsletter, The Content Workshop.

The post 8 mobile app analytics best practices to be mindful of (including mistakes to avoid) appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

In both cases, mobile analytics provides insights into the behavior and experience of mobile users, which helps companies:

• Boost conversions and retention by removing bottlenecks in the user journey.
• Make data-driven decisions on how to refine their products.
• Find and fix bugs and other UX problems.

To provide these benefits, mobile analytics tools come with various quantitative and qualitative analytics features, such as session recordings, events, funnels, and more. In this guide, we’ll show you three real-life examples of companies using these mobile analytics features to improve their products, UX, and conversions. 

Then, we’re going to cover a few essential mobile analytics metrics and explain how to set up mobile analytics tools on websites and native mobile apps.

But before we dive in, let’s quickly discuss the difference between mobile analytics and traditional web analytics.

You can start analyzing the behavior of your website or mobile app’s users today by signing up for a free, 30-day Smartlook trial (no credit card required). Our tool combines the power of session recordings, heatmaps, events, and funnels, helping you see everything your users do, uncover why they do it, and improve their experience.

What’s the difference between mobile analytics and traditional web analytics?

As we said, the term mobile analytics can refer to two different things:

1. Gathering and analyzing behavior data from mobile users who are interacting with native mobile apps. This is the more strict and widely-used definition. In this context, the difference between mobile and web analytics is the platform — one deals with websites or web apps, while the other is only concerned with native mobile apps. Additionally, some analytics solutions are focused on sites or mobile apps, while others (like Smartlook) can be used on both. There are also differences in the way behavior tracking is set up on each platform and in the metrics that you should track, as you’ll see later in this guide.
2. Gathering and analyzing behavior data from mobile users who are interacting with websites, web apps, and native mobile apps. This is the broader definition because it doesn’t separate mobile users based on the product’s platform (web or mobile), but groups them together based on the device. In this context, an important difference is the fact that mobile websites have incoming link data, which is useful for measuring attribution for advertising and marketing campaigns. Native mobile apps don’t produce this data because they have to be opened directly from the device.

It’s also worth noting that today, a single user’s journey can take place across platforms. For example, a customer can browse e-commerce items on a website using their smartphone but complete their purchase with the company’s native mobile app.

This is a cross-platform journey, even though it takes place on the same device. As a result, cross-platform analytics has also emerged as a popular category alongside web and mobile analytics.

3 real-life examples of companies using mobile analytics to boost conversions, fix bugs fast, and improve their UX

Businesses turn to mobile analytics solutions to understand how people are interacting with their product in the wild, instead of using focus groups and user tests as a proxy for their users’ actual experience. 

The idea is to gather behavior data, analyze it, and find UX problems and opportunities for improving conversion rates. Mobile analytics tools like Smartlook help businesses do this with features like mobile session recordings, event tracking, funnel analysis, and more.

Here are three examples of companies using mobile analytics to improve their product and bottom line.

#1 AstroPay: Improving sales funnel conversions by 56%

AstroPay is a fintech app that connects 5M+ users with 500+ merchants in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. 

In order to optimize the app experience, AstroPay’s team wanted to analyze feature adoption and customer journeys, as well as find places where users get stuck.

Once they set up Smartlook, they started tracking individual user actions, i.e., events. Then, they used these events to create funnels, which mapped their most important user flows, such as their checkout. 

After they analyzed the customer journey data, they found a problem — many users didn’t complete their cryptocurrency purchase process after starting it. 

From here, the team had to find out why that happened. For that, they used Smartlook’s session recordings, which show a video of everything users do during their session, as you can see in the screenshot below.

AstroPay’s team came away with two key insights from this analysis:

• Some users dropped off because there were way too many steps in the purchase process.
• After purchasing, many users spent several minutes anxiously looking for the cryptocurrency in their wallet, not realizing the transaction was still pending. 

Empowered by these findings, AstroPay made a data-driven redesign of their cryptocurrency purchase flow, removing unnecessary steps and adding a “Purchase Pending” banner. This resulted in a much better user experience and a 56% lift in conversions.

Today, AstroPay’s product and dev teams both use Smartlook to make product decisions based on analytics data.

#2 Vertigo Games: Speeding up bug reproduction and analyzing user behavior

Vertigo Games is a game development company that builds and self-publishes first-person shooter games.

During the early development stages of one of their games, they had a big issue — bug reproduction was slow and often unsuccessful because their team couldn’t see the exact circumstances in which bugs occurred.

As Sinem Bulut Selduz, Game Analyst at Vertigo Games, said:

“Before Smartlook, we couldn’t find the reasons for the drops occurring in various parts of the funnels in our game. In order to find a solution when we had a high drop rate, we were trying to experience it ourselves and to determine the source of the error in the specified place, which caused a great waste of time.”

Sinem Bulut Selduz

Game Analyst at Vertigo Games

Session recordings helped them overcome this problem by showing them everything users did leading up to a bug. Now, their QA can simply watch how each bug occurred, instead of trying to reproduce it via trial and error.

Additionally, the product team also uses session recordings to verify if new users get a great first impression of the game.

Both teams also use detailed funnels (with as many as 60 steps) to map how users navigate their onboarding tutorial and other key flows. This helps them understand the functionality and user experience throughout the game.

#3 Hookle: Improving the onboarding experience and fixing bugs easier

Hookle is a Finnish startup that offers a social media management app for Android and iOS.

They wanted to use a new mobile analytics tool to:

• Check which features in their mobile app are useful for their users.
• Improve user experience (UX) and app usability.
• Give their users fast and accurate support.
• Speed up bug reproduction.

Additionally, they wanted a mobile analytics tool that was compatible with Flutter — the framework their app was built with.

Smartlook checked all of these boxes, so Hookle’s teams started using it. Thanks to the session recordings, they quickly saw an opportunity for improving their onboarding.

As Jere Seppala, Co-founder and CTO of Hookle, said:

“Instagram and Facebook didn’t make it clear to users how to sync their accounts. It required a certain amount of time and was troublesome for users. We wanted to make it more frictionless. With Smartlook’s screen recordings, we improved the app onboarding. Now, there are no failed onboardings and account connections.”

Jere Seppälä

Co-founder + CTO of Hookle

The customer support team also uses session recordings to debug faster. Before Smartlook, it was hard for them to understand bugs due to the mismatches between what users described and what actually happened. Now, they easily solve any discrepancies and find the root cause by simply watching their users’ sessions.

The different types of mobile analytics (& tools to implement them)

Now, we’ll discuss a few different sub-categories of mobile analytics, starting with the crucial, but overlooked distinctions between quantitative and qualitative analytics.

Quantitative vs. qualitative analytics

Mobile analytics tools can collect two types of data: quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative data is information in the form of numbers, meaning it can be quantified, measured, or counted. This data is used to answer questions like “What?”, “How much?”, “How many?”, “How often?”, etc.

Quantitative analytics tools provide charts, dashboards, and reports filled with stats and metrics about your users, such as who they are (i.e., demographics), their device and operating system, their location, whether they’re new or returning users, and so on.

Some popular quantitative analytics tools are Flurry, Firebase, and Countly. You can find more examples in our article on the top free and paid mobile app analytics tools. 

While useful, most quantitative analytics solutions have two limitations:

• Their data can be difficult to interpret if you don’t have a data-oriented personality and technical skills. This means quantitative tools are most useful to technical product managers, data analysts, and developers.
• They often can’t tell you why users do what they do, making it difficult to improve their experience and your conversions.

Qualitative data is non-numerical data that’s descriptive and rich in context and detail. This type of data is used to answer two key questions: “How?” and “Why?”

Qualitative analytics tools help you get the subjective insights into what your users want or need or why they do what they do. In recent years, these tools have gained popularity in the mobile analytics world as product teams look for more accessible solutions that can give them a better understanding of the “why” behind their users’ behavior.

For example, session recordings are one of the best ways to gather qualitative data. 

The screenshot above shows a mobile game session recording. As you can see, the video on the right lets you seeeverything exactly as your users saw it. This, alongside the additional information on the left, provides the necessary context for solving UX problems and improving your conversions.

Session replays also have a low barrier to entry, which is why product, marketing, UX, customer success, dev, and QA teams can all benefit from them. This is something we’ve discussed at length in our product analytics guide.

Besides session recordings, heatmaps and surveys are also popular qualitative analytics features.

Some widely-used qualitative analytics tools are Smartlook (which also has quantitative capabilities), UXCam, and FullStory. You can learn more on this topic in our article on the top 8 session replay and visitor recording tools.

Product usage and engagement analytics

Again, organizations use mobile analytics to gather data on how users interact with their products. The process of gathering and analyzing these data points is called product usage analytics (or engagement analytics).

Having access to app usage and user engagement data helps you uncover:

• How often users login to the product.
• Which features they use the most/least.
• How much time they spend using the product, and much more.

Smartlook, as well as traditional analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Amplitude, can all help you get these insights. To learn more, check out our article on the best product analytics tools.

Product performance analytics

Product performance analytics refers to the process of finding bugs, crashes, slow load times, and other technical problems that affect your UX.

For example, Smartlook has a Crash Reports feature for Android apps, which automatically provides a list of all app crashes. The feature also shows you information about the version (or versions) of your app where a crash occurred, as well as the number of users who experienced it.

Due to their technical nature, classic performance analytics tools like Crashlytics, BugSnag, and Sentry are used by technical product managers, developers, and QAs.

However, tools that incorporate session recordings (like Smartlook) also enable non-technical team members to analyze product performance. We’ve discussed the benefits of combining crash reporting with session recordings in our article on the best Crashlytics alternatives.

Essential mobile analytics metrics

Before we dive into the metrics, note that the first few are mostly applicable to mobile apps, but the final one (conversion rates) is a must for both websites and mobile apps.

Daily, weekly, and monthly active users

These first three metrics are pretty straightforward:

• Daily active users (DAU) is the number of users who open your app in a day. 
• Weekly active users (WAU) is the number of users who opened your app at least once during the week.
• Monthly active users (MAU) is the number of users who opened your app at least once during the month.

Many product analytics tools will calculate these metrics for you. For example, in Smartlook, you can open the dashboard and click on “Add new tile”. 

Then, click on “Active Users”, where you can choose between daily, weekly, or monthly active users, and choose the data range you want to analyze (seven, 30, or 60 days).

Once you click “Save” the newly created tile will appear in your dashboard, where you can easily keep track of your daily, weekly, or monthly active users.

Retention rate

Retention rate is the percentage of visitors that continue to perform an action (e.g., log into their account, open a feature, or make an in-app purchase) for a certain amount of time after first doing so.

Smartlook has a feature called Retention Tables, which lets you track user cohorts over time while calculating retention for you. 

To calculate retention, you first need to select an action, i.e., an event. In the example below, we’ve used account logins as our event.

As you can see in the screenshot, the retention table shows that 376 users triggered this event for the first time on Monday, 10.19, which is our Day 0. 

Over the next few days, the table automatically tracks this user cohort (users who first performed the “Account Login” action on 10.19). 

Here’s the retention data for the next 5 days:

As you can see, on Day 1, 76 of the 376 users performed the action again. That number gets progressively lower, with a big drop between Days 4 and 5. 

Conversion rates

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action on your site or product, like:

• Completing an onboarding tutorial.
• Opening a newly released feature.
• Making an in-app purchase.

Your site or app likely has many important flows, each one with its own conversion rate and issues that lead to drop-offs. This means you’ll need to analyze each one, find out its conversion rates, and remove its bottlenecks.

You can do this in Smartlook by combining funnel analysis with session recordings.

Funnels are sequences of steps (i.e., events) users go through to complete a goal. Building funnels lets you analyze user behavior through these key flows, find out where users drop off, and calculate conversion rates.

You can also jump into session replays of people who dropped off to find out why.

For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook session recording of a mobile user’s journey while navigating an onboarding sequence. 

During the roughly 10-minute session, the user completed 91 events. If you look at the drop-off rate between each step, you can find where the sharpest drop-off happens. 

Perhaps there’s a technical error there or users simply get bored with the tutorial. Either way, watching session recordings of users who dropped off at a specific stage can help you uncover why they did so.

For more detail on this topic, check out our funnel analysis guide.

How to set up mobile analytics tools on websites and native mobile apps

Tracking mobile users’ interactions with a website usually requires the same setup process you’d use for tracking users on desktop or laptop devices. The setup is simple — you just install a JavaScript snippet in your site’s code and they start collecting data.

For example, once you install the Smartlook code snippet, our tool starts recording all mobile (and desktop) user sessions on your site and collecting data about page views, referrers, locations, devices, taps, and more. 

A few minutes after the snippet is installed, session recordings will start appearing in the “Recordings” tab.

Then, you can further analyze your users’ behavior with:

• Heatmaps, which show you where users click (or tap), scroll, or move their cursor. They’re easy to create and interpret, making them a great starting point for analyzing user behavior. If you’re looking for an easy entry into mobile analytics, learn more about the use cases for mobile app heatmaps.

• Event tracking, which lets you monitor specific user interactions like button clicks, text inputs, and page visits. Tools like Smartlook offer several ways for you to track these interactions without coding, such as selecting from a list of standard events or even turning a hot spot on a mobile heatmap into an event.

• Funnel analysis, which we discussed earlier.

You can learn more about these and other useful analytics features in our guide to tracking user activity on websites.

Tracking user behavior on a mobile app requires a little more effort in the setup phase.

Mobile analytics tools have to be integrated into the app’s code with a software development kit (SDK) by an experienced developer. 

For example, Smartlook has SDKs for 9 popular platforms, frameworks, and engines: Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, Unity, and Unreal Engine. 

Once the correct SDK is integrated, Smartlook starts recording all user sessions on the mobile app. From here, you can watch session recordings and utilize other analytics features, like:

• Custom events, which let you track pretty much anything you want outside of standard events like button taps or navigation between screens. Custom events usually have to be created via JavaScript. However, they give you immense flexibility in analyzing user behavior. 
• Wireframe rendering modes, which let you record users’ sessions without affecting their experience and endangering their personal data. Instead of recording the UI as users see it, these rendering modes draw a representation of the content on a screen. This is much less taxing on users’ devices and is also a great way to protect their personal data since none of it ever gets captured.

• Retention tables, which we already discussed.

To learn more, check out our in-depth guide to mobile app tracking.

Analyze and improve your conversion rates, revenue, and retention with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

Our platform can be used on:

• Websites and web apps, including ones built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.
• Mobile apps built with popular native mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, and Unreal Engine.

Smartlook also has integrations with A/B testing platforms, like Google Optimize and Optimizely, traditional analytics solutions, like Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and other widely-used tools, like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and many more.

If you don’t want to spend time setting up Smartlook, you can see it in action by booking a free demo here. Оur team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business at a convenient time for you.

You can also try Smartlook with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required). 

Pavel Kroh

graduated in biophysics, but the whole professional life works as software developer. He spent years with desktop, backend and database programming, then smart mobiles changed the game and opened the whole new software universe. Last ten years he devoted to various kinds of iOS programming, lately specialising in SDK development.

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