How to track your app’s performance in Google Analytics

You’ve developed and designed a new app; you’ve done your market research, perfected its functionality. And you’ve launched it on the store. But bringing an app to market is only the start of a constant process of monitoring and tinkering. 

Understanding how your app is being used – by whom, what for and when – is critical to ensuring its long-term success. The good news is that these metrics are relatively easy to obtain using Google Analytics, and so any developer can successfully track their app’s performance over time.

Of course, the performance of any product or service within the market needs to be assessed in an ongoing fashion; apps are in this sense no different. But what is so exciting and powerful about Google Analytics when it comes to monitoring apps is how granular its detail can be – and therefore how panoramic a view of your app’s performance can be achieved.

Google Analytics breaks down its metrics into four ‘blocks: Events, Conversions, User Properties and Audiences. Each of these contains a wealth of information on the quartet of key data-points that every marketer needs to understand in order to maximise the potential of their app in the market.

Take Events. This ‘block’ offers you access to what users are doing with your app. Each developer can add code to various interactions within their app that enable Google to record them: for example, log-ins or downloads, referrals or cancellations. Whatever you need to know about how your users interact with your app, Google can show you … and you can improve the user experience by paying close attention to what the data tells you.

Any given event can be marked as a Conversion – this block contains information on the key aspects of your app’s performance: sales, for example, or subscriptions. In this way, developers can monitor the key indicators that will make the difference between profitability and failure.

In the User properties and Audiences blocks, meanwhile, is the data you need to understand and expand your app’s customer base. User Properties tells you about your current users: who they are, what they like, what they don’t. Audiences, meanwhile, enables you to group your users into segments – and understand them at that “higher” level, by country or gender for example.

From within your Google Analytics dashboard, in other words, you can understand who is using your app – and how. This data can then inform improvements and enhancements both to the app and your marketing strategy. And this is why Google Analytics is so powerful: because, as we’ve seen, you can gather the data you need to answer the questions you have.

All of the data gathered for you by Google Analytics is configurable, which means that at any stage in your product cycle you can be recording the information most critical for your decision-making. Some of the key metrics for assessing the success of an app, of course, include app downloads, active users, average session length, the intervals between sessions, and retention. Analytics allows you to drill very deep down into each of these, monitoring the information you need to make the decisions ahead.

In other words, Google Analytics offers app developers and marketers the tools necessary to take detailed look overtime at the key indicators which power market success. And that’s how to how to track your app’s performance in Google Analytics.