Measuring user activities gives us a chance to improve our mobile applications. In other words, you can improve user experience based on collected data. If your application uses AWS resources, it makes sense to enable AWS Mobile Analytics in your software by default. The idea is analogous to using Google Analytics in your web application. Let’s see what information AWS solutions can give us about users.
Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, and New Users
These metrics provide information about user activities on a particular day. The New Users metric is probably what each owner of applications loves when still growing. Let’s see how statistics are presented.
Sticky Factor
The Sticky Factor report allows you to analyze on which day your application was the most visited by unique users (e.g., in the last month). A simple example gives you more explanation about this report:
“For example, a Sticky Factor of .25 means that on a particular day, 25% of your users from the previous 30 days used your app.” [AWS Documentation]
Session Count and Average Sessions per Daily Active User
This report is useful to scale your backend resources if you have one. You can predict when your application will need more infrastructure resources and increase them to improve the user experience on your mobile app.
Average Revenue per Daily Active User and Average Revenue per Paid Daily Active User
The reports below show statistics about in-app purchases. If you sell digital content/items, these three reports can help you track the revenue generated by the mobile application.
Day 1, 3, and 7 Retention and Week 1, 2, and 3 Retention
Retention reports present how many users return to your application. These data can be interpreted as the level of usability of your application. If users return to the mobile app after one, three or seven days, it could mean that they need your app in their daily lives.
Custom Events
AWS mobile analytics allow you to add custom events to your mobile application. For example, you may want to track all unfinished purchase processes in your eCommerce app. If the value of this metric is high, it could indicate that there is something wrong with your purchasing process.
Custom Dashboards
You can create your own dashboard to monitor your most important metrics quickly and easily. There are two types of dashboard charts:
- Summary charts, which display data per series aggregated over the displayed date range.
- Trend charts, which display data per day over the displayed date range.
Auto Export Collected Data
Sometimes we need do deeper analyses, so the mobile analytics solution has an auto export functionality. Thanks to that, you can export data, for example, to Amazon S3 in a flat format and import them to other analytics solutions. Remember that AWS retains your data for 25 months, which can be directly accessed by the AWS console. Usually, that is enough time to observe how our application is doing. To compare statistics of mobile apps over a longer time, you have to enable the auto export functionality because it is disabled by default. You can find more information about auto export in this article: Amazon Mobile Analytics Auto Export to Amazon S3.
How to Configure Mobile Analytics in a Hybrid Mobile Application
Integrating mobile analytics with a hybrid mobile application is simple when your application already uses AWS Cognito. You can read more about AWS Cognito in the article: AWS Cognito Authentication in Ionic Framework. All you have to do is put a few lines of code into the source code of your application. Here is more information about it: Use Amazon Mobile Analytics with Your JavaScript. Thanks to that, you can track users’ activities in your mobile application. Statistics will be presented in AWS Console after 60 minutes. When you are planning to use AWS Mobile Analytics, do not forget to read current limitations in AWS Documentation.
