Developers
While looking at your data in beautiful reports can be fun, the real power of Google Analytics is uncovered when you derive insights from your data. Having Analytics in your app can help you identify where in your app users spend most time; it can also help you see where users are getting stuck. You may find that users who tend to take a specific action are more likely to convert, so see if drawing more users to that action has an impact on your conversion rate.
What Actions Get People to Convert?
Go beyond looking at the sheer number of actions people take in your app. Combine your custom event data with conversion metrics and see what actions tend to have the highest conversion rates. Build custom reports to identify which events or screens have the highest conversion rate or revenue. Once you know what’s successful at getting users to convert, derive a hypothesis as to why an event or screen might have good results. Then, if appropriate, drive more users there to see if it has an impact on conversion metrics.
In the example below, Shopping in Star Shop has a high conversion; this result isn't surprising since users are indicating that they're interested in buying by being in the shop. More interesting is seeing that if someone Lost More than 10 Times, the conversion rate is low and those users didn’t generate much money. It might be worth offering a promotion after 8 or 9 losses to keep the user interested. Also notice that users who started a New Game after Gameover generated lots of revenue. You might hypothesize that those users are determined to take another chance, so more inclined to convert. Lastly, the Discovered Secret Stairwell is particularly interesting — the conversion rate is fairly low, but it generated lots of revenue, indicating that it was potentially difficult to find, but those that discovered it purchased a lot. It may be worth seeing if driving users to find the staircase could increase conversion.
Know Your Flows
Your home screen is probably the most visited screen in your app. But do you know what happens after that? What percentage of users navigate through which flows, and where do they drop off the most? In a gaming app, it may be useful to investigate which levels have the highest percentage of users leaving your app, in order to see where users find it difficult to proceed. You can then take action by modifying sections of your app that might need improvement.
Similarly if you've an e-commerce app, the behavior flow report will show you at which stages of the purchase flow the highest percentage of users abandon their purchase. By taking these data and improving your purchase flows, you may be able to reduce your drop-off rates.
In the example below, users tend to click the Level Up action after they consult the Sorcerer. If users tend to get stuck on a level, then you might want to guide them to see the sorcerer before completing a task.
Not Sure of the Right Approach? Test it
Stop guessing when it comes to finding the right features for your audience. Use Content Experiments in your app to run A/B tests — without needing to update your app. Think a stronger call to action like “Buy Now!” will drive more purchases than the more common phrase “Checkout”? Test it! Content Experiments uses Google Analytics data to optimize towards your objectives and Google Tag Manager to control the test from the server — so you can test multiple variations of the same app at the same time. And since this is a standard feature of Google Analytics, you don’t have to set up additional tagging for your KPIs; you simply focus on building your variations.
Experiment results are displayed in Google Analytics reports that summarize all of the key information about your experiment. Experiments and Variations are also available as user segments, which allow you to superimpose that information over all of your Google Analytics reports to gain even deeper insights. However, don’t worry about keeping an eye on your reports: you can set an experiment to lock-in the winning variation for all of your users automatically.
