News last month that Brits are Europe’s biggest mobile spenders, with m-commerce totalling £7.9 billion this year alone, should give food for thought for businesses across the country with underperforming mobile strategies.
A recent survey found that 91% of the UK’s small businesses have sites that are inaccessible via mobile devices, an alarming figure when you consider that mobile now makes up around 60% of online traffic.
Yet even businesses with mobile platforms in place are often neglecting to use the tools available to maximise their potential. While the use of analytics to improve site conversions is now more commonplace, the mobile equivalent is frequently ignored.
To boost the performance of an m-commerce platform without a large investment, diving deeper into analytics may be the answer. With a bit of patience and a touch of business acumen, you’ll be able to use analytics data to pinpoint small improvements in a short space of time. The first step, is knowing what to look for.
For mobile applications, tracking your installs, active users, interactions, and events, will help establish glitches and help pinpoint where users abandon and why.
Strong install rates mean little if interactions are low. This suggests your app isn’t fulfilling a purpose for the user, either through a fault, a lack of functionality or a miscommunication of its function.
Analysing events in your app will enable you to track bugs and software issues, but if everything on this front is healthy, it might be a problem of communication or design. All platforms promoting your app should be clear about its function and benefits, while the app itself should feature a simple, clean design, optimised to a variety of handset options.
Evaluating navigation trends will help you pinpoint what specifically is working and what isn’t. If, for example, a particular section of an app is experiencing higher abandonment than others, it’s here that your improvement efforts need to focus.
Furthermore, analytics platforms will often let you segment your data by app version, device info, locale, language, or user or usage data. So, if an updated version of your app results in a decrease in conversions, you can pull comparative data to see where more abandonment is taking place in the new version, and make the necessary improvements to solve the problem.
For mobile sites, keep an eye on your load time and bounce rates. The percentage of visitors entering your mobile site and leaving immediately shouldn’t exceed 33%, while 57% of online shoppers will only wait three seconds or less before abandoning a site.
A high bounce rate can indicate that the site is too cluttered for users to find the information that they are looking for, or that calls to action on the site aren’t clear enough. Alternatively, it may be that your SEO is poorly calibrated, meaning visitors are clicking through to information that they’re not expecting, then leaving instantly. Making your mobile site easier to navigate and improving your SEO will bring down the bounce rate and increase conversions.
Analytics platforms will also often offer a user-level reporting function, letting you filter data by visitors to help understand their behaviour and motivations. Users may be coming from a certain referral source, in which case it’s worth focussing marketing efforts on this to improve retention and results. Push marketing is a growing area of focus for the m-commerce market and analytics will also help you review its success as you experiment with strategies.
While analytics platforms can offer many benefits to businesses, your choice of software here is of increasing importance. NSA revelations last year pushed privacy issues into public consciousness, and there’s growing market uncertainty around businesses abusing user’s data. Be sure your tools don’t compromise your data control by looking around on the market for the best option.
Web analytics data may look complex at first, but reviewing it on an ongoing basis will help you to react to the needs of your customers in real time - a huge advantage for businesses hoping to lead the way in a competitive market.
By Maciej Zawadziński, co-founder of Piwik PRO.
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