T H E F U T U R E O F M O B I L E M A R K E T I N G :

23 EXPERTS ON APPS,

ANALYTICS, UX AND MORE

Mobile is increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives—accordingly, we hear the cry “Mobile-first!” being shouted from organizations and digital marketers who must adapt and adopt, or fall behind. However, many organizations are still struggling to implement mobile and app analytics, analyze user activity and leverage data insights from their mobile presence in order to create truly effective experiences for their customers.

At the 2017 Mobile Analytics Summit, ObservePoint invited 23 industry experts to address this concern, and many related technical challenges, and provide actionable solutions surrounding mobile and app analytics, technical QA and the user experience. Their insights are shared here.

“As the world moves from web to mobile to cross-platform to IOT and beyond, let’s not forget the basics. So many businesses and agencies have spent the past decade or more optimizing based on their web analytics data. Not unlike teaching an old dog new tricks, analysts have to learn to apply the knowledge they’ve gained on web to new platforms, such as mobile, using old and new techniques to drive growth.”

Krista SeidenAnalytics Advocate & Product Manager, Google Analytics for Firebase

“Too often, as Digital Marketers, we forget that we are guests in the consumer’s world. Mobile marketing used to mean marketing through a mobile application or mobile web experience. But savvy marketing teams are recognizing that ‘mobile’ is becoming more than just our device, but in fact, all touch points working holistically as the customer moves through their day-to-day world. Teams that understand how to be polite to guests in the mobile experience of today and respond to the data available will shape the most engaging experiences of tomorrow.”

Matt GellisFounder & CEO, Keystone Solutions

“The insights hidden in your app’s analytics can unlock a goldmine of new, highly effective marketing opportunities. Analyze your app data and discover those insights to drive better marketing campaigns and best practices around tracking the results.”

Aaron SawitskySenior Product Marketing Manager, Localytics

“Sound analytics is the bedrock of a forward looking mobile product strategy. Your organization’s ability to leverage artificial intelligence for contextual inference, personalization, or operational improvements is predicated on moving beyond first-order data collection competencies and ‘making room’ for this new capability in your organization.”

Chris SperandioProduct Leader, Segment

“Mobile has become the most important digital customer experience of our time, but it is not the only method of reaching your customers and prospects. When I think of a feature or deliverable, I break down its mobile aspect simply as a display surface. I prefer to think of the goal, context, and other variables that may apply to the customer and start building from there. Focus on the customer relationship and their experience with your brand is paramount. To exceed expectations in this goal, use the correct, not just ‘best’ technologies to deliver experience. Use data procured over time, combined with real-time insights, iterating often and striving for individualized personalization, versus mass segmentation.”

David DeVisserPrincipal Architect, Adobe

“It ’s simply not enough for digital marketers to shift their focus to ‘mobile-first’—they need to shift their strategies to ‘customer-first,’ and that starts with providing a captivating, fulfilling and consistent experience for their users, across all mediums. Your product, messaging, strategy, customer service, customer analytics—all of your marketing efforts need to be aligned, and all with the customer’s needs at the center. Take the time to implement your data collection tools correctly, collect that data and analyze your customer’s behaviors to discover how to provide them with the best experience they can have while engaging with your brand.”

Rob SeolasCEO & Cofounder, ObservePoint

“Everyone wants to build an app, but it ’s hard to prove its value when you’re not a mobile-first company like Uber. Understanding the value of an app as an immersive, experiential experience as opposed to a transactional one is key to understanding and engaging with your customers. You’ve spent a small fortune driving downloads; now you have to make sure your product is sticky enough that people will continue to use it past the first week. That’s where product analytics differentiates itself from marketing analytics.”

Tim TrefrenCofounder, Mixpanel, Inc.

“Consumers go through a lot of different journeys. Many engage with brands across multiple mediums, such as desktop, mobile, TV. The challenge is even greater now because you need to understand not only how you collect all this data but also the customer journey. How do you track user engagement? How do you know if a user touched a specific channel? Complication only rises at that point.”

Gadi EliashivCEO & Cofounder

“Understanding customers extends far beyond traditional demographics like age and gender. Executing a highly targeted marketing campaign involves knowing how a customer acts and even thinks—and being able to respond in real-time. Geofencing can be an effective way of reaching customers closer than ever to their actual purchase time. Properly executed geofencing campaigns can provide customers with compelling and highly personalized offers while providing retailers with valuable insights to customer movement and behaviors.”

Wesley HallSenior Analytics Developer, MaassMedia

“Attribution data holds a wealth of insight. Reviewing dozens of client accounts has revealed that most advertisers can expect to save between 10% and 35% on their mobile ad spend, simply by analyzing the data they are already tracking. Influencer reports reveal the path each install took from impression to install in order to reduce network overlap, eliminate unnecessary spend and improve targeting precision. Combined with an understanding of mean-time to install (MTTI) by network, this insight helps advertisers configure their attribution settings for increased efficiency.”

Grant SimmonsDirector of Client Analytics, Kochava

“Mobile apps attract your most engaged customers, however, their interactions are not limited to your app. They interact with you on multiple platforms depending on their need. For example, app interactions often lead to conversions on desktop. It is only recently, that businesses have been able to better understand a user’s interactions across platforms to give a complete picture of the value of mobile apps.”

Moe KissProduct Analyst & Digital Analytics, THE ICONIC

“We can’t be using the old standbys of Page Views per Visit, Avg Time Spent, and Bounce Rate when analyzing our apps. It ’s time to rethink our calculated metric and segmentation strategies to properly align them with consumer app usage.”

Eric MatisoffData Science & Analytics Evangelist, Adobe

“Data is the language of customer relationships. It fuels experiences. It ’s how we understand at a specific point in time who a user is and what they’re interested in. Your data is what differentiates you from the competition.”

Chris SlovakVP Global Solutions, Tealium

“Mobile app measurement is a beast because of the platform challenges, behavioral nuances, and technology limitations. And traditional mobile app measurement metrics like downloads, opens, and crashes tell us very little about the actual business success of the mobile app. We’ve figured out how to tame the beast by applying a strategic approach to quantifying success using analytics to deliver mobile experiences that surpass traditional digital channels by drawing customers in, captivating their attention, and bringing them back each time they pick up their mobile devices.”

John LovettSenior Partner, Analytics Demystified

“User demands are ever changing, and the integrity of your analytics strategy (and the insight you glean from your tech stack) holds critical value in keeping your app highly competitive. Mobile app analysis is equally as important to mobile app development. Through quality app analytics data you can identify your application’s strengths and weaknesses, anticipate user behavior, and deliver a better experience. But how can you know your data is accurate? You need to know what to measure and how to test your data collection.”

Sun SneedDirector of Product Management, ObservePoint

“The mobile era has ushered in unprecedented innovation in marketing and analytics technology, but it has come at a price of proliferating data silos, SDK bloat, and an increased engineering and business execution dependency. Leading mobile companies are moving to embrace modern day infrastructure that unifies and enriches customer data, deploys it rapidly within and across the modern growth stack of solutions, and uses it to deliver personalized customer experiences.”

Stephen Blake MorseSVP of Global Solutions and Operations, mPartical

“The mobile app plays a vital role in our daily lives, and consequently it becomes critical for businesses to understand the user behaviour within their app, such as the onboarding experience or the level of engagement. To capture and understand meaningful data requires robust measurement implementation.”

Amit KanakraiDigital Analytics Expert

“We can’t ignore the significance of smooth mobile application testing as part of a mobile app’s success. Despite that, the mere occurrence of a testing strategy does not ensure the mobile application’s quality and performance. The pains and frustrations of manual mobile app testing can be avoided—and the cost savings of automation realized sooner—by thoroughly defining your mobile app, development, measurement and performance strategy and then automating your mobile app testing strategy to meet those defined requirements.”

Matt ThomasProduct Manager, ObservePoint

“Status Quo Marketers hold on to a bygone era of advertising by flooding the market with cross-channel promotions and messaging in the hopes of grabbing an individual’s attention. They struggle to absorb, and maybe, ignore critical facts about how consumer behavior has changed. Connected Marketers, on the other hand, understand that grabbing a person’s attention involves a value exchange. These marketers use insights and data to learn when and where to reach the individual and how to meet her needs, on her terms.”

Alison MurdockSenior Vice President of Marketing, Verto Analytics

“In the era of the connected individuals, marketers and businesses, should focus on creating value for and with people, not from them. Being a Connected Marketer isn’t just about reaching customers on all possible touchpoints. You need to break down siloes and cross-device barriers—devices aren’t merely channels of your marketing strategy, but extensions of each other and of the mobile user. The Connected Marketer understands that connectivity is as much a behavior as it is an opportunity to engage with consumers.”

Michael BeckerCofounder & Managing Partner, mCordis

“The value of mobile measurement can’t be quantified only in terms of acquisition but must be uncovered an experience at a time as you listen to your unique customer experience at all phases of your customer’s journey from introduction to advocacy.”

Eric MyersSenior Analytics Implementation & Management Consultant, Keystone Solutions

“Marketers trying to capture a mobile app user’s screen—and mind—play in a highly competitive world. To win, marketers must carefully look at and coordinate all aspects of how they acquire users, understand their behavior, engage over time, and optimize experiences that retain them as high value users in the long run.”

Chetan PrasadMobile Product Manager, Adobe

“The old way of mobile and app validation is tedious, time-consuming and frustrating. Like trap-ping goldfish in a swollen river, you must wade through a torrent of network traffic, decipher what you’ve picked up, and hope you’ve caught everything. The new way is streamlined, faster, and more accurate—automation. Automated your mobile and app analytics testing tools let you easily record mobile journeys, play them back, and find validation risks before they interrupt your user’s experience.”

Matt MaddoxDirector of Education, ObservePoint

The Mobile Analytics Summit is a one-day, online event that brings together thousands of mobile and app marketers, analysts and developers from around the world to learn from industry innovators. Sessions focus on mobile and app analytics, technical QA and user experience, offering actionable insights to propel your organization’s mobile success.

The 2017 summit sessions are now on-demand.

Watch the 2017 Mobile Analytics Summit On-Demand Now

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