How studying mobile user behavior impacts app marketing

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Before I get into how the analysis of mobile user behavior impacts the marketing of apps, let me briefly go over what mobile user behavior is and why it is important. With literally millions of apps out there, comes a lot of diversity, both in the apps themselves as well as the diverse mix of people who use them.

The mobile behavior of those who download and use your app is also highly diverse. Some like a lot of content. Some convert more on Sundays. There are users who like engaging with apps. They like tapping, pinching and swiping. There are users who will abandon your app if they don’t get what they want. NOW. Gesture usage and abandoning are just a few examples. Mobile User Behavior is how users interact with your app and the study of it can open a can of wonderful opportunities for marketing your app.

App Marketing is the practice of just what it says, the marketing of your app. There are many ways to do this, but for this post I will focus on mobile user behavior and how it can impact your app marketing.

It is post launch that mobile user behavior has the most impact on app marketing since this is where users most engage with your app. You should know that once users download your app, your marketing is not finished. In fact it has just begun. App marketing extends to retaining these users and making them active.

You need to analyze how users are using their smartphones and tablets in order to make more educated decisions on how to market to them within your app.

How mobile behavior benefits app marketing

Below I’ve included some real examples how studying how your users behave and interact with your app can help support an improved user experience through a refinement of your app marketing strategy:

• Content delivery – Say for example, content is part of your marketing strategy. Wouldn’t knowing exactly how users are behaving on certain content screens provide you with some insight? Are users converting on certain screens serving certain content more than others? Are they spending milliseconds within certain parts of your app while spending more time in others? The more time they spend in other sections of your app will provide you with data that would allow you to figure out the why. Perhaps they like the section where they can flip through photo galleries or the articles about travel over the screens that serve them content about cooking?
• Product price comparison – You have a retail app and you see customers using the app to conduct price comparisons on specific items. This type of behavior shows that your users are price conscious regarding certain items. This might get you to include some content concerning those items.

The age of context
I feel the following example will really drive home on how the study of mobile user behavior impacts app marketing. In the digital age of context, studying how users behave and when within your app is paramount to tailoring your app marketing initiatives.

If you can analyze for instance, times around the holidays where a certain group of your users were buying Christmas gifts for their children, and what they were buying at the demographic level, your app marketing strategy might be refined to offering them similar items at half the price, or at 1/3 of the price if they forward to five friends.

Brands need to comprehend how their users are behaving within their apps at a contextual level in order to gain insight on what to serve them and when, whether it be content or a special promotion. The study of behavior will only strengthen your app marketing initiatives and enhance the mobile user experience.

Beyond traditional analytics
In your mission to monitor mobile user behavior you need to use a visual mobile analytics tool to figure out the why behind user’s actions. This type of tool goes beyond what a traditional analytics tool provides by presenting you with key behavioral visual data. Hence, providing you with insights into the user experience. Being fed data in this fashion will allow you to optimise your app marketing strategy, rather than just working with the numbers that a tool such as Google Analytics provides you with.

Monitoring and understanding user behavior

Below I have included the key features of a user behavior analytics tool and will provide examples how such features can provide insights into refining your app marketing efforts.

User recordings
Dive deep into users’ behavior within your app by watching how it is used and viewed through their eyes. Review every action the users are taking; gestures such as pinches, taps, and swipes.
Imagine, for example, you see your users are trying to register with Facebook but keep encountering a pop-up error message saying: “Facebook login failed.” Due to this technical problem, many of the users don’t complete the registration process and abandon your app, probably never returning to use it. Fixing this problem can result in an increase in registration rates, which in turn may help your marketing efforts in converting new users into active users.

Touch heatmaps
Visualize the behavior on your app’s screens by being presented with a visual aggregated report of all gestures performed on each screen. For example, you may find your app marketing failing because of a call-to-action (CTA) on your screen that seems to be in the wrong place. If users tap on an image instead of the call-to-action button in the onboarding process, they will not be able advance to the next tutorial screen.

This is an instance of a confusing UI element that you may want to revise, perhaps by removing the image and just leaving a more pronounced call-to-action, thereby isolating the CTA and securing more conversions. Here, you can analyze the user’s behavior or lack thereof to make marketing decisions affecting future user behavior such as implementing a different image or design.

Realtime in-app analytics
Seeing the extent of user behavior in a visual report provides you with insights that would allow you to understand where your users spend the most time and how they flow through the screens of your app, as well as any friction they may have experienced. You can uncover how you might be able to tweak the conversion funnel of your marketing campaign by seeing first-hand how they are flowing through it and why they are completing or not competing it.

For example, you can discover the reason users are getting stuck is that the app does not provide product info on the checkout screen, causing frustration and user-abandonment of the cart. From this you realize that if you include product info you may be able to improve your marketing campaign ROI.

As you can see, knowing how your users are behaving within your app is imperative to developing and refining your app marketing strategy. Monitoring mobile user experience and behavior from day one is imperative and it will only make your road to app marketing a success in the long run.