Mobile analytics: what to get right first

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you only fix one thing about mobile analytics this quarter, make it the first item below.

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Start here

Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

Track flows, not screens. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Eventually

Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. Three things worth confirming about mobile analytics before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.