What to ask your agency about mobile analytics
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on mobile analytics, these questions are worth asking early.
You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What this looks like day to day
The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. Three things worth confirming about mobile analytics before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.