Forrester: five metrics e-business teams should measure for mobile analytics
Under half (46 per cent) of firms have implemented a mobile analytics solution, Forrester research has found, with only two per cent of advertising and marketing budgets focussed on mobile.
The results of the survey of more than 350 mobile professionals has made Forrester analyst Julie Ask suggest: "Too many e-business professionals are shooting ducks in the dark when it comes to the performance of their mobile websites, applications, and marketing campaigns,"
Ask has put forward five metrics e-business teams should work with their customer insights teams to measure:
Engagement metrics
Engagement — including adoption — tops the list of what every enterprise wants to measure to demonstrate the success of mobile services, especially when sales/conversion isn’t the primary use case for the mobile touchpoint. E-business professionals use proof points like “Our mobile traffic has grown 300 per cent year-over-year” to request additional funds. Benchmarking their application downloads compared with those of the competition taps into their competitive nature. Analytics providers — especially those with PC-based roots — have transferred their paradigms for engagement to the mobile phone. Key metrics include unique visitors, length of stay, and frequency of visits.
Financial metrics
Financial metrics are naturally more important to the retail, travel, and entertainment industries than to financial services firms. Among the e-business professionals surveyed, 77 per cent of retailers use financial KPIs compared with only 31 per cent of financial services companies. Many professionals attribute values to mobile activities or task completion as a proxy for pure revenue — a feature that many vendors support.
Mobile app, web, and campaign performance metrics
Feedback in mobile happens in real time. An app crashing or a website returning a 404 error will have an immediate impact on mobile app ratings and conversion rates. Analysing performance helps e-business pros detect errors early and optimize campaigns in real time. In the longer term, analytics will guide improvements to the user interface. Priceline saw a 400 per cent improvement in mobile conversions by simplifying and re-engineering its checkout process to make it more mobile-friendly, such as offering fewer steps, larger form fields, less information, and less scrolling.
Benchmarking metrics
Benchmarking plays a role primarily in mobile advertising and marketing, whether a professional is on the buy side or the sell side. Vendors like comScore offer audience demographic benchmarking data across mobile sites and applications to assist advertisers with media buying. Others like Distimo offer download or revenue rankings.
Qualitative metrics
Improving customer satisfaction is a top three objective for e-business professionals — especially for those in the service industries (e.g., banking, insurance). Targeted use of customer satisfaction surveys will help companies generate insights and hypotheses as to why consumers, for example, abandon shopping carts in a mobile retail experience or wait until they are on a PC to execute trades, despite being presented with the same tools and information.