Strategically Communicating

Note: This post is a deviation from the standard format, as none of the the reading for this week was from the textbook and accordingly there is no exercise attached to the reading. In lieu of an exercise, I have chosen to answer the question asked by Donna in the Canvas announcement linking to each tool. The question was: “What are the differences between these resources and when would you use them?”

For this week’s reading we were presented with five different services for web/mobile analytics. Below is a brief description of each service, as well as situations where you can get the most out of them.

1. Google Analytics (web/mobile)

As might be expected from Google, their analytics service intended to track website and mobile traffic is incredibly robust. You can find out basically anything you want about visitors: time spent on site, country and city of location, details about their computer/device, language used, ISP, etc. Google Analytics is best used as a foundation on which to build the rest of your analytics. The sheer amount of raw data you can get on visitors to your site/mobile environment is both impressive and slightly unnerving, and can help inform every other metric other analytics services provide you with.

2. Apsalar Mobile Marketing Cloud

Apsalar is an “all-in-one” approach to analytics over several different applications. It allows users to do a variety of things, such as tracking customer trends across all apps synced with the surface and monitor purchasing trends, track digital “abandoned carts,” track app ROI rates, track which sales efforts are working and which ones aren’t, track high value customers and share analytics data with business partners. Apsalar is intended for businesses with a high volume of sales across several different applications, and is a bit too heavy for smaller businesses.

3. Flurry Analytics (Yahoo!)

Flurry Analytics fills much the same role as Apsalar, offering many of the same services (such as tracking habits of specific customer segments over multiple apps, ROI, demographics) while also offering a few new ones, such as the ability to track precisely how users go through an app. However, unlike Apsalar, it’s intentionally light-weight in its implementation and specifically built with convenience in mind. It’s also free, although you can only track 5 apps at once.

4. Localytics

Although Localytics includes many of the same standard analytics tools offered by other services, its primary focus is on the customer experience. Localytics lets subscribers custom tailor push notifications, in-app notifications, and other user experience tweaks based specifically on the usage data the app collects. This service is particularly useful for business who want a high level of hands-on engagement with their app users.

5. Facebook Analytics

Like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics collects a slightly terrifying amount of user data and makes it available to businesses. Unlike Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics is specifically tied to the Facebook ecosystem, with a high level of focus on integrating Facebook services (although it can be used on third-party sites and apps, provided the appropriate FB services are built in – all of those “Log In With Facebook” buttons, for example). Like Localytics, FB Analytics also allows for push notifications and in-app notices. Great for business integrated with the FB ecosystem, less useful for businesses that aren’t.