What a ride for mobile enterprise. This year we’ve seen the bar risen tenfold, with Android making a big stand against Apple’s iOS. Let’s not forget about the iPad and the imminent tablet wars. With two contending platforms and a dizzying array of mobile devices, metrics and analytics around their respective app markets is rising in demand.
Now we’ve also seen growth around data exchange networks and new forms of mobile advertising. The real time web, social networks and localized targeting have introduced a new wave of metrics to play with. But just as important are the mobile apps themselves. How are they performing in their price buckets? Where are they seeing the highest adoption rates? Which devices are best suited for a given mobile app?
A new report from Eric Peterson, founder and Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified, begins to cut away at the amassing numbers surrounding mobile app metrics. The report is also sponsored by OpinionLab, a company that develops voice-of-customer listening technologies.
The report, titled The Mobile Measurement Framework: Making Sense of Your Mobile Efforts in the Context of Your Business, outlines the growing needs businesses will have around this qualitative data. It’s important for direct consumer and user response, and can tap into a series of market research datasets that have been unavailable until recent times. The purpose of the report is to aid enterprises in their presentation of user experience, interaction and engagement.
“The overall quality of the user experience is the first essential metric in the new mobile-measurement framework—and it’s crucial to use a tool that provides the audience with a direct mechanism for expressing their joy as well as frustration,” said Peterson. “Using an opt-in, open-text system like OpinionLab enables businesses to get into their users’ heads and gather great and useful insights while also preventing potential PR and product-support challenges.”
The report’s significance lies in the establishment of new metrics around the growing, multi-channel marketplace. It recommends three core measures, including mobile websites, mobile apps and traditional websites. Interesting, then, that The Mobile Measurement Framework promotes this multi-pronged approach to analytics.
Earlier today I offered my thoughts on mobile app market interfaces, and how they will need to become more organized and streamlined for future consumer use. They contain an array of built-in marketing channels, but will only become more segmented in the next year or two. Not only are there multiple platform opportunities for app marketplaces, from kids’ toys to televisions, but the marketplaces themselves vary on every device. The Android Market you see on your smart phone is vastly different from what you get on the web, and neither are very helpful.
As companies, Demystified and OpinionLab are able to put your consumer interfacing experience into context, through web and mobile analytics. The access points for reaching consumers are growing by the day. Businesses and publishers will need to keep up, in order to keep a seamless and unified front for their brands.
