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Apple’s iPhone was launched in June 2007. Since then, over 2 billion iPhones have been sold worldwide, with 240 million units in 2021 alone. That’s quite a lot of iPhones and a lot of iOS operating worldwide! And all these phones have iOS apps! The App Store – the source of all iOS apps – has over 2 million apps.

Image source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/

The growth of iPhones has coincided with the growth of mobile e-commerce and the development of apps in the Apple App Store covering every possible activity. These apps in the App Store generate a huge amount of data which is important for improving the customers’ user experience (UX), providing a seamless engagement with customers and generating increased revenue.

But, how can you use these data to pull out actionable insights to respond to feedback from your app customers? It’s by using iOS App Analytics!

Overview of mobile app analytics

Mobile app analytics converts raw data from your app users into business and functional insights by tracking, observing, and mapping user behavior on the app. Mobile app analytics can help you determine insights like:

  1. User behavior data
  2. Impact of new features
  3. New opportunities for app development
  4. Refine and improve the UX of your app

You can analyze any number of metrics from mobile app data, depending on your business requirements and the industry / vertical that you operate in. But the most common metrics for all organizations include:

Image source: https://www.fullstory.com/mobile-analytics/

iOS App Analytics

As an iOS app owner, you are no doubt asking yourself the following questions:

  1. How many users are searching for my app in the App Store?
  2. How many of these users have found my app?
  3. How many have downloaded my app?
  4. How many are active users?
  5. Which features of my app do they use most often? Which are the most ignored features?
  6. Are my iOS App users experiencing any issues while using my iOS app?

Apple offers a free analytics service to all iPhone users that can respond to all these queries. However, it has been noted that many iOS app owners do not use this service to its fullest extent either due to a lack of awareness of this service or ignorance of how to use iOS App Analytics.

Image source: https://appfigures.com/analytics/integrations/stores/ios-app-store

Run App Analytics for iOS Apps

You need access to an “Apple Developer Account” with a published app to use App Analytics. Learn how to upgrade your account to a developer account by visiting https://messapps.com/allcategories/development/creating-first-ios-developer-account/

  1. Once your App Developer account is ready, sign into the account with your sign-in credentials
  2. This will take you to the iTunes dashboard
  3. Click “App Analytics” on the dashboard
  4. Find and select your app to be analyzed

Use App Analytics for iOS Apps

Use App Analytics to get the following key information from your iOS App:

  1. App Store performance
    • How many people discovered your app on the App Store?
    • Which apps and websites direct people to your product page?
    • Measure downloads and conversion rates to understand the impact of your marketing initiatives
  2. Marketing campaigns
    • Measure the benefits of your marketing campaigns across different channels
    • Create unique links for each campaign to track the average spend per user for each campaign and identify those campaigns that drive the maximum downloads
  3. In-app event performance
    • In-app events can influence the growth and success of your iOS App
    • In-app events can include page views, notifications, reminders, and downloads pushed by an event
    • These can be broken down into categories so that you can see how the events are pushing the visibility of your iOS App
  4. Track paying users
    • How can you check if the changes to your app are working?
    • Track the number of unique paying visitors to your app in a given time frame (a day, a week, or a month)
    • Use filters to find out the sources of your paying customers, which help you understand which of your marketing campaigns works better than others
  5. App pre-orders
    • Track the number of potential users who have pre-ordered your iOS App before it is available on the App Store
    • You can filter the data by geographical location, source of pre-order, and several other metrics
  6. App engagement and use
    • User engagement is a very important metric of your iOS App
    • With App Analytics for iOS, you can track many engagement metrics
    • These include the number of people who use the app regularly, the number of installations, active devices, and much more
    • By tracking these data and taking corrective action where required, you will be able to provide a superior user experience to your app users and ensure they stay loyal to your app

The “Overview” tab of iOS App Analytics gives you eight different metrics of your iOS app:

  1. Impressions: number of views for more than a second
  2. Product page views: number of times your app’s page has been viewed on an iOS phone
  3. Sessions: the number of times your app has been used for more than two seconds
  4. Number of active devices: the number of sessions running in a particular timeframe
  5. App units: total first-time purchases made on the App Store
  6. Purchases: total first-time in-app purchases from an iOS device
  7. Total sales: total revenue from your app from various sources
  8. App crashes: total crashes in a particular timeframe

Image source:  https://developer.apple.com/app-store-connect/analytics/

Benefits of iOS App Analytics

iOS App Analytics offers many benefits to you as an iOS app owner/developer:

  1. Track the kind of devices on which your app is used
  2. Filter app data by date, region, version, referrals, and other data points
  3. Get insights on your app users and their functionality through in-app feedback
  4. Learn how frequently an app user visits your app while searching through the App Store
  5. Create app campaign links and measure the success of various marketing campaigns
  6. Track sales from the App Store and your iOS app
  7. Track the time spent by users on your app

Conclusion

Having spent a lot of time and effort designing and rolling out your iOS App on the App Store, you might want to know the performance of your app at all times. App Analytics for iOS helps monitor your app’s health, performance, and engagement.

Use App Analytics for iOS to get valuable insights into how your users interact with your app, which will help you continuously improve your app UX, thereby positively influencing your app user retention.

Finally, remember that you should not use analytics blindly. The choice of metrics to be analyzed depends on what you want to achieve with your iOS App – do you want to create or raise brand awareness, boost revenue through your app, or something else?

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