What is a Mobile Tech Stack?
Mobile tools enable you to measure and track data at different points of the user lifecycle, extracting essential learnings at each stage.
There are different types of mobile tools that you can utilise, including:
- Attribution tools – which help you understand the effectiveness of your acquisition campaigns and gain a clear understanding of user interaction with the different touchpoints on the path to install.
- Analytics tools – these help you make sense of the data collected within the app itself. These tools collect data that helps to reveal user behaviour, engagement and retention – allowing you to optimise the app accordingly.
- Marketing Automation Tools – these tools allow you to better organise your data and manage your relationship with your users more effectively. These tools enable you to automate processes and foster more personalised and authentic relationships with your users.
In order to really make an impact, you need to ensure you have the right measurement tools in place to help quantify your success. Access to data is the most sure-fire way of getting a solid understanding of your users and their behaviours. That’s why it is essential that you can access a clear, data-driven picture of your users across the full user journey.
By integrating your chosen mobile tools together, you are able to gain a comprehensive view of your users, from first impression through to in-app behaviour. Mobile tech stacks also collect and organise data from multiple sources, such as the performance of your campaigns, your product analytics as well as the in-app experience, all of which are essential insights to support your app marketing strategy.
The Importance of a Tech Stack in your Mobile App Launch Strategy
Picking the right tools for your app business is important, but it’s not the only thing you need to take into consideration. You will need to work closely with an expert in tool implementation to ensure each tool is implemented properly and that your tool selection is integrated.
By solidifying your mobile tech stack pre-launch, you are able to create a much more data-driven mobile app launch strategy, giving you an in-depth view of your users from the offset. A mobile tech stack will also enable you to gain far more comprehensive insights into your product performance, helping you understand your app’s most engaging features as well as areas of improvement.
The additional learnings gained, will help you to understand your users better and build a stronger, more personalised relationship with them as a result. You will also be able to adapt to your users’ behaviour if needed, for example expanding functionalities that are popular with users or removing those that aren’t. By collating all of these learnings, you will gain a holistic view of the user journey and app lifecycle, significantly increasing your chances of app success!
What to Consider When Building your Mobile Stack
Every app is different. This means that every app needs to build out a mobile tech stack suited to its needs. There are a few important areas to consider when building out your mobile app launch strategy to ensure you choose the right mobile tools:
- Breadth of tracking – you want to ensure you choose a tool that will track the full range of data required for your app business. If a tool is unable to track the full scope of data necessary, you may end up missing out on extremely valuable data insights.
- Resources necessary for implementation and coding requirements – some tools require more developer resource and coding requirements than others. You need to be sure that the tools requirements are in line with internal resources and available skill sets.
- Integration capabilities with other tools – when searching for the right mobile tools you also need to ensure that they integrate well together. Not all tools integrate together easily, making it harder to gain data-driven insights across the full app lifecycle.
- Price – each tool has a different pricing structure. You need to first define your budget and how much you are willing to spend before researching the right mobile tools for your app.
- Support – make sure to research how much support is offered alongside each mobile tool. It is important that you are able to access support, so you know that if you ever run into complications they will easily be resolved. However, too much hand-holding could signify that the mobile tool is instinctively difficult to use.
In-app and product analytics tools
At the end of the day, customers getting value out of your app is the biggest predictor of success. Knowing how a product is used is fundamental to creating more value, and that’s where product analytics comes in.
With product analytics tools like Mixpanel, companies can track and analyse essential product usage data to understand exactly how users interact with what they build. The data they track goes well beyond vanity metrics like page views or session duration to also look at the actions users take, known as “events.” Product analytics tools can also integrate with other tools in your stack–including attribution and marketing automation tools–to merge data across each touchpoint a user has with your brand.
The data collected can then be analysed to uncover important trends, answering common questions such as:
- How many daily/weekly/monthly active users does my app have?
- Where in my funnel do users drop off?
- How does the retention rate of my users vary between different user segments?
- Who are my power users and how does their usage differ from casual users?
- Which acquisition channels bring in the most engaged users?
- How do all my A/B tests affect key metrics over time?
Armed with these insights, product and growth teams can make data-informed product and campaign decisions to maximize retention, conversion, and growth.
Growing and scaling with a product analytics tool
A product analytics solution on it’s own doesn’t guarantee innovation and growth. There are three interrelated questions to consider as you look to scale:
- Are you collecting the right data?
- Are you asking the right questions?
- How is data incorporated into decision-making processes?
Knowing the metrics that matter to your business, with KPIs defined at the leadership level so everyone is on the same page, is the first step. Once defined, it becomes much easier to build an event-tracking framework that ensures the right data is gathered and there’s structure around the types of questions you’re asking of that data.
We recommend Mixpanel because the reporting is easy to use, making powerful analysis accessible to everyone so decision-making can be guided by data. Not only does this make for smoother, more efficient collaboration, it also minimises risk.
As companies look to grow and scale, they will ask more complex questions of their data and incorporate it further into their decision-making processes across the company.
Ensuring Success with your Mobile App Launch Strategy
Once you have integrated your mobile tech stack successfully, you will get a clear picture of your user from first impression right through to loyal advocate. To take full advantage of the mobile tools you have in place, you need to ensure you have a solid app marketing strategy in place that utilises the learnings gained from these tools and enables you to optimise continuously.
To figure out what will make the biggest impact to your app, you need to create mechanisms that will drive ongoing growth. This is where app growth frameworks come in. By incorporating growth frameworks into your app marketing strategy you will be able to clearly see your key metrics move in the right direction and it will enable you to continually iterate and evolve your strategies as your app business scales.
Growth frameworks will make visible the relationship between all the different app marketing activities you are running. By using your mobile tech stack as the foundation of your app marketing strategy, you will be able to make data-driven decisions and implement impactful strategies that will allow for exponential app growth.
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