Mobile analytics refers to the practice of capturing data from advertising networks, mobile apps, websites, and web and app visitors to help brands understand where their users are coming from and how they are behaving on their mobile properties in order to improve their user acquisition, retention, engagement, and conversion efforts. Similarly to traditional web analytics, mobile analytics work by identifying unique visitors and recording their behaviors. Because of the fragmentation that was introduced by mobile and the limited functionality of third party cookies, mobile analytics are significantly more complicated than web analytics and mobile measurement companies are specialized either in attribution (measuring where users came from) or user behaviour (measuring how users behave in an app or mobile property).
The difference between web analytics and mobile analytics
Historically, companies have treated mobile and non-mobile devices as separate, and even used a separate vendor for their web analytics vs. their mobile analytics. Most modern product analytics platforms track both. The most important trend in mobile analytics when it comes to both attribution and behaviour measurement is the ability to perform cross-platform, cross-device and cross-browser attribution and measurement. For example, if a user is engaging with a Branch in the Facebook browser and then opens the same brand’s site in Safari and then purchases in the app, a modern mobile analytics solution should be able to attribute those interactions to the same user.