The Windows Phone Developer’s Guide: App Analytics

As a continuation of our ongoing developer’s guides, we will be reviewing the main app analytics providers on the market. Their services are appreciated by developers and publishers alike and considered as an essential tool to understand their users. Because every one of us want to focus on the more popular functionalities of our apps these services become handy. We are going to breakdown these providers to categories by available developer resources

Stick with the free options.  Flurry, Apsalar, mtiks, Localytics all look good.  Flurry's adoption is the broadest by far, so worries about scale and reliability should be less than Apsalar, mtiks, Localytics, newer entrants. Flurry has some really nice features, but not as many tools (to take action on insights from reports) as Apsalar.  Localytics' dashboard is not quite as polished, and based on what I've seen, I'd rate their free offering considerably behind Apsalar and Flurry which also offer a unique sister platform called App Circle. App circle allows you to drive promotion via analytics. You pay the ad providers per download, so you only pay when someone buys your app. Features like this help you drive your app up in rankings and help increase your user base.  You don't get things like funnels or retention analysis or any support to speak of.  But what sets mtiks apart is their anti-piracy tool, while it still isn’t a full-fledged feature (it reports the unauthorized users but there is no way to block their access.

1.     Flurry

2.     Apsalar

3.     mtiks

4.     Localytics

Also, if you are one of those DIY guys, check out Countly: It is a mobile analytics software that you can install on your own server that has all the major features of the other players but you have the bonus of the secrecy as no one can pull your data or use it.

As soon as you're looking at spending money on ads, you should be thinking about performance-based marketing and properly attributing your spend to installs driven, and tracking those installs to overall performance (virility, retention, monetization).  There's a good argument to be made that you can't do this very well with Flurry, which is really only designed to attribute installs from its own ad network.  Flurry being an ad network first, and an analytics provider second (really, only as a loss leader for its advertising business), there's no incentive for them to change this either, especially with such broad adoption in mobile.

In this content, the alternatives seem good as they are more focused on analytics and less on ads. In this category there is a new provider we should really talk about and it’s Mix Panel which offers the best segmentation tools and dashboard ever. Also Kontagent (currently a paid-only solution) starts to look reasonably appealing (and worth paying for).

1.     Mix Panel

2.     Apsalar

3.     Kontagent