If you have made it this far, you have successfully received some installs for your app. That’s a good thing. For all the previous steps in the process, it did not matter whether your app was good. Now the app is installed on the Android device, and now whether your app is good matters. What’s also beneficial is that you can now track how “good” your app really is.
Tracking user behavior within an app or web site is known as Analytics. The Google Analytics is well known as an analytics library that your developer can include in your app. There are other libraries for analytics, including Flurry, and many others that may be specific to a particular type of app, such as a game, or included with an ad network.
While I show examples in this chapter in Google Analytics, you or your developer may be using something else. It is important, in this chapter, to understand the why of analytics, even as we talk a little bit about the how. HOW VALUABLE ISYOURAPP? We’ve wondered in previous chapters how we can know if your app is good. I am going to propose a very simple definition that, hopefully, will allow you to measure the value of your app in numeric terms.
The most important task that your app must do is to produce conversions. Conversions, as we discussed in a previous chapter, are when users take action that you want them to take. Therefore, you define what those conversions are. The most important goal of analytics is to track those conversions. When those conversions are tracked, you can count them.
Conversion rate can be measured as both a number and a percentage. One example makes this clear. In earlier times, the ratio of paid installs to free installs was about 12%. Out of 100 people that tried the free app, 12 would buy the paid app. In a more recent sample, about 22% of free users became paying customers. In that sense, the conversion ratio increased from 12% to 22%, and we can say the app is converting better. We can look at other ratios, then, on the number of people who buy extra add ons after the install, to determine the conversion rates for them as well.
