Mastering Mobile App Tracking: Different Paths to Seamless Analytics

Remember when marketers realized that most of the traffic on their website was coming from smartphones? And the rush that followed as they tried to check whether their website even worked on a small screen? Fortunately, today no one doubts the importance of this topic – optimizing the user experience on mobile devices has become crucial. Not only can native apps better support this goal, but they can also be used offline and provide additional advanced features. Along with the growing impact of native apps, mobile app tracking has become an important topic in digital analytics and online marketing. In this blog post, we’ll outline two different approaches to mobile app tracking that we’ve had success with for our clients. 

But let’s be honest: no analyst liked this area very much at first! Working within an app environment is quite a challenge. While the web provides endless possibilities for accessing browser data, testing, and debugging your implementation, native apps often feel like a black box. Not to mention having to test everything twice, for iOS and Android. But with technological developments, we now have more ways to implement app analytics, making the whole journey much more exciting. 

Integrating App and Web Analytics: Insights from International E-commerce Companies

Let’s look at two international e-commerce companies that asked us to support them with mobile app tracking. In both cases, the goal was the same: app analytics that are aligned with web, enabling global reporting across web and app. Both used hybrid apps, where part of the content is displayed natively, and another part in webviews. Tracking hybrid apps creates an additional challenge: ensuring the user journey can be analyzed when users switch between the content displayed in these two technologies. 

From Data Layer to Reporting: Implementing Adobe Analytics for Mobile App

For our client, a pet supplies business operating in various countries, we were asked to support the implementation of Adobe Analytics for their mobile application using Adobe Experience Cloud Mobile SDK. As this technology hardly allows any data transformation, our cooperation was mostly related to defining the app data layer and the setup of Adobe Analytics. We worked closely with different business stakeholders – app developers, web analysts, product owners, and digital marketers.

Furthermore, we needed to ensure that the data provided by the app was digestible by Adobe Analytics and could easily be reported on together with web data, but was simultaneously generic enough to be used in their Customer Data Platform (CDP) without creating unnecessary complexity. The information received from the data layer was passed from Adobe Data Collection to Adobe Analytics and mapped to specific variables and events via processing rules. In this case, the webviews were tracked directly from the web part. We only had to verify that the user identifier was passed correctly from the native app to the webview to ensure unbroken visit and visitor data. The good news is that thanks to Adobe Experience Platform Assurance, feature testing has become much easier. We were able to test not only the requests and context data set by the developers but also Adobe Analytics dimensions and metrics mapping. The experience is unlike when testing with Charles Proxy; instead, connecting the testing device works seamlessly and data is presented in an easy-to-read format. 

Transforming App Data for Better User Insights: A Hybrid App Strategy

Another of our clients, one of the leading online and offline platforms in the European beauty industry, took a completely different approach to app tracking. After implementing Adobe Analytics via Tealium on their webstore in 6 markets, we were asked to extend the setup to their hybrid application. Here we were able to use the Tealium Mobile SDK, which inserts a hidden web pixel into the app. This is where all the tracking takes place – and thanks to this technology, digital analysts can use all Javascript magic they want – just like on the web! While the app developers only implemented a generic data layer, we were able to use advanced logic to transform the data into an Adobe Analytics-readable format, enrich it with app data, and create persistence logic for better user journey analysis. Thanks to the Tealium webview tracking feature, we were also able to capture data layer calls from webview and pass them to a natively implemented Tealium container. Not only did this allow us to stitch the visit and user identifiers, but it also enriched the web-triggered calls. We were able to provide app context information, as well as data about previously viewed pages and clicks in the native app. 

Unlocking the Secrets to Successful App Analytics  

Good news for everyone: implementing app tracking is no longer a nightmare, if done wisely! It can be quite a journey as it differs for each application, requirements catalog, and tool stack. But don’t be afraid and embrace the topic! We are happy to support you with our experience and expertise and look forward to hearing from you.

You can also reach out to our analytics team directly by contacting them at analytics@feld-m.de.

If you’d like to learn more about how FELD M can support you in the field of Digital Analytics, check out our Digital Analytics services!