Building a mobile game is just the beginning of your journey to success. Once you’ve accomplished this stage, it’s time to publish it, and listing your mobile game in Google Play and Apple App Store is just a part of the game. With more than 6.64 billion smartphone users in 2022 and over 3 million apps and games worldwide, competition is getting more fierce than ever. If you want to have a successful game, you must stay sharp and provide your users with a great gaming experience. But how can you know if you’re on the right track? Mobile analytics tools are the best solution.
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But what are mobile analytics tools?
As we mentioned in our previous post, optimizing your mobile game for app stores is similar to optimizing your website and other content for the web. App store optimization (ASO) comes with a wide range of benefits, the most important being a higher ranking, increased organic traffic, and more sales.
Because ASO and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) have basically the same goal, mobile app analytics tools aren’t too different from their web counterparts; they track and analyze users’ activity and events on games and apps.
By seeing how people interact with your playing, you get invaluable information about how your mobile product works and how you can optimize it to be as user-focused as possible. Therefore, in an attempt to acquire new players and increase downloads and sales, you can consider mobile analytics tools as your best friend.
But finding the right solutions can be quite a daunting task. That’s why we’ve done the hard part and gathered 10 of the most highly recommended mobile analytics instruments to help you decide which are the best options for you and your business.
Why do you need mobile analytics tools?
No matter how interesting and useful your game may be to potential fans, without visibility, it will not get the attention it deserves. So, you need app analytics tools to help you in gaining a good understanding of how your users engage with your app and how your game journey can be optimized to reach its goals.
On one side you want to measure and analyze the user behavior, on the other side, you need to track the success of your marketing efforts and ad spending. That’s why you need instruments that will help you to answer questions such as:
- which are my game’s most popular features?
- what are my upgrade rates and why are they up and down?
- who are my main important users and the inactive users?
- which of my marketing efforts have the greatest impact?
- what are the drivers of engagement and long-term retention?
In conclusion, you need to use mobile analytics for helping you with:
- a better understanding of your gamers’ profiles and behavior, which leads to increased ROI;
- identify your game’s failures and successes, to create more data-driven development and marketing strategies;
- defining, segmenting, and targeting your audiences and giving them what they want and need;
- determining the best performing acquisition channel(s) for you so you can focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Best Mobile Analytics Tools
With so many mobile analytics instruments on the market, it can be challenging to find the right choice for you, that includes all the features you need and fits your budget. These ten tools are some of the most effective apps that can help you to improve the app store optimization for your game, boost your ranking and get more players.
AppAnnie
App Annie is a mobile and data analytics platform that combines comprehensive app market data and advanced mobile analytics to provide you with both strategic direction and tactical knowledge.
App Annie is available for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone and gives you access to the organization’s technology innovations and data sets. This way, you can see the shared data, and identify the best opportunities for your game, while creating and developing successful marketing campaigns.
The price is customized, but both the paid and free subscription options can help your game stand out from the crowd. The free version of App Annie provides ratings, rankings, reviews, charts, and app details, while the premium pricing plan adds ASO options, download and revenue estimates, usage estimates, advertising estimates, and audience estimates.
App Mobile Analytics Tools by Apple
App Analytics is Apple’s mobile analytics app that gives you specific data for mobile applications and games that are published in the Apple App Store. It provides user engagement, App Store impressions, sales and trends, and user segmentation.
By using App Analytics, Sales and Trends, and Payments and Financial Reports, you can also see how players interact within the App Store and how they discover your mobile game. Available in App Store Connect, these tools are included with Apple Developer Program membership and require no technical implementation.
Firebase
Firebase is Google’s mobile app analytics platform that supports developing, nurturing, growing, and improving your app by displaying all metrics in a single central location.
Built for Android, C++, iOS, and Unity, this app aggregates users’ data and shares it via an immersive dashboard that allows you to have a unique view of what happening in and around your app or game. You can see the number of users and sessions, session duration, operating systems, device models, geography, first launches, the app opens, app updates, and in-app purchases.
By using Firebase, you understand your players with rich analytics, then use our experimentation and messaging capabilities to personalize your game for different player profiles, while maximizing retention and revenue.
App Radar
With App Radar, is all about making your life easier, as it offers several tutorials to help you optimize your ASO from the ground up. We also created an article with the top 10 gaming App Store Optimization (ASO) best practices for you. This mobile analytics app comes with keyword tracking and research functionality, so you’ll know exactly which keywords to use for getting more downloads. You can also edit your app store listing, as well as reply to your app reviews directly inside the tool.
Built for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, App Radar provides you with key metrics tracking, localization, keyword rank tracking, keyword research tools, and more. You can also use its suite of tools to track competitors’ search strategies and optimize your ASO.
In terms of pricing, the platform gives you the possibility to start for free and pay as you grow.
Adjust
Adjust is a mobile analytics app designed to help you identify and build your user base. The app provides a single platform for mobile attribution, campaign automation, and data privacy and protection — all informed by accurate, high-quality data.
Built for Android, iOS, HTML5, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, this mobile analytics app tracks hourly trends, assesses LTV, and analyzes cohorts. Notable is the platform’s Fraud Prevention Suite, which protects your application or game from fraudulent activities.
Use Adjust to view and understand patterns and metrics of user behavior. By identifying and understanding them, you can recalibrate the mobile gaming app for your users and extend their involvement with your game.
Kochava
Kochava is a platform designed for tracking engagement, LTV, and user acquisition. Through this mobile app analytics platform, you can view important data, build user groups, and analyze ROI through pinpointed data.
Developed for Android, iOS, tvOS, Windows & Xbox One, Unity, ReactNative, Cordova, Adobe Air, Xamarin, Web SDK, Corona Labs, Adobe DPS, Adobe Analytics, Kochava allows you to access information related to retention analytics, real-time ROI, location-based marketing, channel attribution, contextual targeting, and more.
You can use it for real-time visualization of your campaign performance and engagement, targeted audience identification and segmentation, targeting, understanding the user funnel, and prevention of mobile ad fraud.
Kochava’s pricing plan is simple and flexible, so it can fit every budget. It starts with a free subscription that includes App Analytics™, attribution, and more. The paid plans start from $100/month and include a 30-day free trial.
UXCam
UXCam is an all-in-one mobile app testing and analytics tool designed for app developers (including gaming developers), mobile product teams, and marketers.
With this one-stop solution for app analytics, you can view recordings of user sessions, which can help you identify the causes behind an app crash or bugs that affect the user experience and improve them. With the Embedded Event Analytics feature, you can go from quantitative app metrics to qualitative insights and zoom in on specific user or event cohorts with similar characteristics.
Built for Android, iOS, Cordova, Xamarin, Flutter, and React Native platforms, this software can also help you with user onboarding via the User Analysis tool. In terms of pricing, it starts from a free subscription and continues with a Premium and Enterprise subscription, both of them having customized values. Check out our recent article for best practices to improve UX for your players.
AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer is a marketing analytics and mobile attribution platform catered to mobile app and gaming marketers. Built for iOS, Android, Windows, Unity, Amazon, and TvOS, it provides the measurement, analytics, engagement, and fraud protection technologies you need to get the answers to all of your questions. This way, you can attract, retain, and engage high-value players, while increasing ROI and maximizing your marketing budget.
It includes features such as user acquisition attribution, people-based attribution deep linking, smart banners, and performance metrics. Extremely valuable are the advanced game analytics and cohort reports that help you increase retention by giving a full view into player behavior, so you know exactly how, where, and when to engage them.
In terms of pricing, the subscription plan starts with a free option and continues with the paid options, which come with a 30-day free trial and custom plans upon request.
Flurry
Flurry Analytics is a free mobile analytics software package built for iOS, Android, and Windows. This easy-to-use platform includes advanced functionalities like on-demand complex queries, funnel analysis, and custom segmentation, allowing you to track new users and active users, sessions, and more.
Combining Audience insights with Segments gives you powerful insights to focus on different parts of your audience for a smarter product roadmap, superior user acquisition strategy, and more effective monetization strategy. You can also measure and analyze activity across your entire app portfolio (including crash and user acquisition analytics).
Smartlook
Smartlook is a mobile analytics tool that offers recordings to identify the customers, funnels to discover why visitors don’t take the next step, and a customizable dashboard to easily analyze the data. You can choose what events, funnels, and statistics you want to see and play related recordings right from your dashboard.
One of the most interesting features is Mobile Heatmaps, which show your users’ behavior and their points of interest. You can generate them in a matter of minutes from the data you already have, and the Smartlook galleries automatically show heatmaps for every fragment in your app, displaying them all in one place.
Smartlook is easy to implement thanks to SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native, Unity, Unreal, Flutter, Cocos, Cordova/Ionic, and Xamarin. In terms of pricing, it starts with a free plan for personal use and continues with paid plans ($31/month for Startup, $79/month for Business, and custom for Enterprise). All plans start with a 10-day trial, while the paid options include a 15-day money-back guarantee.
Final words about mobile analytics tools
Whether you’re just starting out on your mobile gaming marketing journey and want to increase your game’s visibility and ranking or want to go deeper and find more advanced data, you need a mobile app analytics tool to help you navigate the realities of ASO. Don’t miss out on our article about the top 20 time-saving tools for game developers in 2022.
While there are tons of mobile analytics apps available to choose from, these ten mobile application tools we highlighted above offer detailed information about your users and provide unique data points that can highlight patterns of behavior. Armed with these new metrics, you make your app irresistible to your targeted audience.
