This is quite concerning, given the time, effort, and budget required to acquire new users. While there are quite a few reasons behind why a user uninstalls an app, bad UX sits right at the top of the list.

Most apps today struggle with retention issues mainly because users cannot accomplish their goals. From high loading times and constant crashes to unresponsive elements and confusing layouts, users continue to face UX problems while using apps. 

This is extremely challenging for product managers as these UX issues impact crucial product KPIs like user engagement, retention, conversions, referrals, and so on.

But, a major cause for concern is that most of the time businesses are unaware of these problems. This is why you need a strategy that not only helps you discover crucial UX issues but also enables you to optimize mobile app UX. 

In this blog, you’ll learn exactly how to do that with a specially curated 5-step framework that covers the entire cycle of mobile app UX optimization. 

Step 1: Identify where users are facing problems in your app

Before you go about optimizing your app and fixing UX issues, you first need to find out where exactly your users are facing these problems.

Are they leaving your app during the signup flow, or is an unknown crash occurring on another screen? 

While there are quite a few ways to identify problem areas, let’s look at some strategies commonly used.

App store reviews

The most obvious way to get feedback about your app is through reviews left by users on platforms like Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store.

By tracking these reviews consistently, you can identify common issues in your app or even discover problem areas that were previously unknown. 

However, since writing a review requires additional effort, a lot of users tend to skip it entirely. Also, most of these reviews are shared by users who either had an amazing or terrible experience. 

This could prevent you from gaining any honest, nuanced feedback from these reviews. 

Support emails

Another commonly used method brands rely on to discover issues within their apps is support emails. 

Users generally send these messages to your customer support team when they require some kind of help or encounter a problem in the app.

However, users only opt for this option when they encounter a problem. Also, not every user would take the time or effort to raise an issue or write an email about it. This again limits your visibility of user experience. 

In-app surveys

Using surveys is a great way to establish two-way communication with your customers. It also allows you to collect crucial feedback that can be leveraged to optimize user experience.

For example, when users complete a purchase, you can prompt a survey to know more about their experience or you can use it to get feedback about new updates or features. 

However, a common issue with this method is the number of people who fill up a survey. Since surveys tend to interrupt the user journey, people might either not take them or rush through their responses. In this case, the data might not capture the pulse of visitors. 

Also, there could be a gap in the data collected about user behavior as surveys fail to capture the voice of the silent audience. 

Quantitative analysis

In addition to previous methods, you can use analytics tools like Google Analytics, CleverTap, Moengage, or Mixpanel for deeper insights into user interactions with your app. 

These tools offer data on user demographics, actions, and engagement. They provide user data like time spent on a screen, number of user sign-ups, location of users, etc.

However, these tools primarily answer the ‘where’ of user behavior. For example, Google Analytics tracks user drop-offs from the sign-up screen of your app. But this information still does not tell you why this happened. 

This limitation leaves you making assumptions about user actions, rather than having concrete reasons for decision-making.

Qualitative analysis

Why do you need mobile app session recordings?

The best way to overcome the app optimization challenge is to opt for tools that enable you to conduct qualitative analysis. Through this analysis, you notice certain patterns or nuances in user behavior that are not clearly evident with quantitative metrics like session duration or bounce rate.

For example, let’s say you manage an e-commerce app. A user is exploring your collection of t-shirts and tries to choose a different size. However, the button to change the size is non-responsive. After a couple of attempts, the user quits the app. 

In this scenario, a tool like Google Analytics or CleverTap will show an increase in the number of people who left this screen and quit the app. However, this information does not reveal the reason behind this action. 

On the other hand, using mobile app session recordings, you will be able to watch this user event in real-time.

This means you no longer have to wait for users to report an issue within your app. You can review these recordings to discover these issues and fix them proactively before they cause major damage.

Tools like VWO Insights for Mobile Apps help you do this by offering deeper insights into customer behavior with powerful features like mobile session recordings and mobile heatmaps.

Secondly, when you release a new app version, you may want to know how new users interact with it compared to returning users. Or, maybe you want to study specific scenarios where the app crashed and failed to respond.     

This type of analysis provides some much-needed context to user behavior and allows you to make data-driven decisions to optimize the app. Depending on your tool, segmentation of recordings can be done in different ways.

For example, with VWO Insights for Mobile Apps, you can filter all recordings based on various factors like device type, location, android version, iOS version, screen viewed, app crashed, app not responding, etc. 

Why do you need mobile app heatmaps?

A heatmap is a visual representation of data that shows how users interact with your app. 

Color overlay is used to visualize where exactly users are tapping on a particular screen within your app. This is a crucial feature as it gives you a clear idea of how users are interacting with important sections of your app.

Let’s say you added a new section called ‘What’s Trending’ on the home screen of your news app. Since it’s an important section, you can use heatmaps to study the taps it receives and guide improvements based on this data.    

As another example, say your gaming app has a section where users can buy new gear and accessories. When you check the heatmap of this section, you notice that a very small number of users are clicking on the ‘View More’ button even though the product screen is receiving a lot of clicks.

Based on these insights, you can either change the placement of the ‘View More’ button or you can add a new ‘Infinite scroll’ feature that allows users to see more products without clicking anywhere.

How can your business benefit from qualitative analysis?

No matter what industry you belong to, qualitative analysis will give you deeper insights into user behavior and help you understand the factors that influence their actions. 

Let’s look closely at how businesses across industries can benefit from this qualitative analysis.

1. Shopping apps

Qualitative analysis is extremely crucial for e-commerce apps. It can help you to understand why users abandon the purchase journey. 

E-commerce apps often run flash sales or special offers to attract more customers. Since the traffic is relatively higher during this period, you may want to study user behavior and identify key areas that should be improved.

For example, your checkout screen has a section called ‘You Might Also Like’ just before the ‘Buy Now’ CTA button. The section recommends relevant products to the users based on what they are purchasing, making it an important part of your cross-sell or up-sell campaign.

However, during one of the flash sales, you observe the heatmap of this screen and notice that the ‘You Might Also Like’ section is receiving much fewer clicks. To understand this issue better, you watch session recordings of users who reach the checkout screen.

Surprisingly, you see that the product images in this section are taking almost 8-10 seconds to load, which is why users are skipping it altogether. 

Based on these observations, you can optimize the product images in this section and ensure that they load along with other elements on the screen.

This will result in faster loading times and will also increase cross-sell purchases from the checkout screen.

2. Finance apps

Industries from the financial sector can also use session recordings to analyze critical screens such as a loan application form or new account opening form. 

For example, consider you have an ’Insurance’ section in your app where users can buy a health insurance plan. 

Here, when users want to compare different plans, they can select their desired options and click on ‘Compare’, which takes them to a new screen where an in-depth comparison table is displayed.    

To optimize this comparison section, you want to study user behavior and identify possible friction points. Let’s say, you use the session recordings feature to know how users interact with the screen. 

Here, you see that users have no issues while comparing the two insurance plans. However, since there is no option to add another plan, users have to go back to the ‘Insurance’ screen. This action resets their choices and they are again asked to select their previous options along with the new plan.  

This issue complicates the entire comparison process and causes users to abandon the screen altogether. 

Now that you’ve identified a critical pain point, you can improve the flow of this process by adding a new button that allows users to choose a new plan directly from the comparison screen.

Also, you can use these insights to further optimize the ‘Insurance ’ section and guide improvements to the design or layout of the screen.

3. Food & drink apps

Apps that deliver food and groceries deal with a large number of users on a daily basis, which is why it is critical to observe behavioral patterns.   

For example, let’s you want to simplify the checkout process in your app. To know what changes are required and get a better understanding of user behavior, you analyze the heatmap of the checkout screen. 

Here, you notice that even though users are interacting with important elements like adding an address or choosing the payment method, the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section is not receiving a lot of clicks. 

To further understand this behavior, you looked at session recordings of this screen and saw that users are scrolling down without noticing the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section, hence you got a hypothesis that it might not be really visible.

Based on these key insights, you can make certain changes to ensure that the section receives good visibility so that users can easily benefit from it.  

4. Travel & local apps

Another industry that can greatly benefit from qualitative analysis is travel or hotel booking. Let’s say, your app allows users to book tickets for inter-city buses. 

You notice that users are spending a lot of time on the ‘Bus Listings’ screen, but very few are proceeding to the ‘Booking Confirmation’ screen. To understand why this is happening, you watch recordings and analyze user behavior.

Here, you observe that users are scrolling through a long list of buses and they are even struggling to find the right one. While analyzing the heatmap for this section, you also notice that the ‘Sort & Filter’ option is receiving very few clicks. 

This suggests that users are not using this feature effectively to narrow down their choices. 

To overcome this issue, you can improve the visibility of the ‘Sort & Filter’ feature or you can also recommend commonly used filters at the top of search results. 

5. Gaming apps

When dealing with gaming apps, session recordings can reveal glitches or bugs during gameplay and can also show how new versions or updates are affecting user engagement. 

For example, you want to know how users play through a challenging level in the game and whether they encounter any difficulties. To do so, you analyze the session recordings and notice that a lot of users are quitting the app after repeatedly failing at a series of tricky jumps.

You observe that users are struggling with the timing of these jumps. A possible reason might be the lack of pop-up tutorials at this particular level, which means users are unaware of the advanced controls required to clear the jump.

To solve this problem, you can introduce a couple of tutorials or demos just before users start this level. By doing so, you can help them understand the controls and also avoid interrupting their experience. 

Step 2: Decide which issues should be tackled first

Identifying user issues in your app is crucial, but what you do next matters most.

For example, let’s say you have a travel booking app where users can search and book flights, hotels, trains, etc. Since a major source of your revenue comes from users who book international flights, you want to optimize their experience. 

To achieve this goal, you check the recordings of users who dropped off while booking an international flight. Here, you notice that when users try to add coupon codes on the final checkout screen, the app stops responding and crashes.

On the other hand, a few users have also reported issues with the filter option on the screen that displays all available international flights.

While both these issues are affecting user experience, the one on the checkout screen should be high priority as it directly results in abandoned bookings and loss of revenue. 

An optimization framework thrives when you prioritize critical app sections, allowing efficient resource allocation and addressing key user experience issues.

Step 3: Share data-backed insights with your stakeholders

To create optimized experiences, avoid relying solely on intuition. Instead, continually track and share data-driven insights with all stakeholders involved in the optimization process.

For example, suppose you are studying the heatmap for an e-commerce home screen and notice a lot of clicks on one of the image banners. But, since the banner is non-interactive, it results in dead clicks and creates frustration among users. 

Use a tool like Insights for Mobile Apps to share findings. Backed by data, these observations facilitate discussions with stakeholders to find efficient solutions and enhance user experience.

This approach ensures everyone is informed about user interactions, streamlining decision-making for future changes.

Step 4: Turn insights into hypotheses for your tests

After identifying critical issues, gathering data, and sharing insights, it’s time to optimize your app. However, implementing changes directly from observations might involve risk and create new problems.

To avoid this, convert your insights into hypotheses and conduct A/B tests. A/B testing involves showing different app screen versions to user groups and analyzing data to determine which performs better in terms of app UX and engagement.

Follow these key A/B testing best practices for optimal results.

1. Define your hypothesis and identify a goal

Before you start with mobile app A/B testing, it is important to have a well-defined hypothesis. 

For example, while analyzing the heatmap of your home screen, you notice that the CTA button is not getting enough clicks. You also observe that the button is placed a little lower on the screen which is why users are probably unaware of it.

Based on this, you create a hypothesis that bringing the CTA button to the top of the home screen will result in more clicks. Using this hypothesis, you create a variant of the screen where the button is placed higher on the screen. The metric you are tracking for this A/B test here is now clear: The number of clicks on the CTA. Your goal is to increase the same.

2. Test small before you go big

Making any kind of change to your app is bound to impact performance and UX. 

However, if you start your optimization journey by testing big changes like a complete app redesign, you face a higher risk of impact on revenue and sales.

To avoid this challenge, you should start testing small, incremental changes and focus on building a culture of experimentation within your organization. 

With this approach, you not only prevent any large-scale impact on the app or business, but you also gain the trust of other stakeholders by sharing consistent results and insights. 

So, when you do come around to run complex tests, it would be easier to get approval and support from the rest of the organization.   

3. Choose the right A/B testing tool for your mobile app

Once you are prepared to begin your optimization journey, you will need an A/B testing tool to get started. 

While there are a lot of mobile app A/B testing tools available today, you should choose one that matches your requirements and business goals. 

You must also ensure that the A/B testing tool has minimal impact on your app’s performance.

VWO empowers you to launch your experiments effortlessly and allows you to test a wide range of features such as in-app messaging, app layout, UI copy, and much more.

Step 5: Monitor behavior after the UX is modified

Once you start running experiments and implement certain changes to the app, it will gradually have some kind of impact on the overall UX and user engagement.

This is where you double down on your efforts and closely analyze how users are interacting with all the changes and tweaks.

Again, you can use the mobile heatmaps or session recordings feature with Insights for Mobile Apps to study user behavior after the changes have been implemented. 

Track the impact of your optimization efforts and look for ideas or opportunities to further improve app UX. 

By combining your testing efforts with advanced behavior analysis, you create an optimization cycle that will not only improve in-app user engagement but will also drive business growth in the long run.   

Register now for a product tour of VWO Insights for Mobile Apps and enjoy free 90-day access to discover real-time insights and drive app conversions. 

Time for a reality check! 

According to research on worldwide retention rates, the churn rate for mobile apps starts at 74.7% on Day 1 and gradually increases to 94.3% by Day 30. In other words, the retention rate across 31 mobile app categories is 25.3% on Day 1 but drops to 5.7% by Day 30. 

If you are running a gaming app or a publishing app, losing users means they’re disengaged. For eCommerce or delivering apps, it can seriously impact your revenue goals. 

So, what is the solution to reverse this churn trend? In this blog, we will tell you how to tackle the problem at its core using the power of experience analytics. 

To understand where to start, you first need to calculate the churn rate for your app. 

How to calculate churn for your app

The lower your churn rate, the better. A higher churn rate means more effort is required to improve user engagement and retention. 

Imagine you run a subscription-based streaming service. You want to calculate churn for your app to understand user engagement and make strategic decisions to improve retention if needed. 

Let’s say your app has 40,000 active users at the beginning of a month, and by the end of the month, 28,500 have stopped using your app. You can calculate the churn rate of the month, using the formula below.  

In this hypothetical scenario, your churn rate stands at 71.25% and needs immediate fixing. To do so, understanding the reasons behind the churn becomes essential.

Why do app users churn?

According to a survey of 2,000 users, the primary reasons for app uninstallation are as follows: not using the app (39.9%, limited storage (18.7%), and excessive advertisements (16.2%). 

It is evident that non-usage commands the lion’s share as the primary driver of app churn. To uncover what drives users away, there are some key questions you must find answers to. 

Why did users drop off from the app and never come back?

Take an objective look at your app. Is its navigation cumbersome? Imagine using a different app with such difficulties – would you stick around? Challenging navigation increases the cognitive load on users, which can drive them to abandon your app. 

Further, intrusive ads alone can drive away 16.2% of users, making them one of the top reasons why users drop off from an app. 

Users constantly crave novelty. If your app stagnates, lacking updates or new features that align with users’ preferences, their interest will wane. 

Additionally, if your app lacks security features, privacy concerns can lead users to drop off and seek more secure alternatives that better cater to their needs.

Why do users sign up but are not active?

Generic content or offers blow out users’ interests faster than you think. 63% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile apps offer them relevant product recommendations. So, it’s worth checking if your app is missing that personalization angle.

Now, think about users who signed up but aren’t doing much. Could it be because your app is like a maze, making it tough for them to derive the right value from your app? Users do not have the time or patience to embark on a treasure hunt in your app. 

Your app should be seamless enough to enable users to achieve their goals efficiently, providing the expedition they need. 

Why do some users come back to your app? And how is their experience different from the ones dropping off?

At times, users simply choose to disengage. This change of heart has become increasingly common in today’s digital world, with several options available online. However, if you still see users returning to your app, it shows that your app offers something valuable that resonates with your audience. Some of these returning users may be your loyal customers who trust your brand and your app. 

On the other hand, certain segments of users who drop off to the point of never returning may be seeking more personalized experiences. This trend is especially noticeable among Gen Z, where over 60% of them explore alternative options even if they have a preferred brand. 

For them, a poor user experience, intrusive ads, or generic offers are the least accepted elements to be found on mobile apps today. To re-engage users who may be losing interest, optimize your app to leave a positive impression and foster trust. 

We have touched upon the reasons why users may not be engaging with apps. But remember, user behavior can vary significantly from one app to another. To have users keep coming back to your app, you need to figure out the exact reasons behind their disengagement and fix them. How to do so? We discuss that in the following section. 

What is user experience analytics all about?

When digging into the problems behind app churns, you will encounter two types of analytics offering a solution – quantitative and qualitative. 

As the name implies, quantitative analytics deals with the numbers, and the measurable aspects of the issue at hand. Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we can measure using quantitative analytics include:

• Monthly active users: This tells us how many unique users engage with our app in a given month. 
• In-app purchases: It measures the percentage of users who make in-app purchases. 
• Average revenue per user: By calculating the average revenue generated per user, we can assess the financial impact of churn. 
• Notification engagement: This metric informs us about the number of users responding to in-app or push notifications. 
• Feature usage rate: It helps us gauge the adoption and usage of specific features within our app. 

While these numbers provide valuable insights into user behavior and app performance, they don’t tell us the ‘why’ behind the numbers. 

For instance, if we observe a consistent drop in monthly active users, it signals that users are disengaging with the app, but it does not explain why they are engaging in the first place. 

This is where qualitative analytics becomes invaluable. 

It goes beyond just the numbers, uncovering the reasons behind user behavior. Qualitative analytics reveals the friction points users encounter on our app, how they interact with various elements, and what drives them to churn. 

Without these insights, numbers remain mere data points without direction. 

However, when we combine quantitative and qualitative analytics, they provide a comprehensive understanding of why users are churning and how we can address these issues effectively. 

Therefore, user experience analytics involves delving into behavioral analysis and comprises the following:

Watch the user journey with recordings

Session recordings are qualitative tools that capture real-time browsing sessions of app users, allowing you to review the recordings later to extract valuable insights into visitor behavior. 

Visualize user engagement with heatmaps

Heatmaps provide colorful visual representations of user interactions with different elements on your app. By using a color spectrum ranging from red to blue, heatmaps illustrate which elements on your app page are the most popular (hot) and least popular (cold). 

Study-specific user cohorts

In experience analysis, you can study how users from different cohorts behave on your app. For example, you can observe the behavior of users from specific locations. New users and returning users are also two distinct cohorts that you can delve into to gain a deeper understanding of their specific behaviors. App version, device type, Android version, and iOS version are other user cohorts that can further be analyzed to examine user behavior deeply on the shared characteristics. 

Our platform, VWO Insights for Mobile Apps, supports all these segmentation options and also allows you to create custom events specific to your app as filters. 

Understand funnel drop-offs

Funnels help you figure out where your users are losing interest and dropping off from your app. Funnel reports can also be filtered using different segments to deep-dive into user behavior across their journey on your app. 

How to use user experience analytics to reduce your app’s churn

Regardless of the mobile app, resorting to user experience analytics allows you to zero in on user behavior and use the collected insights to improve the app even further. These enhancements directly contribute to higher user engagement and reduced churn rates, ensuring people stick around and enjoy the app longer. 

Here are some use cases of leveraging user experience analytics from different industries. 

Shopping apps

When it comes to a shopping app, session recordings can provide insights into user struggles or obstacles that lead to cart abandonment. For instance, you can determine if users drop off after trying and failing to access coupon code links on your app. 

Heatmaps offer valuable information by highlighting which elements within your app receive the most user interaction. 

For instance, if users are not scrolling down to view reviews, as indicated by the cooler blue areas on the heatmap, you may consider relocating them to a more prominent position at the top. 

This approach enables you to design your app layout and arrange elements based on your users’ mental model. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Let’s say quantitative analysis has shown that users are churning from your shopping app. You believe that adding items to their wishlist will encourage users to return to the app and reduce churn. Therefore, your goal is to improve wishlist additions to tackle the problem of churn. 

But before you work on improving the feature, you want to understand users’ current level of interaction with it. So, you analyze recordings to see differences in behavior between users who add products to their wishlist and users who don’t. Interestingly, you see many users refrain from using the feature. 

These observations will lead you to make UI changes and optimize the wishlist icon, making it easily accessible and shareable for users. This, in turn, will increase wishlist additions, providing an effective solution to reduce churn. 

Food & drink apps

Food and drink ordering apps heavily rely on user experience analytics. Session recordings provide insights into how users browse menus and make selections, revealing any difficulties they may encounter in finding what they want. 

This information enables you to make improvements in the menu design for enhanced user navigation. 

Analyzing user behavior with specific dietary preferences or interacting with such filters can help you refine personalized recommendations. Filtering and watching user sessions by different times of the day can offer valuable insights into user behavior during peak ordering periods. 

Similarly, heatmaps can highlight areas of increased user interaction, such as ratings or images, helping you plan their design and placement effectively. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Consider you have added a new feature named “Nutritional intake” in your food app for every user. You have noticed that users who used this feature often returned to the app to see their accumulated nutrition/calorie data, which often led them to place orders from the app.

As the next step, you turn to session recordings to observe the behavior of users who are not using the feature and identify ways to encourage its adoption. For instance, placing the nutritional count on screens could attract users’ attention and drive more engagement. 

Therefore, this UI change (or any other) guided by qualitative analysis can improve the feature adoption rate, drive more orders, and reduce churn from the app. But before you implement any change, be sure to run a test and confirm its effectiveness. 

Finance apps

Session recordings help identify any difficulties users may have encountered while filling out loan forms, such as missing fields or incomplete information at certain steps. They provide a detailed view of user interactions leading to contact with customer support, allowing you to pinpoint areas where in-app guidance can reduce support inquiries. 

If you are interested in assessing how users respond to newly added investment charts or graphs in your app, heatmaps can reveal their interactions, enabling you to optimize the layout and information presentation for better clarity. 

You can also gain insights into user behavior when they make changes to their investment portfolios, identifying opportunities to offer guidance and support. 

Finally, filter recordings by the hour of the day will help you understand how users react to market fluctuations of any kind. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Let us say, you have observed a high churn rate on the ‘Add/Manage your payees’ screen of your banking mobile app. 

To understand why users are dropping off, you have analyzed their behavior through session recordings and noticed that they tend to scan only halfway through the form and drop off without completing the necessary details. 

Further, heatmaps show that users are attempting to click on the ‘Help’ button at the top, but it is inaccessible. Based on these insights, you can streamline the UI of the screen by retaining only essential form fields and making the ‘Help’ button accessible.

Finally, these changes will encourage users to fill out the form, complete the details, and seek help (if needed) with just one click of a button. Simplifying these actions will reduce churn and enhance user engagement with the app. 

Travel & local apps

Travel & local apps can also benefit from the capabilities of user experience analytics. Session recordings reveal booking abandonment patterns and provide insights into user behavior and preferences when making last-minute travel bookings, allowing customized offers and support. 

Further, filtering recordings by date will help you gain a better understanding of user behavior and preferences during peak travel seasons while filtering by screen resolution ensures a seamless mobile experience across different devices. 

Heatmaps offer insights into user interactions with map views, guiding improvements in functionality and design. Further, you can track events of saving favorite destinations, thereby identifying ways to improve this feature. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Imagine you have a brand-new travel and hotel booking app, and you have recently noticed a significant churn from the home screen of the app.

After investigating session recordings of the home screen, you discovered that a segment of users opening the app on older Android versions experienced app crashes when trying to make bookings. 

Subsequently, you shared the recording with the development team, who promptly resolved the issue. As a result, the booking process became as easy as a breeze for users. And what’s more? The reduction in user frustration led to less churn, increased bookings, and improved user satisfaction. 

Gaming apps

Gaming apps can also be improved with the use of these analytics. Session recordings highlight areas where users encounter challenges with controls or levels, providing insights for enhancing game design. 

Session recordings also uncover user interactions with tutorials and guides, offering guidance for improving instructional content and overall design. Further, filtering the recordings by game version will tell you how updates or feature introduction impacts user engagement.

Heatmaps too can help you gauge which areas of your app users interact with the most and ensure optimal placement of offers, purchase prompts, and other elements. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Suppose you have recently introduced a daily login reward system in your gaming app, offering users access to new content and in-game currency, all in an effort to reduce churn rates. 

To gain insights into user reactions, you have analyzed both recordings and heatmaps. What you have discovered is a mixed response – while some users are actively engaging with the reward system, others are barely interacting with it. 

You can conduct an experiment to enhance the placement and messaging of the feature, making it more prominent for users to engage with. This test can determine whether these changes will reduce churn rates and improve user experience. 

Reduce app churn with user experience analytics starting today

Before you jump right into reducing churn, understand what is causing users to leave. Doing this will give your churn-controlling strategies the right direction. 

VWO Insights for Mobile Apps is a robust user experience analytics tool that helps you pinpoint the root causes of your app’s churn. By leveraging insights from Session Recordings and Heatmaps, you can generate test ideas and optimize your app to boost retention and revenue growth. 

Sign up for a product tour now and gain a 90-day free access to uncover the reasons behind churn in your mobile app. 

Do they convert to become paid users? 

Do they engage with it or abandon it after a few seconds? 

Are they finding what they need or struggling to navigate your interface?

To truly make delightful user experiences, you must deeply understand how users interact with your app after downloading it. And that’s when user experience or behavior analytics kicks in.

Traditional analytics tools, like Google Analytics or Mixpanel, focus on quantitative data around user events (e.g., 1000 screen views, 20% drop-offs), and behavior analytics focus on “why” the user took a particular action (e.g., why someone viewed a screen, why someone dropped off).

Let’s take one example.

Imagine you invited someone to your party but learned that the person left in just 10 mins without saying any goodbyes. You got this information from your other guests, but nobody knows why the person left. 

If you had a CCTV camera to monitor everyone coming to your party and understand their experiences, you could have quickly discovered that the person was afraid of pet dogs at the party. He was visibly scared when he arrived due to one of his interactions and decided to leave. 

After knowing this, you kept a separate play area for pet dogs detached from partying humans for your next party. The person came again and was the last one to leave the party.

In this example, the information provided by your guests is what traditional analytics do, and what the CCTV camera told you is behavior analytics. 

It can help you understand the nuances of user behavior, especially frustrating user experiences. 

As per a study by PWC on US consumers, one in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.

With the data-backed insights from behavior analytics, you can run experiments, personalize experiences and optimize your app to ensure a seamless user experience. 

In this post, you’ll discover the world of behavior analytics and how it can help you take your app to the next level. 

You’ll explore real-world examples of businesses that have successfully leveraged it and receive tips and tricks for getting started with this powerful tool. 

So, let’s dive in and unlock the true potential of your mobile app.

Behavior analytics tools for mobile apps

Behavior analytics tracks and analyzes user behavior to gain insights into their actions and motivations while they use your mobile app. Session recordings and heatmaps are the most popular tools used to analyze the behavior of your mobile app users. 

You can extract qualitative insights from these two tools by analyzing them against critical user funnels in your app. For example, review the session recordings of users dropping off your purchase funnel.

Let’s look at both features.

Session recordings

With session recordings, you can watch a video replay of how your users or a set of users experience your app. 

A typical tool like VWO Insights’ session recordings captures all user sessions and events like taps, screen views, screen changes, crashes, long presses, flings, scrolls, etc. It ties it all to a single user profile so you can individually study each user journey across multiple sessions. 

This helps identify friction points when users abandon the app and areas where they may be spending too much time. You can do mobile A/B testing on the data-backed observations you extract from session recordings. For example, a SaaS app may use session recordings to identify where users are getting stuck during the upgrade subscription process and then make minor improvements to help users and increase upgrades.

Benefits of mobile app session recordings

Understand abandonment better

Study user experiences exactly where the users abandon the app. One of the reasons for cart abandonments is app crashes or not responding. Watch sessions that led to crashes and ANR issues. 

Resolve user issues faster

Often there are to-and-fro emails with users before your team can get to the bottom of the issue and reproduce it. Session recordings allow you to drill down into user sessions with issues and resolve them fast without bothering the user to provide reproduction steps.

Do better UX research

You can use session recordings to see what users experience to support your surveys or user interviews better. It is like watching a friend using an app while you make observations.

Easier communication and collaboration

Share exactly how users are experiencing the app’s features, the roadblocks, and what you need to do to improve the product’s stickiness, resolve bugs or improve usability. Instead of just showing the quantitive numbers, attach proofs of usage and get stakeholder buy-ins.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps visually represent where users are tapping or scrolling on a given app screen. It helps you understand which areas of the app are getting the most attention and which are overlooked. 

For example, a news app may use a heatmap to identify where readers are tapping the most in the article and then use that information to add internal or external links to the article to improve engagement and time on the app. 

Benefits of mobile app heatmaps

Understand user attention

Quickly understand which parts of your app users tap the most and the least. You don’t need to configure or dig numerical data to figure it out.

Improve engagement with CTAs

Analyze user engagement with call-to-action buttons compared to other screen elements. For example, you can see that your CTA is not getting tapped often, but another unimportant button is getting a lot of taps on the screen. Replacing the button positions could be a helpful insight.

Hypothesis testing

Support hypothesis testing if you plan to redesign your app. For example, changing the order of an app section may increase engagement, as earlier people were not scrolling till the section. Analyzing the scroll map before and after the change can help you validate or disprove this hypothesis.

UI decluttering

Identify cluttered areas in your app’s UI. For example, you can use a heatmap to see if users are tapping non-interactive elements instead of interactive ones, indicating a need to simplify the UI.

With the power of behavior analytics, you can derive data-backed and unlimited optimization ideas to:

• Create frictionless user onboarding
• Boost app engagement & retention
• Improve your in-app conversions and purchases
• Resolve and fix errors faster

Let’s dive deeper into these use cases and look at some popular brands later.

How do behavior analytics help you optimize mobile apps?

Although each industry and every business in it has a unique approach to optimizing user experience, a few things are essential to everyone. Let’s discuss them ahead.

Create frictionless user onboarding

Signup and onboarding are the most critical parts of the user journey. If a user has a bad experience later in the journey, it is still something you can recover from, but if you don’t get the onboarding right, you will never see the user again on your app. 

You have to make sure that the experience is intuitive and quick and that it pushes the user toward the most important value of your app. In short, user activation. 

With session recordings and heatmaps, you can identify the points of confusion and frustration during onboarding. Then eliminate them to have a seamless onboarding.

E.g. – 

The data for a social media app shows that many new users get lost on onboarding screens and drop-offs. The users might want to start using the app fast, but it asks you to follow all screens. 

But it offers a skip button, too, which is not prominently displayed across the onboarding screens. Session recordings reveal that many users don’t see the button, do rage taps on the screen, and drop off without moving forward. Making the “Skip” button prominent in the onboarding screens could help users navigate the onboarding faster. 

Boost app engagement & retention

You have successfully onboarded and activated your user. Now what? How do you ensure that your users actively engage with your app features and return daily to use them?

You can start with questions and answer them with session recordings and heatmaps, or at least develop a hypothesis for a new experiment you can do to optimize your app.

Questions like:

Are users even trying your features? 

Are they spending too much time on a particular feature?

Which features do they ignore? 

Are they tapping a non-interactive element? 

How far are users scrolling on a screen?

Are they looking at important sections you want them to see?

For example, if you notice that customers are spending a lot of time on a particular feature, you can use that information to your advantage. You can make it even more prominent on the app to encourage customer engagement or focus your marketing efforts on promoting that feature.

Another hypothetical example could be an app similar to Instagram in its early phases, which just showed content created by other users. Users spend much time in their feeds but do not interact with the content. The dead taps on the posts indicate that users want to react, but there is no way. That’s when the team introduced the features of liking, commenting, and saving the post after looking at this behavior.

Improve your in-app conversions and purchases

Engagement is vital to ensure the users like what you built in the app. But your ultimate goal is to make money. You can make money by enabling in-app purchases, subscription upgrades, or through ad revenue.

To accomplish this, you must ensure the user can easily access buying options, navigate through the purchase funnel, and have a smooth payment flow. 

This part affects your bottom line the most; hence you must get it right.

The best way to analyze this is by configuring your important funnels and checking which step users abandon the purchase. 

Is it the Cart page?

Are users expecting something on the checkout page?

Is the checkout form too long? 

Is the subscription price too much for the user? 

Is the CTA placed right?

Could users see all the payment options clearly?

There could be other questions you may have in your mind after looking at the quantitive data of your funnels. But session recordings and heatmaps could give you the answers for conversion rate optimization.  

For example, say one challenge your app faces is having millions of free users but a meager paid conversion rate. After analysis, it was found that many users clicked on the upgrade option, then clicked on a few non-interactive text elements, and then abandoned the upgrade. This indicates that they might be looking for more information before upgrading. 

Giving more detailed information about the benefits or a trial product version may be required. This way, the analysis provides a direction for improvement.

Resolve and fix errors faster

Once you lose credibility on the app store and google play store, it takes time to return. When users continuously face app crashes or app not responding errors, they don’t just get irritated but also go to the app store to give a thrashing review and lowest rating. 

This affects your overall app store optimization performance, and fewer users discover your app. Not only do you lose existing users, but you also lose the chance of getting new ones. 

It is essential to resolve user issues quickly and reply to these reviews with quick fixes. You gain their trust, and they feel they are important to you. 

But how do you fix issues fast? 

The usual route is reactive. When someday gives you a bad review, you react and try to solve it by asking for more details by email. 

With session recording tools like VWO, you can quickly filter sessions with rage taps, app crashes, app not responding, or other stack trace issues, reproduce them, and resolve them proactively without your users contacting you. 

E.g. – 

You release a new search filter and a bunch of features in a new app version. As soon as you release the latest version, you start getting a lot of complaints about the app crashing. You are all over the place to reproduce the issue. Asking users to send screenshots, checking error logs, and whatnot.

What if you could filter out session recordings based on app crashes for the day and watch 5-10 recordings? You could have gone to the bottom of the issue without hassles.

How do popular brands use behavior analytics?

Here are real-world examples of big brands using behavior analytics for mobile apps.

Costa Coffee

Costa Coffee is a British coffee chain with Coca-cola as its parent company.

According to Costa Coffee’s case study by UXCam, customers who sign up for the loyalty program through their app spend almost three times more than non-registered customers annually – a whopping 173% increase in spending per customer!

The team realized that almost 30% of new app users dropped off between downloading and registering for the loyalty program. Although they had identified this issue using a quantitative analytics tool, they needed more information to understand why users were dropping off. The numbers alone just didn’t cut it!

Costa Coffee employed session recordings to watch sessions of dropping users. They found that almost half of the users dropped off because of the “invalid password” field validation during the registration. This helped them revamp the registration process and increase their loyalty program’s sign-ups.

CricHeroes

CricHeroes is the world’s biggest Cricket app, with 17M+ users. It allows players to keep scores of matches and track their performance with analytics.

As per Smartlook’s case study, the CricHeroes team wanted to give the best user experience and grow its user base, but the challenge was that they could not visualize where users were getting stuck. 

One of the core engagement challenges was to make users message each other. CricHeroes used automatic nudging to encourage users to message each other.

While looking at the user journeys via session recordings, the team identified new nudge points to start a message. Adding these new points allowed users to send 11% more messages on average. 

Not just this, they could resolve customer queries faster than ever by filtering session recordings based on a particular user session and quickly determining the cause of the issue. 

BigBasket

BigBasket is India’s best online grocery delivery platform offering subscription and on-demand delivery. 

But even the best things can be improved, and BigBasket’s design team faced a few challenges. With limited insights into user behavior and a long UAT process that took five days, they needed a solution to help them better understand their users. 

And that’s where mobile app session recordings and heatmaps came in! Now, they can monitor user behavior, conduct UI/UX research, and test quickly. 

They’ve identified conversion bottlenecks, monitored new feature updates, and helped the dev team replicate crashes and app freezes. 

This has reduced UAT time from 5 days to just a few hours, a 3x lower complaint rate, and 100% more conversions! Now that’s what you call a win situation!

Vertigo Games

Vertigo Games is a game development company that creates first-person shooting games. 

A few questions bothered the Vertigo team for a new game called “Critical Strike,” especially since they didn’t have any mobile analytics tool. 

Questions like:

How do gamers complete or not complete the onboarding guide?

Are players completing the missions as per the intended design?

How to reproduce the exact steps to what caused a bug?

The team decided that a behavior analytics tool would give them a holistic view of quantitive and qualitative data to engage, retain and monetize gamers.

The Vertigo team started using session recordings and heatmaps coupled with event-based funnels to understand the reasons behind the high drop-off rate from critical game flows. It helped them detect problems and reproduce the exact path to errors.

How to choose a behavior analytics tool for your app?

Performance

What is the effect of SDK on your app’s performance? You should carefully evaluate that the SDK provided by the behavior analytics tool is lightweight and shouldn’t lead to slow app loads. Check if your server requests become bulky with the SDK.

Privacy & Security

You must confirm your users’ data is private and secure. Ensure the platform complies with GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Since the tool deals with sensitive data, you should have the flexibility to show or hide elements in the session recordings while your data is protected with leading enterprise-grade encryption. 

Experience Optimization Features

To have a holistic view of everything and run your experience optimization program smoothly, you need a platform to generate insights about your app user’s behavior, enable collaboration with your team with custom workflows, prioritize insights to act upon, run experiments, and deploy the new experiences. 

Not many platforms in the market could achieve all of this for you. You may find something that helps you generate mobile app insights, but you won’t be able to run your complete experience optimization program on them. That amounts to staggering license costs and multiple tools management.  

We have built VWO from scratch to complete this loop for you. With our recent foray into mobile app insights, you can generate insights for websites and mobile apps, run tests and deploy experiences. All by collaborating with your unlimited team members in a single place. 

If you want to try it, start a VWO free trial here. Mobile app insights are available upon request once you begin the free trial. You can connect with the support team via chat.

I hope you enjoyed the blog. Until next time!