When your analytics doesn’t track click events
When your analytics doesn’t track click events
If you’ve been tasked with user activation, user retention or getting new users to complete a core action in your App, one of the frustrating things is discovering you:
- don’t have an event recorded because you analytics needs you to explicitly add some code to track it 🙁
- can’t connect that event with a specific user or relate it to another event for that user.
“So close but so far” – this can be very frustrating because, to get this done needs developer work to be done. The turn-around time puts you in another sprint and more roadmap negotiation.
The Analytics Gap
We’ve experienced this so many times with customers we were helping with working on the retention or engagement projects! The conversation would go like this:
Us: Do you have analytics? Customer: Yes, we use Google Analytics [or Mixpanel or Amplitude or Segment]. Us: Are you tracking this click? Customer: I don't think so.
Game over. Everyone would get crest-fallen and all the big hopes of being able to run an agile project with multiple growth/retention experiments collapses into roadmaps delays. Some of these analytics products are great but often people have implemented them to just track aggregated analytics and trends vs. people analytics and put them aside.
Mixpanel also charges differently for this kind of people tracking and its only available in GA’s super expensive product.
Its profoundly frustrating for us and the debilitating to the customer’s retention and growth plans – roadmap delays can be a straight-jacket.
Supertags
In Pointzi we decided to take this problem away and track events without demanding the Product Manager or Developer think or worry about it.
By default, Pointzi tracks screens and clicks. The applications are:
1. 30-day retrospective review of particular button clicks. (purchase buttons, profile uploads etc).
2. Target an audience that haven’t visited a screen or clicked a button in X days. This is a combination of filters that come from iOS users who’ve clicked (or not clicked) a specific button as a filter for a targeted engagement experiment.
3. Run tooltips, tours or inApp help (or push notification campaign) to measure the uplift on an inApp behavior.
Iteration & Experiments
You can’t improve what you don’t measure and so the goal was to make measurement implicit. If your roadmap and App release cycle is the bottleneck in running growth experiments, its not possible to learn fast enough what your users respond positively to.
Pointzi doesn’t try to be an analytics product and we don’t recommend you use us to replace it, but getting the data to do your growth jobs is critical and we think we’ve helped a lot there.