How’s Your Mobile App Performing?

Location Clues
By LBx Staff | Published September 11, 2012

Andrea Eatherly

Andrea Eatherly is Director of Marketing and Operations at Placed. Andrea’s background is in digital advertising and analytics. Prior to joining Placed, she was Director of Client Services at Quantcast. As the second hire on the Operations team, she was responsible for building out and scaling the Client Services organization as the com- pany’s revenue and client base grew exponentially. While at Quantcast, she was a key contributor to the launch of several products, including Marketer and Lookalikes, as well as to the company’s expansion into the U.K. market. Before Quantcast, Andrea worked at WebTrends. She holds a degree in marketing and psychology from Tulane University.

LBx What do you mean by location analytics?

EATHERLY We are interested in how location influences how someone uses or engages with a mobile application. In other words, we want to know the “where, when and why” a mobile application is being used. Is it being accessed while at a restaurant, a coffee shop, at work, or in the car? Traditional web analytics tools currently overlook this mobile app intelligence, based on location information.

LBx Who benefits from knowing the location of mobile application usage?

EATHERLY Anyone who is involved in mobile applications and mobile marketing. Marketers want to best understand their audience, and location analytics can provide a lot of insight into user behavior. An ad sales team is interested in how to best monetize their mobile app inventory. Mobile app developers and product managers are interested in how best to improve the application.

LBx How does understanding where a mobile app is being used help improve performance of the application?

EATHERLY For example, we can determine how quickly the user is moving when using the mobile app – whether she is stationary, walking, or in transit (driving, on a bus or on a train). If the application is primarily being used while someone is driving or even walking, that can determine if voice recognition should be added to the application to make it easier to use and access. We provide our customers with a dashboard that includes a user profile of the application, which is essentially a location profile of the application. For example, 20% of users access this application in front of a subway station, Subway the fast food restaurant, or a coffee shop. (See Figures 1-5 for the various dashboard views available.) We report on thousands of popular businesses and over two hundred business categories. We provide a heat map that allows for the comparison of different datasets, such as...

The full article is available in the Summer 2012 Digital Edition of LBx Journal.

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