5 Ways to Track User Behavior in Your Mobile App

Why is it so hard to track user behavior? Mobile app users are flighty, elusive creatures. They’ll abandon an app for the smallest issues, use gestures in totally unexpected ways, and are ruled by many different “moods” and “modes” throughout their day. Tracking user behavior can therefore seem like a confusing task. However, it’s not impossible. With the right methods and a few powerful tools in your analytics toolbox, you can understand your users better than ever before, improve your app, and increase your conversion rates.

Here are a few tried and true analytics tools to track user behavior in your mobile app, without losing time (or your mind).

Session Recordings

By far the easiest and best way to track user behavior is to actually see users interacting with the app. User session recordings enable you to do just that, by showing you exactly how users interact with your app, from the second they launch it for the first time and until they quit. You’ll see your app just as your users see it, as well as every tap and gesture they make. All of this can be done at any stage of your app’s lifecycle, without the bias of user testing/interviews.

Session recordings also come with a full timeline breakdown of each action the user took, making it easier for you to closely observe user behavior and understand frustration points. If they’re getting frustrated, quickly quitting the app, or behaving in a way you did not anticipate, user session recordings will bring all of that to your attention immediately. By watching just a few of the right user recordings, you’ll be find any hidden problems harming your conversion rates, user retention, navigation, and more.

Use Cases:

• Watch recordings of first sessions to understand how users interact with your onboarding and why they might have abandoned the app after just one session
• Increase retention by watching sessions under 20 seconds long, to pinpoint causes for app abandonment
• Watch sessions of loyal users to learn what works well in the app and what features should be highlighted

Navigation Paths

Navigation paths provide a detailed map of your app’s user journeys, without confusing you or inundating you with information. The center of this sunburst visualization, for example, indicates that the user launched the app. The sunburst then expands to show the first screen the user navigated to. Then, it details the screens users navigated to from the first screen, and so on. This makes it easy to spot interesting or problematic user journeys. For example, if users going back and forth between the same screens, they may be confused about navigation or layout, or they may be encountering a usability issue or a crash.

Navigation paths, like Appsee’s, allow you to pin a starting point other than the “open app” event to see journeys from any screen or event in your app — even popups. They can also be used as a guide for choosing the most relevant session recordings to watch.

Use Cases:

• Improve navigation by quickly identifying user journeys that show confusion, such as navigation back and forth between two screens (e.g. ‘Login’ and ‘Settings’ screens)
• Compare new vs. returning users to increase retention and understand why users abandoned the app
• Assess paths from cart screen to understand where users are going if they are not completing a payment

Touch Heatmaps

Some of the more elusive user behaviors — how they navigate each menu and screen, how they experience gestures — can only be understood with a visual, qualitative tool. Touch heatmaps achieve this by creating a color spectrum of aggregated user interactions on each screen of your app. These unique heatmaps give you instant insights on what your users are doing and how they interact with each screen, enabling you to track user behavior and understand it immediately.

Touch heatmaps can be filtered by many different parameters, such as the first gestures users made on a screen, the last gestures, or gestures that were unresponsive. They show you how users interact with one area of the screen, or ignore another.

Another useful feature of touch heatmaps is to quickly point out usability issues that are causing unresponsive gestures. These are situations where the user taps on the screen, expecting the app to behave in a certain way, but is disappointed. The cause is often a misleading design, resolution miscalculations, or a misplaced element in the screen’s layout. This is a major point of user frustration that often brings the user to angrily tap on the screen and then quit the app in annoyance. With touch heatmaps, this user behavior issue can be nipped in the bud.

Use Cases:

• Assess features that catch users’ attentions first on each screen, and then optimize design accordingly
• Instantly identify unresponsive gestures to improve gesture UX and understand and meet user expectations
• Observe the last gestures on each screen to see if users’ last gestures make sense, such as tapping the “pay” button on a payment screen, or indicate a problem, such as hitting the “back” button instead of creating an account

For more use cases and tips on using touch heatmaps, check out this free Handbook for Touch Heatmap Analytics.

Conversion Funnels

Conversion funnels can track user behavior by showing a clear breakdown of where users are dropping out of each stage of the funnel. This is a particularly important tool, since it can track user behavior in the areas of your app that most affect your company’s bottom line: onboarding, payment, in-app purchases.

The combination of conversion funnels and session recordings can ensure a particularly powerful approach to increasing conversion rates. While conversion funnel tools on their own provide excellent data, adding the qualitative element of session recordings increases the chances of successfully improving conversion rates. Data such as completion time of each step enhances your understanding of how users behave throughout the funnel.

Use Cases:

• Increase in-app purchases by watching recordings of users as they drop out of the funnel, and understanding what made them fail to convert
• Increase retention rates and improve onboarding by looking at conversion funnels and session recordings for the onboarding, registration, and login processes
• Measuring average time between each step of the funnel

Action Cohorts

Every action a user takes directly relates to another action. Simple enough right? Yet how do you track those actions on a recurring basis and identify engagement issues? Action cohorts enable you to analyze any user action in relation to another, revealing trends in user behavior and engagement over any period of time. Understanding that relationship can help you learn what type of behavior you would like to see from your users, and know how to encourage it.

Action cohorts show allow you analyze how much time passed between the first time a user initiated one action and the time they initiated the second action. This enables you to track user behavior between two specific actions, over a set period of time.

Use Cases:

• Track the relationship between a user’s first and second in-app purchases
• Track user behavior of new users by understanding what happened from the time they completed onboarding and the moment they created an account
• Increase user retention by looking at cohorts of users who created an account and then abandoned the app, and watching relevant user recordings

Summary

There is a handful of ways to track user behavior without resorting to guesswork and without having to go through additional rounds of testing. What these tools provide is an ability to actually see and visualize user behavior as if you were in lab, but without the bias of user interviews. They also allow you to track tiny issues that affect user behavior, such as a confusing UI element or a faulty search feature. Action cohorts, conversion funnels, and navigation paths point you to the data that can have the most dramatic effect on various aspects of your app’s UX. Session recordings and touch heatmaps complete the puzzle by allowing you to see your app through your users’ eyes.

To see these tools in action, you can try them out on your own app with a free trial of Appsee.