Mobile app analytics just got a bit meatier with the release of expanded functionality within Adobe Marketing Cloud’s Analytics application.
The product includes enhanced support for beacons, app acquisition analytics, customer lifetime value (LTV) reports and what Adobe is referring to as retention analysis – the ability to track and understand how newly acquired customers behave based on how they engage with an app. Brands can also use that information for segmentation purposes.
Using the tools, which will be made generally available in November, requires the latest version (4.1) of Adobe’s mobile SDK. The capabilities are also available through the mobile services user interface in Adobe Marketing Cloud, which is used by about 140,000 marketers around the world.
According to Jeff Allen, director of product marketing for analytics at Adobe, the built-in beacon support feature, in particular, is designed to help brands tap into mobile in their eternal quest to close the online/offline gap and to better understand in-store traffic patterns near and around beacons. Adobe’s beacon support can integrate with any beacon provider, Allen said.
“Customers told us they wanted to understand traffic patterns around iBeacons,” Allen told AdExchanger. “This allows them to leverage everything they know about the customer to inform the right level of engagement with their audiences [which] can include things like how many times the person has been to the store, which products they browsed prior to arriving in the store and the projected lifetime value of the customer.”
Beacons have been getting a lot of press lately. At the end of July, Lord & Taylor and Hudson’s Bay stores announced that they were going to start using beacons to identify consumers and send location-based messages to shoppers who had downloaded certain apps. Retail is a major use case for beacon tech, Allen said, as are large-scale live events.
Advertisers and developers will also be able to create customer lifetime value reports based on brand KPIs and specific app monetization strategies with the aim of targeting consumers more relevantly based on projected LTV.
With better analytics will come more brand spend on mobile – that’s the idea at least.
“Customers we have seen who successfully leverage their mobile apps to drive additional revenue to achieve major cost savings – typically through increased efficiency – not only are better at articulating the value of mobile, but they also tend to spend more on mobile,” Allen said. “One of the major metrics that brands need in order to properly attribute success to mobile is the ability to tie their success events, such as purchases, app downloads, etc. back to the mobile app … [which] is especially important when customer journey span multiple channels.”
New research from Forrester released earlier this week predicts that mobile display ads will represent 39% of total online display within five years vs. where it stands now at 24%.
