[Analytics] js1999:
Below is the text of a brief email interview conducted with Sarah Teng, Director of Marketing at Apsalar, for an article about app analytics that will be published soon to the XDA Portal. If you have any experiences with specific analytics providers, post them in this forum.

What are the most valuable pieces of data that come out of your product? Why? Give examples of how I might get actionable data, make a change, and improve results.

Apsalar provides free in-app & campaign attribution analytics that provide actionable data for developers to improve their business. Developers find tremendous value in our cohort analysis, trending report, funnel analysis & the ability to automatically track in-app revenue. These features give developers the tools to measure engagement, retention and monetization. We recently published a case study with Trivi.al, where they leveraged our funnel analysis to identify a key bottleneck in their user invite process, and using that data, were able to double their viral coefficient (a measure of virality of their app.) We also helped Motion Math double their conversion rates (see case study here).

What most differentiates you from your competitors (features, pricing, etc)?

Apsalar differentiates itself in a few key ways. The first is that we are a completely free analytics solution. We want to give tools to developers to help them build better apps, which thousands have done using our analytics. Also, we are a mobile first solution, not a web solution ported over to mobile. This is key because we have built an analytics platform with mobile developers in mind, using mobile identifiers and metrics, vs. working around web-based metrics like the pageview. Finally, we are focused on behavioral metrics, such as users' revenue, engagement, and retention. our ability to track revenue automatically for developers is an extremely valuable feature. Developers need an easy and accurate picture of how their business is performing, and looking at which SKUs are generating the most revenue, including slicing that data by marketing campaign source, is invaluable information that helps them build a better business, not just a better app.

Explain your range of pricing and, if you have a low tier or free option, what features are only available to premium users?

Our analytics solution is completely free, and there are no usage limits.

Are there any technical aspects of implementation that would be helpful to explain?

In order to gain access to Apsalar's analytics platform, developers simply need to download our lightweight SDK and drop it into their app. The basic integration process takes ~5 minutes.

What advice would you give to help make new independent app developers more successful?

Measure & focus on engagement of users, not quantity of users. Focus on measuring the right metrics to track using a funnel or cohort analysis, and optimize your app for high engagement metrics. We recently published an ebook on this topic, explaining which 5 engagement metrics developers must track for their mobile apps.

Related to the above, in your mind what makes an app successful? Why do some "great" apps not get noticed?

With ~1.5M apps in the app stores today, it takes more than simply a great app to get noticed. Most developers use paid solutions to acquire users, but ensuring these users remain highly engaged with the application is the key. Our Big Data Lab recently released some data showing which categories of apps generate the most in-app purchases and saw that the apps that were unable to generate engagement were conincidentally unable to generate revenue. Feel free to check out some more of our data findings on our Big Data Lab Page.