Diving Deeper with Mobile Analytics

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Mobile app developers want visibility and actionable insights.

The mobile ecosystem is like the wild, west West. This space is still in its infancy. There are so many opportunities for us, but also a ton of growing pains we need to get through.

We recently attended the AppNation conference here in San Francisco, and I was surprised to meet so many mobile developers who are struggling to make money when IDC predicts that global app downloads will reach 76.9 billion in 2014 and will be worth US$35 billion.

It does make sense though; the competition is fierce. Mobilewalla, a search engine for mobile, announced that the number of available mobile apps in the marketplace is approaching the million milestone. Faced with the issue of “app fatigue,” what can developers do to make sure that users are:

1) Finding and installing their apps;
2) Returning to the apps–and eventually spending money
through in-app purchases.

Most of them are using ad networks to drive user acquisition. But, there’s a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks. Developers aren’t really getting great insight into which specific ad network users are coming from. They need clear marketing attributions. And, once the user has entered the app, what are they doing within the app? Those are the missing links between installation and monetization. Continue Reading…

Kontagent kScope Social & Mobile News Weekly Roundup

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Data Science and the Art of Winning (and Wedding?) in Las Vegas

Data is big—and getting bigger. Thanks to modern technology, we’re facing “data deluge.” And, this access to big data is opening doors for a new (crucial) role in the new economy: the data scientist.

Forbes’ Dan Woods has a great series on data scientists. A couple recent spotlights are Monica Rogati and Daniel Tunkelang, data scientists at LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s data scientists “turn big data into big value, delivering products that delight users and insight that forms business decisions.” It’s this type of “big value” that leads to innovative products like the professional networking company’s “People You May Know” feature.

From medical researchers to social and mobile app developers, we’re all trying to interpret data as fast as we can, to make better business decisions as fast as we can. That’s why people like Rogati and Tunkelang are imperative to bringing much-needed order to the information chaos.

Data scientists give you more focus on the massive amounts of data now available—what slice(s) of data you should be honing in on, what the data is telling you, how to predict what’s going to happen next based on historical data. Data is useless without science.

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The New Ecommerce Metrics: What Etailers Can Learn from Gaming Companies

Author icon Brian Smith|Comments icon 1

My background is in ecommerce and Internet marketing. Over the years, I’ve used lots of online marketing channels (SEO, PPC, shopping engines, affiliate programs, email, display/re-targeting, social, etc.) to drive sales. I call myself a metrics-oriented or data-driven marketer because I base a lot of my decisions on the data I collect. As many people have said over the years, if you don’t track results, you’ll never know if you’re succeeding or failing.

Leveraging powerful analytics solutions like Google Analytics, Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture over the last 15 years, I’ve attempted to track everything possible and made decisions based on a number of metrics.

In the ecommerce and Internet marketing world, there are general metrics which are interesting like page views, unique users, average order value (AOV) and marketing channel-specific metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.  Then there are meaty metrics like conversion rate, which combined with other metrics, lead to the bottom line: cost per acquisition (CPA), lifetime value (LTV), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), etc. More recently, I ran a SaaS business called SingleFeed and started looking at retention waterfalls and cohort analysis as well as everything that our CRM and marketing automation systems had to offer.

In other words, there are lots of metrics running around in my mind.

And then I started working with Kontagent, and I was introduced to how gamers think about their world. It took me a while to grok the new world order of Farmville, The Godfather, and The Sims Social, but once I did, I realized that there’s a huge opportunity for ecommerce companies to take advantage of the metrics which drive social gaming upstarts. Continue Reading…

Big Data in Social and Mobile Analytics

Author icon Dan Kimball|Comments icon 0

You have massive amounts of data from your social and/or mobile apps. But, are you focusing on the right data to optimize your customer economics?

The rise of social and mobile applications has given way to big data in those spaces. We recently hosted a tech talk on the topic. Kontagent executives, CEO Jeff Tseng, CSO Josh Williams, along with Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Battery Ventures, Todd Papaioannou spoke on these points: Continue Reading…

Building a Killer Mobile App: Appeal to the 7 Deadly Sins (and Other Things We’re Learning)

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 3

Many of us are trying to crack the code on building a killer mobile app business.

“If it doesn’t feed one of the seven deadly sins, it will not be addictive,” Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang told an audience of mobile developers and marketers at Open Mobile Summit.

Chang was leading a panel discussion on the exploding app market, and all the opportunities yet to come. In the past four years mobile apps and advertising has gone from a $700 million market to an estimated $12 billion market this year. We all want a slice of that pie. While Chang’s advice is good, as you develop your app, here are some other things to consider:

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Big Data is Useless without Science

Author icon Chris Bates|Comments icon 9

Many years ago I researched explosives by shining a light on them. It was every bit as exciting as it sounds. We would shine a light, take a picture, then study the explosive to see if it changed. I would painstakingly scour thousands of data points, looking for small fluctuations in intensity, signs of discoloration, or any statistically significant feature. We collected immense amounts of data from sensors, but the explosive always looked the same when we took snapshots. Then eventually we found out that if we looked not just at the snapshots, but also at the differences between the snapshots using a mathematical formula, we could see dramatic changes. We found out that every explosive was different, and we could effectively detect an explosive from a distance by just shining a light. Today, that research is being used to scan people before they enter airports for bombs.

Today, companies have more customer data than they can handle. Like a digital version of the show Hoarders, companies try to keep every bit of detail for as long as possible with the hope that one day these useless bits can be turned into massive new revenue opportunities. Over the past five years, bright engineers have devised open-sourced solutions to store and process the data deluge. We now even have a “big data stack” — that is, a framework for commoditizing data. Continue Reading…

Gamers Saving Real Lives? How Gamification is Solving Medical Mysteries

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is a collaboration between the University of Washington's departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Biochemistry.

Much to the satisfaction of teenage boys gamers everywhere, playing online games can pay off in the real world.

Gamers have used Foldit, an online video game created by the University of Washington in which players compete to design the most accurately folded proteins, to help advance research in the cure for AIDS. Foldit players were challenged to figure the structure of a protein that causes the virus in monkeys. Playing the game, they were able to do in 10 days what had stumped scientists for more than a decade.

How did this happen?
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Page Views Don’t Pay the Bills… Your Customers Do

Author icon Dan Kimball|Comments icon 1

Kontagent helps customers measure KPIs like virality, retention and the lifetime monetization of their users.

The page view is dying a slow, painful death.

Here at Kontagent, we are passionate about data. Actually, let me be more clear: We believe that companies that develop a deeper appreciation of their customer data, and what it means to the health and growth of their business, have a massive competitive advantage.

I’ll take it a step further.

Companies that choose to ignore customer data, and don’t optimize their businesses around [meaningful] customer data patterns will fail in today’s social economy. Continue Reading…

User Analytics: A Few Lessons from Moneyball

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 2

Be the Brad Pitt Billy Beane of the Social and Mobile Web

What do Kontagent data scientist Martin Colaco and Billy Beane have in common?

On the surface, probably not much. But, when it comes to analytics, Beane changed the game for baseball. Colaco could be doing the same for business.

Moneyball is based on Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Faced with a relatively meager budget, Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) uses a groundbreaking, sabermetric approach—the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence that measures in-game activity—to recruit a competitive baseball team. (Read more on how sabermetrics works.)

Beane goes against convention, taking advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to build a team that could successfully compete in Major League Baseball. He analyzes stats that are not generally considered top priority in the traditional scouting process. While most managers pored over stats like running speed, stolen bases and batting averages, the sabermetric approach, developed by baseball statistician Bill James, predicts other factors are better indicators of a player’s offensive success, e.g., on-base and slugging percentages.

Beane basically stared the “old guard” of baseball recruiting in the face and said, “Suck it.” And it worked.

Using sabermetrics, the Oakland A’s were able to put together a competitive team on a $41 million salary; by comparison, the New York Yankees spent more than $125 million in payroll in the same 2002 season. It paid off: the Athletics led a 20-game winning streak, and Beane shifted the paradigm of baseball scouting forever.

When it comes to Web business analytics, it’s not a bad idea to take a page out of the Moneyball book. Sometimes you have to look at data through a different lens in order to better make predictions and optimize opportunities. In baseball, Beane approached player stats differently and got different results. In business, data scientists like Colaco say there’s a similar shift happening in the world of Web 3.0.

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Gamification in Brand Marketing

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Gamification is a hot topic these days. The technique, which involves using game mechanics and dynamics to create rich, engaging and long-lasting experiences for end-users, got its start in social gaming. Now, gamification is making its way into the mainstream, from social sharing to leader boards to badges to digital currency.

Kontagent CMO Dan Kimball attended the Pivot Conference in NYC, where he spoke with brand leaders who are using gamification to engage their audiences in an effort to bridge the gap between their brands and the rising social consumer.  Dan was joined on stage by other noted experts in the space, including:

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