We are excited today, because we received some awesome news coverage by TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb, which has also been quite positive on developer sign-ups so far.
We’d like to pick up a question that was raised in the comments over at ReadWriteWeb and is one that we think is pretty relevant in general.
How are we different from other existing analytics products?
We think it is fair to say that there are iPhone analytics providers out there, which (some of them) have been around for as long as the App Store and are obviously doing a very good job at what they aim to do. Without stretching this post to a few pages, we consider ourselves different in that we focus on a different side of the same medal. These two sides are marketing and product (oversimplified).
Other analytics services focus on product. They try to (and do) answer questions like: How does the user actually use the app? How much time does a user spend with my product on average during how many sessions? Where (e.g. what level) do many users get stuck? When and why does the app crash? The list goes on.
Needless to say, product is of the highest importance when creating an app. Marketing will almost certainly get you nowhere in terms of usage or revenues if your product sucks. The product angle deserves its very own focus. So does marketing.
We try to (and do) answer questions like: Where do my users come from? Which marketing channels work for me and which do not? How much am I paying for customer acquisition? How should I time my marketing? Again, the list goes on.
Of course, product and marketing cannot entirely be looked at separately. They intertwine, not only because usage and revenues per user may vary depending on where the download came from, but also because communicating different product characteristics and features is essential to marketing an app. But generally both, product and marketing, call for different competences and thus deserve exclusive attention. To us that’s the major difference and the reason why we focus on marketing and performance optimization.
