8 ways mobile analytics helps you build a better app: Examples from Mixpanel customers

It’s an all too common story: Your mobile app has thousands of users, but retention dropped 15% last quarter. You suspect friction in onboarding, but can't pinpoint where users are dropping off, or why.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, at least when it comes to mobile apps. 137.8 billion apps and games were downloaded in 2024. And where there’s user attention, there’s revenue to be had. According to Statista, gross consumer mobile app spending reached an estimated 40.9 billion U.S. dollars in Q2 2025 alone, an 11.5% increase compared to the same quarter in 2024. 

So while product managers and app builders have everything to play for, attracting and retaining mobile app users can be tough. Our 2024 Mixpanel Benchmarks Report found that across five core app verticals, average first-week retention rates for digital products across industries, the majority of which were accessed on mobile, fell from 50% to 28% between 2022 and 2023. Average user growth rates hovered under 2.5%.

To build apps that outperform these averages, product managers and other builders need to understand which features drive acquisition, activation, and engagement, and which don’t. 

This is something our customers have been using mobile analytics for years, and we’ve learned a lot from their experiences. Here is an inside look at how leading teams are using mobile analytics as a key part of the digital analytics strategy. 

Mobile analytics captures data from mobile app and mobile web app visitors to identify unique users, track their journeys, record their behavior, and report on the app’s performance. The platforms then present this information in dashboards pulled from integrated data sources.

Legacy analytics tracking technology traditionally varied between websites and apps, with web analytics centering around page views tracked by cookies and apps measured through user actions, or “events,” by way of product analytics. Using different methods and platforms for web and mobile tracking causes all sorts of issues, from siloed data that makes it harder to make data-informed decisions to single-touch attribution models that deliver an incomplete picture of user journeys.  

Today’s web and app analytics solutions have all adopted event tracking as a standard to create a unified data model. This makes modern digital analytics platforms a great solution for all mobile event tracking.

When a user opens your app or loads your mobile web page, mobile analytics records each action taken as a separate event. Everything the user does is recorded, from making a purchase to tapping a button, watching a video, or finally logging out. 

Mobile analytics helps you understand your mobile app user journey and what these events mean, especially when combined with the rest of your digital analytics data. 

For example, through mobile analytics, you can parse:

Of course, gathering these insights is only the first step. To truly improve app performance, you have to apply the data to solve product challenges. Here are the top ways we at Mixpanel have seen our customers use mobile analytics to build better products. 

Saas-based education company codeSpark uses Funnels and Retention Reports to monitor drop-offs and improve retention on their mobile app, as Grant Hosford, CEO & Co-founder, explains.

“With Mixpanel, we keep ourselves honest on how people really use the app. When we find something surprising, we dig deeper into the reports to follow their user journey.”

The kind of surprising user friction that codeSpark found comes in many forms: too many steps, unattractive UI, glitches and bugs, slow loading times, too much text, the list goes on. 

Mobile app analytics help you understand where your user friction is coming from. It will reveal things like: 

With mobile app analytics, you can track all of the events that a user takes. By measuring what you expect to see against what happens, you can spot and eliminate user friction in your app before it leads to churn.

Getting insights into how your app is being used helps you find problems before they grow into emergencies. But just as importantly, mobile product usage analytics can also help you decide what’s working well so you can invest more resources where you’ll see the most ROI. 

Mobile analytics will show you: 

All of those data points tell you which users are most invested in your app, what they care about, and what features they use most. That data can influence your roadmap, inform future user interviews, and show you what to prioritize.

Knowing which features matter most to your users also has a direct impact on revenue, as customer support solution company Kommunicate’s experience shows. 

Kommunicate uses Mixpanel mobile analytics data to decide which features to prioritize as part of its product-led growth strategy. Identifying and moving a high-value feature from Kommunicate’s freemium tier to their paid plan allowed them to increase revenue substantially. 

As Kommunicate Co-Founder & CEO Devashish Mamgain tells us: 

“Suddenly, we started getting many customers in the paid plan as opposed to the freemium plan. That’s when we really realized the importance of product analytics, and we started to track more events in Mixpanel and expand our use of the tool.”

While it’s true that mobile app analytics will help you identify which features users like and use frequently, users aren’t a monolith, and what’s valuable for some might cause friction for others.

With mobile analytics, you can use common traits to segment app users and create cohorts to track the behavior of different groups (like paying users or users who have upgraded their plan in the last 30 days) over time. You can assign scores to different cohorts to determine customer lifetime value.

When travel ecommerce company KKday launched its mobile website and app in 2017, the team needed a way to track user behavior across all of their digital assets. They used cohort analysis to create targeted marketing campaigns and improve personalization, increasing conversion rates 2x.

Sherry Shih, Product Manager at KKday, explains the process:

“We found that we can analyze user behaviors by embedding events and attributes, and then group users into cohorts based on their behaviors. This would allow us to run targeted marketing campaigns on these cohorts to help us progress towards our revenue goals.”

Once you’ve identified different groups, you can use that information to cater to their needs by personalizing their app experience, creating targeted features, and tailoring your marketing campaigns to different segments. 

When you roll out a new app feature, mobile analytics help you test that feature’s performance. Solutions like Mixpanel make it easy to perform experiments and A/B testing with feature flags, run segmented tests, or even build multivariate tests to pit your new feature against several alternatives. 

In the app landscape, decisions need to happen quickly. Competitors can release new features overnight, and user behavior can shift at the drop of a hat. Being able to run experiments and get answers quickly gives you a valuable edge. 

The best mobile analytics solutions will run experiments powered by the same events, cohorts, and metrics you already use, integrating your experimentation workflow into your analytics instead of making it part of a separate system. You don’t need to worry about exporting data, syncing systems, or rebuilding metrics: It’s all already there in your mobile analytics platform. 

That’s exactly how Step uses Mixpanel Experimentation, as Giyom Lebleu, Step’s Chief Product Officer, explains: 

“Mixpanel Experimentation has become part of our process. During our review meetings, we look at the results, make decisions, and record them directly in the dashboard. The combination of reusing metrics, syncing backend data, and sending experiment events to Mixpanel made it all work for us.”

Overarching metrics like total revenue or number of app downloads are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. If you rely too heavily on broad indicators instead of digging down into the details, you can miss important information, like how many users who downloaded your app are actually using it, or what your average revenue is per user. 

Instead, you need to get granular, without losing sight of bigger-picture goals. Organizing your metrics in logical hierarchies, from your North Star metric all the way down to low-level metrics like feature engagement, gives you insights into how they all impact each other. Metric trees help you tie your metrics together to understand how even “small” mobile analytics metrics have an impact on business strategy and performance. 

Taken together, mobile app analytics metrics paint the picture of your business’s health and help you avoid vanity metrics. They can help you understand which customer segments are actually using your app, who is becoming a paying customer, what those users have in common, and where people are dropping off. Without granular details, everyone from product teams to business leaders is flying blind.  

For example, European ride-hailing and delivery app Bolt uses Mixpanel’s user retention reports to determine their roadmap and guide business growth:

“Without these kinds of insights and the ability to understand how our consumers and users are actually using the product in different markets and verticals…it would be very difficult to understand how we can become more efficient and sustainable as a business,” according to Bolt Product Strategist Aastha Yadav.

Almost any platform will give you access to basic metrics reports, but they will rarely give you information about why things are happening in your app. By the time you figure that out, it can already be too late. 

Take churn rate as an example. Churn rate is important, but it only tells you the final piece of the puzzle: You’ve lost a customer. Before a customer churns, frustrations have built up over time to lead them to that point. 

If you don’t know what those frustrations are and why customers are leaving, you won’t be able to improve retention. A mobile analytics solution like Mixpanel has churn analytics that allows you to dig deeper and understand why you’re losing customers. You can see if: 

Let’s look at an example.

When Clement Kao worked as a PM on a CRM mobile app for real estate agents, he needed to understand and reduce the app’s high user churn. The team segmented users into “engaged” and “disengaged” cohorts to understand different behaviors. What they found was surprising, as he explains: 

“Looking at the last 30 days, we found that highly engaged users regularly reassigned leads to teammates, rejected leads, and set vacations within the app. We found that highly disengaged users were far more likely to give in-app feedback.”

Clement and his colleagues used this information (and follow up qualitative interviews), and made several changes that boosted engagement and increased app logins. “Increased logins drove a reduced churn rate and an increased referral rate, boosting both top-line revenue and bottom-line profits,” he adds. 

Understanding the behaviors that drove churn made it possible to optimize the app. Quantitative solutions are valuable, but qualitative features like Session Replay and Heatmaps for mobile apps show you exactly how users are behaving and where they’re clicking. Using a solution that ties quantitative and qualitative insights together in one unified solution gives you valuable insights into user behavior across platforms.

Companies run on data. Everyone from product to marketing to engineering to C-suite execs needs access to product data to guide decision-making. Without it, setting a strategy is just optimistic guesswork. 

Pulling data and running reports without the right solution requires SQL knowledge that non-technical employees don’t have. Each request becomes a burden on data and engineering teams. 

With self-serve mobile analytics solutions like Mixpanel, non-technical team members can easily run analyses, gather insights, and come up with their own ideas to test. 

Lots of talented tech teams use Mixpanel to give more teams access to their data, like Yelp. As Angela Sun, Senior Product Manager of Data Products, shared:

“There is significant time-saving in our team’s daily workflow. In addition, smaller teams are able to answer questions about their product areas without requiring the support of data analysts.”

More insights mean more ideas, more optimization, and a better product overall.

Investors need to see positive metrics when deciding to fund a product. Mobile analytics serves up a lot of the most important data VCs want to see, ready for the pitch deck. 

That’s exactly how Evulpo uses Mixpanel to support fundraising efforts, according to Head of Controlling Matteo Borinelli: 

“With Mixpanel, we now have a reliable base that helps us better understand our runway and plan our growth. Sharing this data with our investors has built trust and contributed to successful fundraising.”

While getting funding can feel like a victory in itself, more resources also mean more effort can be put into your app and product when it comes to design, features, and squashing bugs.  

As we mentioned earlier, modern web, product, and mobile analytics all use event tracking to analyze user behavior. But even when you’re using the same method to gather information, siloed data from different sources and systems can still cause inconsistencies and erode trust between teams who are looking at different numbers. 

Unlike legacy analytics that require SQL, advanced mobile analytics that are connected to the rest of your data (with Warehouse Connectors, for example) give you a complete, accurate picture of your users that your entire team can access in a single, centralized location. 

There are lots of ways to use mobile analytics to build a better mobile app, but that doesn’t mean you have to implement them all at once. Try to do that, and you’ll end up drowning in data and struggling to turn valuable insights into action. 

Keep it simple: Start by setting your business goals and figuring out how those tie back to your product. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can drill down to see which events are tied to those goals and start by tracking a few. When you’re comfortable gathering insights, you can grow your mobile analytics and expand your use cases from there.

Get fast access to product, marketing, and company revenue insights for your whole team with Mixpanel’s powerful, self-serve analytics. Try it for free.