I have been missing one important part of improving my software for a long time. But after starting my new job at 1&1 in Munich, I was reminded of how important it is.

always measure

Whatever you are trying to build is probably been used by an audience of users. Especially in the mobile sector, most of the software is built for a mass market. Therefore, good quality of an app is a requirement (but not a guarantee) for success. And for improving your software, you want to know which parts users are really using.

Does anyone care about the help document? How many percent of users ever opened it? How much time did they spend reading it? Where are your users from? It is possible to get some information out of Appstore/Market statistics, but only plain download numbers.

If you think measuring only makes sense for high traffic websites, consider this: I am using Google Analytics at this website for some time now. It tracks the location of every user and shows them in a world map. This is accurate enough to show the city of every visitor. With the relatively low number of users, I can have a pretty good guess which citizen of Tartu would visit my homepage. Or if any possible new employer checked out my homepage before the interview. You will find plenty of other interesting questions that can be answered by those numbers.

So head over to the Google Analytics for Mobile website, see how easy it is to integrate into your app and start measuring right away.