June 10, 2013

Buddy.com Releases Analytics Solution for Mobile Apps

Buddy.com, a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) provider for mobile application development, has released its new Analytics Dashboard—a tool that will offer visual reports on key performance indicators such as customer engagement, demographic data, social and geolocation information, and commerce and conversion metrics.

By providing meaningful engagement insight in addition to traditional metrics, the solution promises to revolutionize mobile app use analysis. "Buddy.com brings measurement of actual user engagement with a mobile app, not just download or user counts. To understand your customers' usage of an app—and therefore engagement with your brand—you need to 'be' inside the app, and Buddy provides that data," Buddy.com CEO Dave McLaughlan explains. "It means that for the first time, location, social demographics, app commerce, and even concepts like game scoring can all be used to form a perspective on the customer."

Buddy.com's announcement comes just weeks after the release of the Mobile Marketing Association's Mobile Marketing Economic Impact study, which revealed that in 2012, the average consumer spent about 127 minutes a day with mobile apps. Results also showed that marketers spent only $6.7 billion on mobile marketing this past year—a number that's disproportionately low when compared to spending on other channels like television and the Web, where daily user engagement is stagnant or down, respectively. This, according to McLaughlan, is both a problem and an opportunity.

"Mobile is the 'now' marketing platform, and it is the ultimate dynamic marketing platform—I can segment my audience by where they are and what they're doing," according to McLaughlan. For the modern marketer, this makes mobile the most powerful and actionable platform in their trade, he says.

"I can reach the subset of my audience that is most receptive to my message at this moment, which is a different subset than tomorrow," he says. "And most importantly, mobile marketing done well allows me to be far less intrusive but far more effective. Nobody is interested in spending money on a 'will it stick' campaign when Buddy can now provide the metrics to track engagement, response and ROI."