With the advent of mass production, mass advertising was invented too. In the 60s, the goal of most marketing strategies was just to get as much views of their ads as possible. Television spots and street posters were the most popular media because with those means of communication marketers could easily and quickly spread their message throughout the whole country. These were the days of glory for marketing agencies like the fictional Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in Madmen; these agencies could make big money with a poster and a catchy line directed to the general “frustrated housewives” category of consumers. The segmentation was mainly demografic: marketers based themselves on age, sex, income and such other general features... No need for me to tell you that their business model would never work today. It has become increasingly complex to segment a market in any sector. Also, the overload of marketing messages that consumers have been bombarded with over the last decades has made them much more insensible to any communication, so to reach them you really have to stand out. This is why it’s important to really know who you are targeting, so that you can give them something thats truly interesting.

"Downloads only enable an app to succeed, they do not indicate actual success," says Brant DeBow , EVP of technology at BiTE Interactive .  As with every emerging phenomenon, the first studies are more simplistic, perhaps for a lack of data. At the beginning of the App trend, the studies made to understand and predict the user’s behaviour were essentially focused on the number of downloads. According to DeBow there’s much more to the success of the app than that.  With breakneck speed growth of the app industry, the available data increased and the studies of the metrics became more accurate. A few months ago we talked about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on the “How to do the web analysis of my mobile app?” article.   Today the challenge is to relate some of these Indicators with app engagement. So I want to explore some of the metrics that I think are important for you to consider, to make your beautiful app interesting and engaging. Although there are other metrics I could mention, I prefer talking about the ones that are that are mainly used on all kinds of apps. So let’s start!

The past was dominated by voice. Now we have moved into another decade, where digital services take the lion share of industry revenues.   The mobile analyst Chetan Sharma  had predicted that voice data would leave space to mobile data, the new big revenue source.  Only during the past year, mobile data service revenues grew by 20% reaching $24.8 billion, and it has become the primary growth driver for US mobile industry.

A few weeks ago, we talked about how to understand your app analytics. It's a gold mine to figure out the behavior of your users, and to evaluate your app's performance, whatever is your goal.   The GoodBarber internal statistics are a very good starting point, but in some cases, it can be interesting to plug external analytics tools, like Flurry Analytics or Google Analytics. There are great chances that you already use Google Analytics if you have a website, so, if you use it also for your app, you will be very familiar with it too.   Let's see together how to make your app send data to Google Analytics.

An article published on www.igeneration.fr on February 14th, echos a study published by Cisco on the same day: Cisco expects an explosive growth of mobile Internet traffic via moblie devices. In 2016, 10 billion mobile devices are expected to be connected to the net for 7.3 billion people. In a study on trends in mobile data traffic , Cisco identified 10 main trends. Cisco anticipates a monthly traffic volume of 10.8 exabytes in 2016. There have been 0.6 billion exabytes in 2011, and should be 1.3 billion in 2012. Traffic will be multiplied by 18 between 2011 and 2016; and by 2 between 2011 and 2012. The growth rate of traffic data was higher than expected in 2011. At the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people in the world. In 2016, the ratio between the number of connected mobile devices and world population will be 1.4. Of the 10 trends described by Cisco, three of them particularly characterize the mobile market in our view.