Mobile App Analytics

Chapter 5. Visual Session Tracking

Visual session tracking introduces a completely new way of following your users’ individual actions while they are navigating through your mobile app. In terms of high-traffic mobile apps, this means somehow aggregating and visualizing this collected information for the app publisher.

Many monitoring frameworks visualize the aggregated interaction information for a single app view by using heat maps, which show where most users are touching the screen. Even the seemingly simple task of visualizing a heat map as a screen overlay hides a quite complex task for any analytics framework. As most analytics frameworks do not possess a rendered screen image of the selected app screen for a specific platform, the rendered heat map represents a rough approximation for a specific screen resolution only. The combination of all available screen resolutions, screen rotations and densities with platform versions, and screen languages for one platform (such as Android) results in an exponentially large number of rendering possibilities. Even more important, the analytics framework does not know which content an individual user already created and how the app screen looks when this individual data is applied.

The exemplified rendering of app screens is just a rough estimation of how the screen would look on devices with the same resolution, but does not give any hint of how your app really looks on a specific hardware device, filled with a lot of user data.