What is Data Collection and What are The Most Important Events to Track

When your company is client-oriented, one of your priority tasks is understanding your clients’ problems and gathering insights on how people use your product and when exactly they benefit from it.

That’s why data collection is one of the most important aspects of developing your service, website or mobile app.

Analyzing users’ journey will let you improve users’ product experience, churn and conversion rates. You can also improve customer communication and increase your income this way.

Today we (Dashly.io) will talk about what events are, why it’s important to analyze them and what user data you can collect in your platform.

What’s an event

All of user analytics are built on events. Events are actions (or steps) a user takes when using a product. Everything can be an event, be it opening the app, signing up, signing in, watching a tutorial, choosing a plan, uploading a picture etc.

You decide what data to gather for analytics. If you are gathering too much data, you might find it hard to analyze it. This works the other way around too – analyzing just one or two of events is pointless as it will be impossible to analyze how your service works and how exactly users feel about it. This won’t be any useful in helping you build the right communication too. 

Why you need to analyze events

You may encounter several problems after launching your app or website: 

• your product has bugs;
• your users don’t activate into  new features;
• your users are having issues while using your app/website;
• some features are not popular with your users;
• nobody uses your product at all. 

The list goes on and on. The main idea here is that you won’t know anything about any of these problems without having data collection set up correctly.

Collecting the data you need with events tracking is one of the most important steps in understanding how users activate into your product.

The difference between mobile and web data analytics

Companies used to separate mobile and web analytics. Now it’s in the past. Most of the modern analytic platforms track users in both mobile and desktop app at the same time. Now you can gather merged data from all the sources. Data collection differs from one device to another, which is mostly caused by screen size difference. Mobile apps are operated with a way smaller screens, not to mention the fact that users browse these apps by touching, swiping and holding screen elements. Which means mobile apps tend to have less navigation options. 

Desktop screens are a lot larger, and desktop users interact with websites by clicking, double-clicking and using their keyboard. Web analytics usually cover more interaction options, content and page links. 

How data collection works 

Website or mobile analytics track what users have been doing in your platform, what pages they visited and what their location is.

Analytics record data every time a user does something. These are the most commonly recorded events: 

• page visit;
• click on a button;
• input field filling;
• message interaction (reading, answering);
• website exit intent.

Previously published at https://www.dashly.io/blog/what-is-data-collection/