When Apps Go Underground: Announcing Offline Support for Mobile

As part of our com­mit­ment to best-in-class mobile report­ing, we’ve recently devel­oped offline mea­sure­ment for iOS, Android and Black­berry. This fea­ture increases the accu­racy and com­plete­ness of your data, espe­cially in areas with inter­mit­tent or no con­nec­tiv­ity, such as sub­way com­mutes and air­line travel.

The beta ver­sions of App­Mea­sure­ment for iOS, Android and Black­berry are avail­able now. If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate in the cur­rent App­Mea­sure­ment beta, ask your account man­ager to add you to the beta pro­gram for “Offline App­Mea­sure­ment” or add a com­ment to the bot­tom of this post and our beta pro­gram man­ager will reach out to you directly.

Here’s how offline mea­sure­ment works. You con­fig­ure App­Mea­sure­ment to record while offline, usu­ally a dead sim­ple process. When a user’s phone is dis­con­nected from the web, any data you try to send is queued up on the phone. When the device is back online, the cache of hits are sent to our col­lec­tion servers, and data col­lec­tion con­tin­ues as normal.

What if my app has lit­tle or no offline capabilities?

Even if your app has no offline func­tion­al­ity, you still ben­e­fit. Users of your app often jump between con­nec­tiv­ity states—this enhance­ment will improve report­ing accu­racy dur­ing those tran­si­tion peri­ods. How­ever, there’s a more impor­tant ques­tion which you can now answer, “Should I improve the offline expe­ri­ence for my app?”

To answer this ques­tion, sim­ply set a vari­able with the offline/online state of each hit. Then ana­lyze the per­cent­age of your app vis­its or vis­i­tors that expe­ri­ence an offline event dur­ing their app usage. Lastly, weigh the required invest­ment against the per­cent­age of users who use the app while offline. As you can see from the screen­shot below, 13% of app users went offline dur­ing the month—if this were a real app, you should con­sider adding offline func­tion­al­ity to improve the user experience.

My app already has offline func­tion­al­ity. Where should I start optimizing?

If your app already has offline func­tion­al­ity, set a vari­able with the offline sta­tus as men­tioned above. Then start your analy­sis by look­ing at the most pop­u­lar con­tent by offline sta­tus. There are sev­eral ways to do this (a sam­ple screen­shot has been pro­vided below). You can then fine-tune your offline func­tion­al­ity to favor­ably impact your key per­for­mance indicators.

If you haven’t par­tic­i­pated in our beta pro­grams before, this is a great time to start. Beta par­tic­i­pants not only get early access to upcom­ing fea­tures, they also help shape how those fea­tures turn out, pro­vide direct input to the prod­uct devel­op­ment team, and get some incred­i­ble beta par­tic­i­pa­tion gifts. Okay…so incred­i­ble may be a stretch for the gift, unless you count reg­u­lar phone calls with me a gift.

Our esteemed Ed Hewett, who many of you know and love, con­tributed to this post.