Wednesday, 10 February, 2021 UTC
Summary
Dynatrace news
Each interaction your customers have with your mobile app is a make-or-break opportunity for your business to drive lasting customer loyalty. Dynatrace is the only solution to capture the full visibility of customer experience across every digital transaction, providing gapless insight into all the user journeys on your app, from the frontend to the backend.
Connecting insights from different tools is hard
As an application owner, product manager, or marketer, however, you might use analytics tools like Adobe Analytics to understand user behavior, user segmentation, and strategic business metrics such as revenue, orders, and conversion goals.
But whenever you see one of your KPIs underperforming, your analytics tool fails to give you a clear answer as to why. While reports may tell you there’s a sudden drop of conversion rate from the free tier to the paid tier, they won’t tell you that the reason is a failing microservice. If you can’t see business outcomes and monitoring data in the same distributed trace, you’d have to capture all transaction path details from the user’s click to every single database call, which makes it practically impossible to identify the actual root cause of a decrease in conversions.
Connect the dots between mobile analytics and performance monitoring with mobile business analytics
To help establish a common language between your application and IT teams, we’re excited to ship our User action and user session properties (USP, UAP) for mobile and custom applications. User action and user session properties provide a powerful and flexible means of adding information to each user session and user action. These properties enable you to identify customer segments and related metrics, so that you can keep up your conversions and, ultimately, increase your business success:
- Create customer segments and drill down to individual sessions
- Establish BizDevOps collaboration by sharing business context in real time between IT and Business teams
- Optimize user experience while increasing privacy
Create customer segments and drill down to individual sessions
For large customer bases you might already be segmenting your users into various cohorts so that you can better understand the loyalty, campaign sources, or revenue expectations that are associated with individual users.
For example, an airline that cares about providing excellent experience to high-value customers might have a loyalty status and mark those high-value customers as ‘Premium.’ That information is not set and managed within Dynatrace but in a CRM system deep inside the infrastructure. A flexible and powerful way to surface the information, so that mobile and web apps can use it as a property, is to set it up as a request attribute. In the screenshot below you can see an example of such a request attribute. There are many ways to get such a value into a request attribute, so you can choose which approach is optimal for your situation.
Once the information is available as a request attribute, you’re just one step away from linking it to user sessions and user actions. In the Settings of your mobile app, select Session and user action properties and select Add property. In the displayed form, when selecting Server side request attributes as the Expression type, all configured request attributes are listed. Selecting one automatically fills out all fields. Enable the storage types, select Add property. From now on, all user actions and user sessions of this mobile app will be enriched with the customer’s Loyalty status attribute.
This enables you to derive valuable business insights by pairing technical monitoring data with business-relevant customer information. From here you might add a USQL dashboard chart that shows you the performance of your premium customers.
Establish BizDevOps collaboration by sharing business context with IT in real time
Now you can easily use Dynatrace in combination with classic tools like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, or Intercom by linking Dynatrace data to third-party data sources, including revenue trends, customer conversions, churn, and app store ratings.
Linking allows you to follow up on a problem or support request regardless of where it comes from. If you identify a sudden conversion drop among premium customers in your marketing tool, having the corresponding session or device identifiers in Dynatrace allows you to filter requests for that customer group and see, for example, that they are particularly prone to longer response times (i.e., a technical issue). Furthermore, your development team can easily see that there is only one service that is responsible for this. Now that you have clarity regarding the source of the problem, you can immediately focus on fixing the issue. Common examples of data points that makes sense to have in many systems are:
- Session IDs
- Names of user cohorts, segments, or campaigns
- Identifiers of push notifications
The biggest appeal for USP/UAP is their flexibility. Any data that helps you to better understand your customers or your business might be worth adding so that you can increase your insight, learn, and improve.
Dynatrace Real User Monitoring already takes care of device data that is generally relevant—OS version, device type and model, manufacturer, geolocation, language and so on. So, you’re empowered to set up custom USP (Unique Selling Propositions) and UAP (Unique Advertising Propositions) that meet your organization’s specific needs.
Since these configurations are made in the Dynatrace Web UI, you can be flexible in their usage and modification and you don’t need to worry about legacy issues in your deployed app versions.
Ensure privacy by automatically masking personally identifiable information
Personal identifiable information (PII) should be stored in as few systems as possible to facilitate access control and prevent leaks. At the same time your support team might in certain cases need to find an individual’s sessions or identify which group of users encountered a certain issue.
A solution for this problem is to generate one or more anonymized identifiers in an internal system and restrict access to the personalized identifier. The anonymous identifier is reported to Dynatrace as a server-side request attribute and, when configured as a property, can be used to tag user sessions and actions. Employees with the proper clearance can read the PII. To those without clearance, the user data remains masked, thereby providing for wide access to the anonymized session data within your organization.
This enables organizations in even the most highly regulated industries to easily understand the impact of their mobile-native application’s performance on user experience and business outcomes without risking the compromise of PII.
How to get started
To configure session and action properties, go to your mobile application in the Dynatrace Web UI and access its settings ([…] > Edit > Session and action properties).
User session and user action properties are now reported values that have been “promoted” via settings. These properties are explicitly reported in your app’s code via a
reportValue call or they can be back-propagated from a server-side request attribute.Promoting values
Any data that is sent to Dynatrace via
reportValue() can be promoted to a session or action property via the settings of the mobile app, which are configurable in the Dynatrace Web UI.To understand if data is reported correctly, check the details of a user action. In the lower part of the screenshot below you see the heading Reported values. Values that are shown in this list can be configured as session properties, action properties, or both.
Reporting values
The reporting of values must happen in the source code of your mobile app via the SDK API. All native SDKs and all plugins for cross-platform frameworks offer a variant of the
reportValue() call for this purpose.Note: Currently, native iOS values cannot be reported on auto-instrumented user actions, only on custom-created user actions. Next on our roadmap is to enable this functionality.
- Android: Custom value reporting
- iOS: Report a value
- React Native: Report values
- Flutter: Report values
- Xamarin: Custom value reporting
- Cordova: native via iOS or Android, or via the OneAgent JavaScript module
Already a Dynatrace customer? You can start benefiting from user session and user action properties today!
New to Dynatrace? Start your free trial today—leverage user session and user action properties, and finally benefit from compatible customer segments and numbers for analysis that enable you to increase your conversions and, ultimately, increase your business success.
The post Business Analytics for mobile and custom applications enables advanced segmentation and BizDevOps collaboration appeared first on Dynatrace blog.