Cross-Platform Analytics: Unify User Behavior Data Across Web & Mobile

Table of Contents

    Analytics that captures how users behave across multiple platforms

    Web and mobile app users no longer navigate products and services in single-platform flows. They are more likely to navigate an app by way of several different platforms — native apps, mobile sites, and desktop browsing — before they convert.

    Existing user behavior tracking tools or web analytics tools are optimized for desktop web browsing and fail to capture the broad picture of how users flow through multiple platforms.

    Amplitude’s cross-platform analytics lets you collect and synthesize behavioral data as users move from your native app, to your mobile site, to your desktop webpage. Only by looking at user data across all platforms supported by your app do you begin to get a full picture of user behavior.

    User data from all platforms, in one place

    When you use multiple analytics providers to track user data from different platforms, you waste an astronomical amount of time simply organizing, cleaning up, and presenting the data in a readable format.

    Amplitude’s cross-platform capability allows you to pull user data from iOS, Android, mobile web, and desktop website quickly and access it in one location. We sort everything by platform in a consistent manner so you don’t need to do any cleanup.

    Understand the whole user journey with Amplitude

    The modern user journey is a complex exchange of information across platforms. Conversion tracking methods and funnel analyses that don’t account for cross-platform movement are functionally obsolete. Today, you need cross-platform analytics if you want to understand your funnel.

    With cross-platform analytics, you can understand the whole user journey, through key funnels, across platforms. You can then prioritize and gauge the results of your funnel analyses to see which platforms you’re succeeding or failing on.

    How Instacart Discovered an Opportunity to Increase Conversion Rates

    Grocery delivery app Instacart studies how users move through key funnels like first-time user signup and activation on both web and mobile, in order to discover opportunities to improve conversion. With Amplitude’s cross-platform analytics, the growth team identified significant room for improvement on their desktop landing page. After A/B testing different page elements, they improved the conversion rate on that landing page by 10%.

    Learn how Instacart understands their users across mobile and web

    How Amplitude identifies unique users across platforms

    One challenge of cross-platform tracking is making sure you’re getting an accurate count of your daily active users. Most analytics platforms count unique users when they ‘see’ a new device or a new user (if the user is signed in). A challenge arises when a device anonymously logs an event that was actually performed by a user already in the system. How do you make sure you’re not double-counting? Amplitude solves the challenge of attributing anonymous events to the right users by using the ‘amplitude_ID’ identifier.

    Focus on the core product experience

    Providing a core, unified experience across platforms is key to making sure that users can pick up your app, go to your website on their laptop, and pick it up again on their tablet—without getting lost on their user journey.

    Cross-platform analytics helps you understand how users behave on one platform versus another. You can then understand and refine the overall core experience that you deliver to your users.

    An analytics solution that tracks user data across different platforms, presents it in one place, and lets you discover behavioral insights in just a few clicks, allows you to focus on creating a consistent, unified user experience for your app.