Countly Mobile Analytics | Blog

Countly joins Seedcamp

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:52:00 +0300

We are very excited to announce that Countly joins Seedcamp’s 80+ company strong family. Our team firmly believes in this partnership and we are sure it’ll bring several opportunities to both parties.

Announcing Countly services - or, "Release the Kraken!"

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:14:28 +0300

Hello Countly fans!

Today we are very proud that open source, real-time mobile analytics platform Countly is announcing general availability of analytics services and products, providing valuable insights of how users interact with mobile analytics and games. Our service is now out of beta, offering affordable, advanced analytics for companies requiring a stable and feature rich solution for mobile, as well as desktop and Facebook apps.

As you all know, we have been providing sophisticated web based analytics capabilities for apps, through an easy-to-use graphical interface that greatly simplifies data collection and analysis. By tracking in-app activity, developers can focus on issues, improving in-app usability, increasing user experience hence retention and in-app purchase sales.

As of today, we renewed our web page (which in fact caused a lot of vibe among graphic design sites), offering quite an extensive list of services, including training, different editions, paid services and partnership opportunities. We extended our documentation, added datasheets andpresentations, and many screenshots who love to watch visuals.

Until now, we have received hundreds of testimonials, some of which came from Twitter directly, and some directly dropped in our mailbox. One of them is from Ygor Lemos, CTO of famous AirportChatter app: “Countly enlightened our path to knowing our users behavior and gave us mobile metrics that we simply didn’t have before. We chose Countly not only for its beautiful UI or the very flexible API, but specially because the awesome support and the startup spirit of the company that surely is in tune with our own.”. So refreshing.

Working well over a year, drinking 300+ liters of coffee, having 200+sleepless nights, our Community Edition is now trusted by 750 system administrators on 65 countries, collecting analytics data from 60M devices. An incredible curve from a minimum viable team!

Together, let’s build world’s most extensive, user-centric and powerful mobile analytics platform. Join us now and share the love.

— Countly Team

Hacking with Countly, Raspberry Pi and a servo motor

Fri, 03 May 2013 23:19:00 +0300

Countly is a perfect tool for hacking. This time Paul Brown, a veteran Countly hacker, combined his Raspberry Pi hardware with Countly to build a cool toy - an in-app purchase flag.

Paul used a small Ubuntu server, Python as the programming language and a simple servo motor from Sparkfun and a lot of coffee to make it happen. Now, every customer of his Easy Grade Free app who prompted to buy an asset from in-app purchase, but didn’t, makes the orange flag raise.

Paul also provided the source code to pull events from Countly server in Python language. Head over to Github to grab your code. You can also watch the video of a real-world servo running as it catches an in-app purchase attempt:

This nice example shows how Countly API can be used to make fun projects. It’s really a brilliant hack, and gives us lots of clues in Countly HQ to make ourselves (we might even copy his idea, shamelessly!) :-)

Building a mobile application engagement scorecard

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:49:00 +0200

Many companies have their own mobile application development teams, working on several projects at the same time. Sometimes outsourcing the mobile development needs can also be an option, decreasing the operational expenses at the expense of depending on third parties. Mobile development is becoming a requested skill and due to abundance of development platforms, operating systems and programming languages, it may be hard to find a specific, focused skillset for a project.

Whatever the solution is, companies are looking for a good performance model that can be used as a mobile application success index. C-level execs are depending on certain metrics like downloads and installs, amount of usage, in-app purchases and other numbers that are simple to read and interpret. However some statistics hide crucial information about app’s performance and user experience, but they are neglected due to lack of information and awareness. This hinders potential issues found in user experience, backend, graphics and applications purpose for a use in general.

Below you’ll find a scorecard listing most important engagement metrics for an application. Use it as a basis to calculate the overall performance of your mobile applications. You can add or remove extra metrics, e.g amount of in app purchases, or assign weighted numbers in order to calculate the total score for a given application.

Number of downloads: This is by far the most important metric you need to analyze. If possible, try to track the referrers for your application. Under Android, campaign tracking is straightforward, however Apple doesn’t allow third parties to track referrals (but there are different methods for this such as IP matching).
Number of uninstalls: We’ve seen apps with more than 160% uninstall rate - every 10 times the app is installed, users uninstall it 16 times. Uninstallation can be tracked from push notification feedbacks, that is, if an application enables push and if it’s uninstalled, then you can count it.
Retention: Retention simply tells how many users come back to open your app just because they embraced it. Just like repeating customers, retained users are one of the most critical metrics in application engagement. With retention screen you get an insight of percentage of users coming back to use your app again.
Store comments and ratings: Though not directly available in Countly dashboard, there are several online services providing this information by scraping application store web. Honest opinions from end user should be taken seriously by the product manager and considered as an improvement area.
Number of opens: Statistics show that one fourth of all apps are opened only once. A small frustration, an issue with login, a typo in help screen will force user press home key, never returning back to that app again. Fun stops. Thanks to Countly dashboard, you can see how many times your app is launched, and take necessary precautions in case average number of opens is alarming.
Time spent: This metric can easily be misleading, since time spent in a simple utility (e.g weather app), a casual game or a video streaming app can vary greatly. Therefore do not simply compare your “time spent” data with other apps, but rather benefit from custom events (e.g number of channels watched in a session) to correlate both data.

These are the most important insights you can note if you want to build a scorecard for your application set. This list is no means exhaustive, and you are encouraged to add or remove other parameters you see fit (e.g in-app purchase).

Make sure you assign weighted points (e.g 15 for number of downloads and 20 for retention), summing 100 in total. Provide a simple formula for each item and define how you’ll score them. For example, getting 1 star is 4 points, 2 stars is 8 points etc.

Finally, fill this scorecard periodically (e.g every week or month), so you’ll get a consistent sampling for each application. You’ll be amazed with the insights gained after noting down a few samples already.

You are what makes Countly successful

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:47:00 +0200

Thank you.

Because you believed in us, our mission and vision, to make mobile analytics truly open and private for everyone.

You’ve given us inspiration - to build a community around Countly, a project that acts autonomously and socially responsible.

You supported us with our key values - freedom, usability, quality and business readiness.

You made Countly possible - with your feedback, trust and collaboration.

We are grateful for your help.

Countly: Not only for mobile apps anymore!

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:15:57 +0200

Those who were with us during our first months will clearly remember that we only had one single SDK - iOS. Then came Android to show our commitment to mobile, as “mobile first” company. Companies we closely work with have written SDKs like Windows Phone and Blackberry Webworks. Individual developers and other companies have contributed Mac OS X, Appcelerator Titanium and Unity3D SDKs.

We’ve hinted you on Twitter that AS3 SDK is baking, thanks to Ontek. With this SDK, you’ll be able to track Flash apps, including those on Facebook.com running as a Facebook application. Facebook analytics was something out of our scope when we started our open source mobile analytics platform, but contributions coming from partners and developers is slightly making Countly a general-purpose analytics solution for mobile, desktop, Facebook and set-top-box devices.

You said set-top-box?

Meet John Clayton from Code Monkey Labs. John first heard of Countly from a twit and he started checking around. Eventually the idea to use Countly to track his Channel TWiT - the best way to view content from the TWiT Network - came to mind and it took a very short time to implement it.

Let’s listen to what John is doing about analytics with Countly: “I’m currently tracking Roku devices. Being able to see different model numbers and OS versions (there’s been a lot!) helps me use features of the Roku that are compatible with most devices. I’ll start developing an iOS version and it’ll also benefit from Countly dashboard”

By the way, Roku is a great device. When we heard about John getting analytics data from Roku devices, we gave it a go and it’s really a slick device (we bought the Roku 2 XS model - full motion control for games, plus free Angry Birds game). Based on Arm processor, it’s really fast on a full-HD TV. Motion controller gives it a native, natural user interface feeling - if you are going to buy one, make sure you choose XS.

Thanks John - letting us know about your Roku experience and good luck with your business!

— Countly Team

Countly: The road ahead

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:33:00 +0200

Mobile world is booming. In 2013 alone, it’s expected to have half a million more in application stores. RIM and Microsoft are speeding up the race by offering their hardware and operating systems polished for end users. There are other players trying to enter the market like Mozilla and Ubuntu. This year will probably see more than a few mergers in mobile world, in the neighborhood of 1B USD.

Countly is positioning itself in open source world, specifically providing open source solutions for both SMEs and big players like telcos, groups having mobile development divisions, digital agencies, banks in need of data privacy and insurance companies. Add hardware manufacturers to this and our list is complete, so you can have an idea of which markets we are interested in and we are approached by.

Most successful open source companies build a business model around two licenses, combined with SaaS offerings and an architecture tightly integrated with a strong API. Dual licensing provides software enthusiasts the analytics platform they need, while a commercially supported version is used to give professional services, provide indemnification, along with warranty and roadmap priorities.

We, in Countly, believe that transparency and community building blocks are key factors towards building a successful open source business. With these information in mind, we are announcing what we’ll be focusing in 2013:

Push notifications that help improve customer engagement by sending relevant messages timely and in-context.
User analytics that provide per-user, deep-dive analysis together with push notifications allowing administrators send messages to users who complete a series of tasks, or fall into a category - like what intercom.io or customer.io does, but this time in mobile domain.
Funnels that helps identify users who follow a series of steps - very valuable if you want to understand how many customers have completed a defined task, or when they left. It’s a great insight to track down issues that otherwise cannot be found by heuristic evaluations.

Some of our active users automatically get an email, directing them to our survey. The results of the survey provided us great insights and what-to-do-next.

Here’s a list of cumulative results, in terms of requests coming from you. We chose to share it with public so you can have an understanding of is asked and what we might be working on:

A native iPhone & Android client
Crash reports
Device grouping (e.g to be able to see percentage of iPads, iPhones, Windows Phones etc)
More dashboard customization (well, more is a misnomer here, we do not have this feature yet, shame).
Ability to see a list of events/segmentations on the same graph.
Getting reports in PDF

All are thought out and valid requests, and make sure that we know our shortcomings. 2013 will be a great year that forces us to clean-up this requirements list, so keep an eye on us! :-)

— Countly Team

Next generation mobile analytics platfrom gets a major update

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 11:54:00 +0200

We are more than proud to present our newest version, Countly v12.12, an open source, real-time mobile analytics platform for mobile developers, carriers, gaming companies, digital agencies and simply everyone who wants to increase their mobile app performance, retention and engagement.

In this version, we added two more major mobile platforms; Windows Phoneand Blackberry. For Windows Phone, we have support for versions 7 and 8, and for Blackberry, our SDK works with version 7 for WebWorks. Support for upcoming Blackberry 10 is very near, so make sure if you have a Blackberry 10 app, go with Countly :)

Other notable changes include:

A management API is added. All user and application related operations can now be performed through the API using an API key.
Thanks to our translators, now Countly can speak Portuguese and Russian as well.
Event keys can now be sorted, increasing usability.
We removed “EVENTS SERVED” from the dashboard and added “TIME SPENT” metric, which is more convenient.
We fixed a bug that prevented correct visualization of event data which has segmentation values 0-23 (hours of the day)
We optimized dashboard experience on tablet devices.
We added awesome animation for closing popups with ESC key :)

There are many more bugfixes around, but the most important part is, more than half of implemented features and bugfixes are reported directly by you, our users and community members. This shows our dedicated support for a healthy Countly ecosystem.

Our Countly Cloud SaaS solution is still free during beta, and our pricing model will highly encourage those who are already collecting data from their users. If you haven’t tried our cloud, please go to our front page and subscribe now.

We had a lot of fun while developing Countly, and we believe you’ll feel the same. Download Countly now, and start collecting valuable data from your mobile apps!.

PS: We need your support to be one of the most extensive, user-centric and powerful mobile application analytics platform to date! Feel free to share our enthusiasm on Twitter and Facebook.

6 tips for a better mobile analytics experience

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:33:00 +0200

Whether you are using open source version of Countly, or the Cloud version, chances are you need some insights about what to do with a very valuable data collected from your applications. Without making the dashboard numbers relevant and meaningful, it’s not possible to measure the performance hence improve your mindset and develop a better user experience.

1. Start early

Most bugs and UX problems are seen in the first few days of your application. It’s crucial to remedy these issues on day 0. Mobile analytics won’t help you improve unpolished areas, however will give some insights which events to collect. Call a few friends of you and ask them to try out your app (e.g via TestFlight, AppBlade or HockeyApp) - heck TestFlight can also gather crash logs and usage information directly from devices in the field. Data collected early will bring you invaluable data - believe me, it’s worth when you find some glitches after you send your app to AppStore and find out that it’ll take a couple of days more to update everything.

2. Watch key indicators live

Recently we sent a few questions to our loyal Countly Cloud users and 78% of them found live charts the most important factor choosing Countly. Currently you can see number of users and newcomers online, real-time and we are planning to add more charts by time. This feature gives you insights about instantaneous usage, and how, for example, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest mentions affect usage of your application.

3. Increase session length

The more you retain your users in your application, the more likely they’ll be engaged with you. This increases life time value of your user automatically, as he’s more inclined to buy assets if you provide in-app purchase (IAP). Of course, some users will buy an IAP item the first day, and some will wait a month but start buying like crazy. While it’s critical to know the reasons that drive your users to stay in your application, it might be more important to know the reasons they stop walking with your service. So do your best and help him stay in your application for even a minute more.

If you are interested about this topic, Intercom has a nice wrap-up of ways to increase user engagement. Highly recommended read.

4. Think global

Localization (l10n) is most important part of a software. You can intentionally focus on a specific country or a group of users sharing the same culture, start small with a language and then add others, or think big and spend some money to localize your application. If you are not the developer of Draw Something where you need to be proficient with many languages and spend $$$ on thousands of selected words, chances are you can find native people on Guru or Elance to provide language packs for your application. And believe me, you’ll be amazed with how many people are searching on AppStore and Google Play in their native language.

If you are interested in learning more about localization of App Store entries, read The Importance of Localization in application stores by App Annie.

Hey - if Countly is not available in your language, why not give it a hand and make dashboard speak natively with you?

5. Compare device and platform performance

Cross-platform tools like Gideros Studio, Unity3D or GameSalad make it easy to write once and run on many platforms. Targeting on several devices and models is the key to spread as much as you can. In an era where number of Android devices outperforms any other smartphones in the world, iPhone being the most profit-making platform and Windows Phone exceeding 20.000 applications in their Apps+Games Store, it’s very hard to select one OS and ignore others.

Countly provides mechanisms and a sexy interface to compare different platforms and platform versions, and helps you track performance among them. This helps you decide which platform and device to focus on in the future. Make sure you spend your money on the right platform.

6. Exploit custom events

Custom events and segmentation feature helps you track different happenings inside your application. If you want to answer questions like “Which item is purchased more?” “Which countries were top performers in terms of in app purchase?” or “Which application version leads to more sales?”, then you need to understand custom events.

Apart from these tips, we suggest you compare last timeframe (which is available in Countly dashboard) and gather demographic data from your users, with the help of custom events. Needless to say, custom events are really very powerful if you think about how to use them over and over again, during your application’s beta phase.

Mobile is now a part of everything we do, changing our mindsets and mobile analytics has never been so popular - so use it effectively and wisely for your next killer app!

— Countly Team

New from Countly labs: Showing active & first time users online

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:13:00 +0200

Team Countly is working hard and listening full ears! We just added another feature to our Countly Cloud service which has been requested from you. Now Countly Cloud members can see how many active users are using their application at that moment.

This gives greater insights, like understanding which reason caused an increase on live users. Moreover, it’s now unnecessary to try to guess how many online users your application is seeing at a particular time. With the introduction of online users, Countly is now better than ever.

Screenshot below shows two gauges showing instant online and first time users. There’s also a “MAX” parameter there, which shows all-time maximum users for a particular box type.

Next to those gauges, we have a simple, live chart which shows the number of online users and new users, in two colors (blue and orange). It’s easy to identify color symbolications here - watch the blue and you’ll see online, watch the orange and new users have you.

While these do look like simple additions, dashboard feels much better now. Moving gauges show you exactly what’s happening at that very moment. Chart moves smoothly as it gives insights about whether usage trend is increasing or decrasing. All dashboard is now more intuitive and heuristic.

This feature is only available in our Cloud. If you are interested, or simply subscribe to our cloud and we’ll send you a free account for your simple analytics needs. We are still investigating the pricing model, however make sure that there’ll be a very cheap (if not free) price for entry level mobile analytics needs.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter & Facebook and make sure you get the latest news :)

— Countly Team

Interview with Countly Titanium Appcelerator SDK author & contributor Christian Sullivan

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:35:59 +0200

Every day more and more agencies, developers, brands and product managers implement mobile analytics, and Countly is no exception. We see tremendous growth in daily installations and interest in our Countly Cloud, just becase analytics provide an unparalled opportunity to measure the performance of your application in mobile world.

In this context, Countly project has seen many contributions from talented developers, and there are signs that the open source nature has made it a reality to build your own analytics at home, in your own hands. Importance of data liberation and open access is also mentioned by our own Christian Sullivan, one of the most hardworking contributors behind Countly. According to Christian, Countly has an awesome interface and great feature set - but the main critical idea is its openness and extensibility.

You are the author of Titanium Appcelerator SDK for Countly. How did you start with Countly?

Well, I have been a long time hacker of Google Analytics but didn’t like how I am always constrained to what features they choose to implement and having to hack up my apps to work best with GA instead of fixing my analytics to work better with my mobile applications. So once I saw Countly I was hooked! When I saw it was done in Node.js and MongoDB I was sold. I immediately forked the native iOS SDK and created a module for Titanium Mobile.

What are your first impressions with Countly?

Awesome beautiful interface and great initial feature set! Still needs work but this domain has an endless potential. Making it an open source project allows of the platform to grow exponentially faster. I am a huge advocate that open source will allow technology to grow at its intend speed as apposed to how patterns and closed source software cripples the overall grow of tech.

Why did you decide to provide an SDK? Are you actively using your own SDK in your mobile apps?

Since it is open source, it allows me to make changes on the fly to meet my projects needs. The ability to host on my own server allows me to scale as needed. I use Countly in all of my personal, business and client apps even if they are not mobile apps! (Ed: Countly can track any types of apps, regardless of their being mobile in nature)

How many apps are you currently tracking?

I have 8 apps in production and another 10 or so projects in development. We love to implement Countly in all demos and even simple interactive app mock ups and show it to our customers. They love it. We like to push Countly to the limits so at times we are tracking hundreds of custom events. With some of our dev work we have experimented with using Countly as a remote error tracking console and live remote benchmarking logger.

What are the 3 things you fall in love with Countly?

The fact that it is written in Javascript, its simplicity and its gorgeous UI / UX.

In which areas do you think Countly needs improvements?

I think Countly should separate client and api server apps to different projects. I’d better see that the forced use of supervisor service is removed - since I use forever to keep my apps up with a custom http-proxy. Another thing I wish to get implemented is better upgrade system to allow for many users to always be on the newest version.

By the way, I’m working on a Create JS client API to let users use cross platform in web apps, Cordova (Phonegap) Apps and Titanium Apps with out the need for a native module to use.

Thank you, Christian for your time and contributions.

Cost of tools and services used developing Countly: $0

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 19:41:00 +0300

Developing an open source project has many more advantages than we initially thought of. There are awesome companies/projects out there that support OSS and give their tools and services for free for use within OSS development. In this blog post I’ll be talking about the ones that we use for Countly.

With the tools and services listed in this post you will be able to;

Host your website or service [1][2]
Host your public and private code repositories [1]
Host your blog with your branding and URL [1]
Host your support site with your branding and URL
Develop your project with a powerful IDE
Host & manage your project translations
Get visual feedback from your users

For a total sum of 0$ per month!

[1] these are also valid for projects that are not open source
[2] for 12 months

Amazon Web Services

Amazon offers something called “Free Tier” to its first time customers. Below specs are enough for most but if you want to see all services available for free you can check out AWS official web site.

Amazon EC2 Linux or Windows Micro Instance with 613MB memory
30GB storage

Github

We have been using Github for source control and we were never disappointed. Although there was a time when Github for Windows client messed up my push, I never had any issue afterwards. Git is for sure a great version control system itself and Github makes it even greater by making collobaration easier.

Bitbucket

We love Github but we also love Bitbucket. I would have thought a lot to decide between Github and Bitbucket if I knew Bitbucket at that time. Currently all of our public source code is hosted on Github but we store our internal code bases, count.ly web site and demo, recently announced Countly Cloud and download/upgrade tracker on Bitbucket. Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos for up to 5 person teams for free so thats why we chose Bitbucket over Github.

Sourceforge

Well, I don’t think a service that defines itself as “SourceForge is where open source happens” needs any explanation but let me tell you why we switched from Github Downloads to Sourceforge.

Github is great for general git purposes, push, pull, clone, branch, merge etc. but it is not so great about showing you the stats of your package downloads. Initially we were using Github to serve countly-server and countly-sdk packages until version 12.07 and all Github provided was the count of accesses to the download URL. A number you can easily increase by requesting the same URL thousand times from the same IP.

However Sourceforge offers detailed analytics about your project downloads like time segmented graphs, locations and operating systems of the downloaders as well as offering a nice looking project page to add screenshots, features and a description to your project. It is also quite easy to access old releases from the project page.

WebStorm IDE

Until a very recent time I was using only Notepad++ for coding countly-server and a virtual Ubuntu box for testing. I knew about WebStorm, actually Atilim suggested me using this earlier and I said meh Notepad++ is great, but since our code base is getting larger everyday it would be a wise choice to use a powerful IDE that has VCS integration, refactoring, debugging, automatic deployments etc etc. so I switched to WebStorm. They offer a generous free licence to OSS projects and I grabbed one immediately.

(Atilim uses XCode and Eclipse for iOS and Android SDKs respectively)

Transifex

As you all know Countly is translated into 9 languages in 12.09 release and there are 4 languages on the way. We needed a powerful solution to manage these translations and luckily I bumped into Transifex. It is pretty easy to edit and manage your language files from the web interface and they also provide a command line client which is especially good to download all translation files to your local machine. You can add suggestions and reviews to translations, create language teams with managers and contributers, communicate to language teams easily. Transifex is also free for open source and also they provide an Transifex itself open sourced for anyone who likes to install and manage their own translation server.

Usabilla

In the demo in our homepage there is a “Help Us Improve” button floating on the right. Well, that little button is part of powerful user feedback service Usabilla. While browsing a user can activate the tool by clicking on the button, selects some portion of the page, gives it a rating and possibly tags it “usable”, “attractive” or “boring” and submits the form. These feedback is available for you in your Usabilla dashboard and you can easily browse through what people think about the design/usability and what they hated the most. Usabilla team generously offered us a 6 month free account.

Tender

Tender is what gives power to our support site. Its a ticket based QA/feedback/support system with an integrated knowledge base management suite. The driving force for us to use Tender is the fact that it is highly customizable and supports markdown for both the tickets and knowledge base articles. Folks at Tender are also very helpful and they offer a free for OSS version.

Tumblr

Most people think Tumblr only works for media sharing. I can tell you comfortably that it works for heavyweight blogging quite well. I have used Tumblr for another project’s blog and suggested using it for Countly too. Since Tumblr allows custom domains, it really lightens your weight a little by not making you host a blog yourself. Also Tumblr is fully customizable so you can make it match your branding.

If you have anything to add to the list please let us know in the comments. We love free software and services thats why we are developing one :)

— Onur

Countly Cloud

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:53:22 +0300

We have been releasing Countly for 4 months now and it has been almost a year since we started on the project. Having the chance to work, discuss, talk with wonderful people among the community we are truly enjoying being part of the open source community and ever-growing mobile industry. It is fascinating to receive so many feedback and solid resources/work like translations, SDKs for other platforms (Windows, Titanium Appcelerator), tutorials about deployments to PaaS providers etc. from the community and all this support continuously increase our excitement, fuels us all every day.

As you may have noticed, a few days earlier we put a signup button for Countly Cloud to our homepage and even started to roll out accounts for early signups. We have decided to write a blog post about what Countly Cloud means for the future of Countly and what will it offer to its users.

Countly Cloud will be a hosted solution that offers Countly Mobile Analytics as a service. There will be different account types ranging from Individual to Enterprise (we are thinking about 5) with different feature sets which will fulfill the needs of anyone in need of mobile analytics. Pricing will be pretty straightforward and affordable. Countly Cloud will carry out our motto “Own your data” and will never sell or share your data with anyone else.

Early adopters to Countly Cloud, who have accounts now or will have in a few days, will use the service for free with full features until some period after we publicly launch. Afterwards they will be offered discounted accounts and means to export their data from the cloud and import to their local Countly Servers.

We started open source and we will go on open source. Development of Countly Server and SDKs will continue with the same pace and we have many more exciting features on the way.

If you haven’t tried Countly yet signup for a Cloud account from http://count.ly or grab the latest release from Sourceforge. In the meantime you can check out our online demo.

Countly now available in 9 languages

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 22:36:33 +0300

We can’t believe the day we present Countly in different languages arrived this fast but here it is: Countly Mobile Analytics is now available in 9 languages including; Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish. There are more languages on the way and if your language is missing please join us at Transifex.

Below you can find a summary of other cool new features and optimizations in 12.09 release. Here is the full list of changes.

City level location information of your users
“Ghost graphs” on the dashboard that show previous period performance for you to enjoy your app growth instantly
Optimizations in total (unique) user calculation

In case you are new to Countly, here are some resources for you to start right away:

Support - Open up tickets for your problems, questions and feedback
Knowledge base - Documentation for server, SDKs and other concepts
Github - Repos for server, iOS and Android SDKs
Sourceforge - Downloads for all server and SDK versions
Mobile Analytics 101 White Paper - Available from Count.ly

Thank you once again for helping us bring Countly one step closer to be the best mobile analytics platform!

— Team Countly

Honeymoon in a mobile world may last for 5 days

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 22:32:35 +0300

Over the last week, we analysed mobile applications we tracked in order to find some usage patterns. Collecting tens of millions of events from dozens of applications, we found out that a typical mobile application, if not properly marketed, will see demand from users for 5 days after launch. Number of downloads and active sessions drop considerably after first week.

Here’s a summary of our deductions after analysing our data:

Average time spent on applications varies between 1.5 and 8 minutes.
Users get bombarded with information about the new in the first 4 days of launch. Number of installations start to drop after day 5.
There’s a small spike in usage in weekends. This is especially evident if the app is a game or joy app.
Applications lose an average of 60% of their users immediately after 1 week if there are no marketing efforts associated with it. It takes an additional two months to lose 40% of the remaining.

Bottom line: All application stores are competitive environments, and just like it’s not easy to be seen in a crowd full of 600.000 people, your mobile application can easily get lost. Developers and agencies should make sure their apps get good media coverage, and in order to make it a reality, developers should be focusing on attention on a unique spin and innovation.

— Countly Team

#1 free app uses Countly to track mobile app performance

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:48:32 +0300

Countly is gaining popularity! Last week, we had an interview with Murat Deligöz, CEO of Ontek, and he explains how Countly helps his company understand user behaviour and increase retention and loyalty.

Countly: When did you start using Countly?

Deligöz: We started using Countly a month ago, with our “Ciz Gitsin” application in Appstore. We first started to collect only basic data like application installs, usage, countries, and then, as Countly grew, we added more features to the dashboard.

Starting from version 1.02 of Ciz Gitsin, we have already integrated 15 different custom events and segmentation to get insights about all mobile applications we own.

Countly: Why do you think analytics is important to a mobile company?

Deligöz: Mobile analytics is what web analytics is to companies. If you don’t have a mobile analytics strategy, it’s impossible to keep up with ever changing climate of Appstore. Mobile application development needs focus, development effort and engineering talent, however the real journey begins after submitting to Appstore & Google Play, as it includes more complex measurement and monitoring.

Countly: How many events are you tracking right now?

Deligöz: Cizgitsin generates more than 2.5 millions of events each day.

Countly: What is the single feature you love most in Countly?

Deligöz: Being real-time of course. It feels great to get the latest statistics immediately without waiting for the data to be compiled. Moreover, I love the feeling that I can directly control Countly - being open source I already changed a few things on the dashboard to suit my taste.

Countly: What would you like to see in Countly?

Deligöz: We already sent several wishlists and feature requests to Countly team, however none of them are critical. Two things I’d love to see is modular dashboard and bigger icons in iPad. We always carry iPads to check latest usage status of our application.

Countly: Thank you Mr. Deligöz, for your answers.

My pleasure. Oh, by the way, Ciz Gitsin was #1 free app in Turkish Appstore, and at peak times, our server received more than 70 events per second. Our simple servers were cool enough to cover the hard work. I must admit I should have known MongoDB and Nodejs before.

Top 10 things to track in a mobile application

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:17:00 +0300

With the introduction of events in Countly, now you have the opportunity to track and count literally anything that happens inside your application. This gives you insights and instant information at the pinpoints you define. Therefore, defining event actions should be treated carefully as they are fixed once, and until you send another application to Appstore/Google Play, they cannot be modified.

Given it nowadays takes several weeks for an app to get approved especially in Apple case, you need to define your event types carefully. Here we’re going to help you and list 10 items to track in a mobile application.

In-app purchases
Level passing accomplishments
Settings page entries
Player scores with grouping
Use of stores
Levels not passed
Retries
Exit points
Video watching habits
(Your custom event here)

Of course, this list is by no means complete - it should also be dynamic, i.e one event list in an application cannot be same as in another one, so each application should be investigated carefully about where to put event collectors.

As a bonus point - please have a look at our “Methods for Custom Events” document which will guide you through implementing your own custom events and collecting meaninful data, segmented with example variables like country and application version.

— Countly Team

Woot! New, shiny Countly is ready to download

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:43:49 +0300

Hello Countee !

We are proud to announce that our open source, real-time mobile analytics platform Countly just got more awesome with custom event analytics. Now you can do cool things like:

Get instant in-app purchase status like number of purchases and total revenue
Understand which level is the hardest and which level helps users buy more virtual currencies
Track how long users are engaged with each section in your e-book, segmented with countries.

Curious? Download & install Countly from Sourceforge now. For a list of additional features, check this page.

KUDOS! Countly can handle 60 M+ daily events

We built Countly on high performance MongoDB + Nodejs infrastructure. This gives us more flexibility while handling both server and client side with Javascript. Our recent performance tests showed that a modest hardware equipped with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 can handle 700 requests per second - we even didn’t use any database sharding methodologies.

More documentation added

We’ve written lots of documents to our ever-improving knowledgebase, which is meant to be the hub of all Countly related information. Check the lately added Countly Users’ Guide, Countly Implementation and Configuration Scenarios and Translating Countly.

New features coming soon:

We are now working on:

Localization with 10+ languages
Export / import data support
Amazon AMI images for instant Countly experience

We welcome your feedback and questions regarding our new, wonderful update. If you haven’t done so, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with ever growing features.

Thanks for your continuing support towards making Countly the best mobile analytics application!

5 articles worth reading about mobile, analytics and data

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 23:39:55 +0300

This week there’s been some nice articles around and wanted to share them with you.

Read on:

Have fun! :)

— Team Countly

Get Countly in your language!

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 23:14:23 +0300

Hello Countly fans!

We are proud to announce that our open source, real-time mobile analytics application Countly is now being translated in many languages, including Spanish, Turkish, Latvian and Greek. This is an important step towards making Countly a more global and visible application since we want Countly used byeveryone, from all of the world.

We are using Transifex online translation service that helps coordinating the efforts with an intuitive interface. If you would like to participate in the translation of Countly, simply contact the person responsible with that language, tell him about yourself and ask how you can help out. It’s also possible to start a translation effort of your own in case nobody jumped in.

Ready? Go to Countly localization page and start contributing!

— Team Countly