How to Measure the Success of Your Mobile Tour App & Audio Guide

Your tour guide app has a big role to play. It welcomes visitors, points them towards the right routes, and explains important features or exhibits. Your visitors might interact with this technology every single day, but if you don’t measure its success, then you won’t know how useful it is, or how well you’re marketing it. 

In this post, we walk you through the top reasons to measure the success of your tour guide app and exactly how to do it. 

Why you should measure the success of your mobile tour app and audio guide

Many different types of companies and organizations use mobile tour apps to increase visitor engagement. Universities, museums, galleries, libraries, cities, parks, and tour companies all offer mobile apps. When you don’t measure the success of the app, the activity and engagement is lost.

If you measure the success of your app, you’re able to collect troubleshooting data. For example, if you find that you have a high amount of time spent in the app, but low app downloads, this tells you that people enjoy using the app, but not enough know about it. 

On the flip side, low time spent in the app with favorable download counts would tell you that people know where to find the app, but that it may not have enough content to keep them engaged for very long. 

Goals for mobile tour apps

Your mobile tour app or audio guide doesn’t exist for its own sake. The answer on how to measure success lies in your goals for creating the app in the first place. Figure these out first, and measuring success gets a lot easier.

Here are some of the most popular goals.

Ease and affordability for guests

Maybe you want to provide more options for guests to tour your site. You might already have docents and tour guides, but you want self-guided tours to increase capacity or cater to guests who want the self-serve experience. If this is your goal, pay attention to app downloads as well as improved site capacity management.

Brand reputation

For some universities, museums, and other organizations, a mobile tour app is all about the brand. With this goal in mind, you might want to use app downloads and the reviews of your app in the app stores as key measurements for success.

Sharing educational content

Many museums, galleries, and other organizations want to use their mobile tour and audio guide to share educational content or digitize a collection. If this is your goal, app downloads, page visits, and total engagement time will be just a few stats to look at to find out if you’re educating your target audiences. 

Profitability

As a tour company, you might use your mobile app for an additional revenue stream, separate from your in-person guided tours. In that case, the app needs to pay for itself and generate profit. Your aim will be measuring sales versus what you pay to create and maintain the app. With STQRY, the cost of creating a mobile tour guide app drops dramatically using the STQRY builder versus a custom developer. So luckily, your path to profitability won’t be far off if you use a whitelabel solution. 

How to measure success

With a firm grip on your goals, it’ll be easier to identify which metrics and factors matter to you. Here’s how to measure your tour guide app.

Review your top metrics

To measure the success of your app, you should integrate it with an analytics platform. STQRY has a direct integration with Google Analytics to provide you with best-in-class insights. These insights are easy to find the automatically generated reports, and don’t require you to be an analytics pro. 

Here are the most important metrics:

• Page views (how many times each individual page was viewed)
• Total downloads (how many times your app was downloaded from an app store)
• Total visits (how many unique visitors used the app)
• Total visitors (the amount of many times the app was used)
• Average time spent in the app (on average, how many minutes users spend in your app)

You can review these metrics for each of your streams, or app types, such as your web-based and native mobile app. 

If you want to track the success of certain pages or pieces of content, you can check page views for that specific page. You might also want to check how much time was spent on average on that page as well. 

Pay attention to anecdotal evidence

Digital analytics are great, but they’re not the only way to measure success. 

If your goals are education or brand awareness, you might be more concerned with what visitors and customers are saying about your digital experience. Pay attention to positive feedback about your app in the form of in-person comments, online reviews, and social media mentions. 

If you created your app to reduce crowding, increase capacity, or provide affordable tour access, then you’ll of course want to watch out for successful changes in the management of the space, as well as adoption of the app (which can be discovered by checking downloads and average time spent).

Measure success on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis

Whether you’re reporting back to someone, or just want to keep an eye on the app yourself, it’s a good idea to review your top metrics for different time periods. 

When you review your monthly tour app metrics, you’ll be able to set monthly benchmarks, like the expected number of app downloads. You can also detect seasonal trends and adjust your benchmarks accordingly. Some metrics, such as your average time spent on the app, should stay relatively the same, unless weather is an issue, and you experience shorter visit durations at certain times of the year. This would also be reflected in your app engagement.

On a quarterly or annual basis, you can better track growth. You’ll want to see a continual increase in your app downloads, which will show that your marketing of the app is effective. If you can only permit a certain number of visitors per day, the growth of app adoption will flatline at some point, and then you’ll have an accurate benchmark for the number of downloads per month.

Measuring your app doesn’t have to be difficult and it helps organizations in the long run decide if they are meeting educational goals and providing visitors with the best experience possible.

To learn more about creating a branded tour and audio guide app, check out STQRY.