In the last weeks I wrapped my head around client-side analytics here at Klamr. Looking back, probably the biggest Gotcha! was the realization that ignoring all the cool out-of-the-box stats and colorful graphs would have been better. It’s all to easy to get paralyzed by the sheer amount of information each tool provides you. The answer you’re  looking for isn’t between visits and pageviews and referrers and user flows and mobile data and custom segments, so don’t spend your time looking for it there (just yet). Eric Ries calls them “Vanity Metrics” and tells you why they are dangerous. I should have listened earlier.

It actually starts with making sure you know what your app is supposed to do and what user actions are valuable for you. That’s all that really matters in the beginning. Whether you’ve got 50 or 5000 sessions and whether your median session length is 34 or 58 seconds, that doesn’t tell you much yet. So, better start with what matters and ask yourself: what are the few important actions I want my users to do with my app?

Hence, if I would start over again, I would do the following:

1. Make a list with the 3, 4, 5 most valuable user actions in your app, on a very high level. For a shopping app, a completed purchase should obviously be on this list. For a photo sharing app, a shared photo should be on. A blogging platform would include creating a new blog and publishing a post. Note that this list should contain the successful  final action at the end of activities, not the actual activity leading up to it. Analytics tools often call them “events”. A purchase, for example, usually consists of a relatively long flow, but for now only the successful completion matters.
2. Determine where and how these events are happening in your app, i.e. the lines of code that actually perform them. Find out whether you wanna instrument your client application (web or native) or whether you better do it on your server backend. Instrumenting your client often tends to be easier tool-wise, but sometimes it’s just better done on the server. But keep in mind that you try to find out how to improve your client. Getting the number of purchases, for example, isn’t the actual goal here. What you actually want to do in later iterations is find out where you can improve user flows, UI and UX to optimize. That’s why server-side instrumentation doesn’t work out well later.
3. Instrument your system with the tool of your choice, e.g. murm.io, Google Analytics or Flurry. Then release it and wait for data. Instead of tons of numbers you should now see your few major numbers showing up in the tool.

See what this gives you and then iterate. You can add more (refined) events, categorize them like a Pirate, add funnels and goals, and go deeper. And in one of your next iterations you can look at what you can do to improve.