It’s no secret that mobile commerce is on the rise, and companies like Groupon are reaping the benefits of creating a positive mobile app experience.
In a recent webinar titled: The Groupon Cookbook To Mobile Growth, Mike Burton, Android Engineering Manager at Groupon, and Josh van Tonder, Director of Product Marketing at Crittercism, discussed how Groupon ensures optimal app performance using Crittercism technology.
More than half (54%) of global transactions for Groupon are completed through the mobile app, making performance and uptime imperative for success. To date, Groupon’s mobile app has garnered 80 million downloads and generates $100,000 in transactions per hour.
Advertisement
Groupon has seen multiple benefits since partnering with Crittercism, including:
- Decreased crash rates (from more than 1% to less than 0.02%);
- Faster identification of app issues;
- Same-day response to critical issues; and
- $100,000 revenue impact per hour of downtime.
Although several factors contribute to the success of a mobile app, Burton emphasized the importance of quality assurance (QA): “If you can afford it you definitely want to have an internal QA team or solution testing your apps. Quality assurance is very important to mobile development.”
Monitoring Made Easy
The growing influence of app stores has motivated brands and retailers to improve their mobile experiences on an ongoing basis to stay competitive. “The key thing about app stores has been the idea of a rating system,” van Tonder said. “Your app is in a store with apps that are doing the same thing, so ratings are really important.”
Groupon has received a five-star rating from iOS users and a 4.5-star rating from Android users. Burton attributes this success to the eTailer’s partnership with Crittercism. The mobile application performance management solution helps companies across all categories recognize and prioritize problem areas within their apps.
Groupon partnered with Crittercism because the solution was “super actionable and made monitoring really easy,” Burton said. “[The solution] provides us all the information we need to fix crashes.”
Crittercism tracks traffic upticks and notifies Groupon if any patterns deviate from the norm. Crittercism also monitors app performance, providing analytics and identifying slow API responses.
Not only does Crittercism help identify app issues, it also helps businesses prioritize and address performance hiccups. “When you push out a new version of the app it’s easy for a team to get distracted,” noted van Tonder. Crittercism has helped Groupon focus on the most significant issues and sort problems by the number of affected users.
“Mobile is exploding,” noted van Tonder. He added that with approximately 1.7 billion mobile devices in use this year, tools like Crittercism play a role in managing the ever-growing segment.
