How does Quora.com and Wikipedia measures their monthly active users?

You'll find that looking at top line revenue alone won't provide much value to you if you are asking the question "Is my advertising spend worth it?" Typically, in advertising I want to know the Lifetime Value of the customer or the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Then, it boils down to : If I spend $100 to acquire this new customer and he spends $150 over the lifetime of his paid relationship with me then, yes--- my ad spend is worth it. On the other hand: I could spend 10K this month in ads. I could sign up 20K in users/customers/top line revenue. But my data will tell me I spent MORE per customer/user than they are actually worth over the average lifetime. So that's what usually answers the "Is it worth it" question in any advertising scenario. 1. How much to acquire the user? 2. How much does the user spend over the avg lifetime? If it doesn't make sense, it's not worth it, regardless of what your top line revenue tells you. You might find this blog post on cohort analysts valuable as it goes into more detail. (I have no affiliation.) https://apsalar.com/blog/2012/01/how-to-use-cohort-analysis-to-improve-revenue/

You may think many users automatically prohibit the sending of push notifications and that may be the case for those who feel push notifications are intrusive and annoying. That being said, research actually indicates that app retention and engagement are up In fact, 68% of users opt-in to push notifications according to Responsys' research (http://www.responsys.com/blogs/nsm/mobile-marketing/push-notifications-marketers-new-power-tool/ ). Furthermore, research shows that engagement is up because of push notifications (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1010950). . That's why marketers are focusing in on push notification strategies according to Localytics research http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Proof-App-Push-Notifications-Actually-Matter/1011149. So if you know of an app getting poor engagement over time, the question really should be "Why is our app not engaging and what would engage users?" Also, "Is it obvious what benefit someone gets by opting into the push notifications?"

There are some market-research companies which have very detailed sector specific knowledge. Thus, they are not freely available for consumers. Here are a few to get you started: http://www.mintel.com/ https://www.marketresearch.com/ https://www.marketresearchreports.com/ https://www.ibisworld.co.uk/

You mention, that you can code and maintain yourself, and at the same time it sounds like your data can be dispersed across multiple sources. And you want to minimise license cost. In my business we use R a lot for both analysis and reporting. It is free (open source), but you will have to build programs. But it will read any format, and also create output to any destination you want. So you could start off with a mix of R, Excel and pdf, just to get things going. However, it could make sense for you to build a database already so you familiarise yourself with data warehouse thinking, since you want to expand with marketing automation. At that point you will need a database for monitoring response, sales etc. So it is important to build the right foundation as ealy as possible. If you don't want to code, but want point-and-click, there is boatloads of software for that, but probably more license cost (unless you can find open source for that). So If I were you, I would start off with something smaller. After all, you want to focus on the value you create for the business and your colleagues, and the time you save, rather than a smooth IT-infrastructure for this. I have lots of experience building reporting and analysis in the areas you mention, so if you want to discuss further, feel free to set up a call. Good look with your development. Best regards Kenneth Wolstrup

There are three types of metrics that you want to collect. 1) Aggregate metrics 2) Cohort metrics 3) Funnel metrics A tool like Flurry is OK for aggregate metrics. Google Analytics for mobile is probably the better choice depending on your needs. For cohort and funnel metrics, I prefer using Mixpanel. And for tracking App installs I prefer Tapstream. For a deeper dive into the above analytics types above, I recommend reading Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz.