Our Blog

AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are becoming the first port of call for consumer questions. Murmuras has expanded its on-screen measurement technology to capture real GenAI usage—tracking questions, AI responses, and user interactions across 3,000 German users. This new measurement enables companies to understand how AI applications impact brand visibility, SEO, and content strategy.

The use of retail apps like Mein dm or Lidl Plus is growing rapidly – and with it the personalization of coupons. Murmuras has used new on-screen technology to investigate how personalized app offers really are and how successfully they are redeemed. The combination of app tracking and receipt matching provides a complete picture for the first time.

SMobI is an innovative app that uses AI to analyse mobility routines and support users in switching to sustainable modes of transport. Real-time intervention techniques help to break habits, while transport associations and local authorities receive new impetus for climate-friendly mobility strategies.

An increasing number of retailers are relying on exclusive app-based offers and personalized coupons. A new consumer panel with 3,000 participants provides innovative opportunities for generating insights. The collected data offers valuable insights for retailers and manufacturers, helping to better understand customer behavior, assess the impact of discounts and develop more targeted strategies.

Murmuras won the 17th Science Award for Best Startup with their innovative platform for analyzing Retail Apps and mobile consumer behavior. Founded in 2019 at the University of Bonn, the company has evolved from a technology provider in academia to an analysis firm specializing in Retail Apps.

While coupons are a beloved feature, the analysis indicates that leading retail apps are still in the early stages of implementing personalized strategies. However, a case study highlighting the success of a Payback coupon for L'Oréal products in the Mein dm app demonstrates promising strides in targeted offers based on detailed user data, signaling an emerging trend towards personalization in retail apps.

The retail industry is in the midst of a digital transformation, with apps from major retailers such as Lidl, Edeka, and DM gaining increasing popularity. How can retailers and FMCG leverage this trend? Murmuras has developed an on-screen technology that captures behavioral in-app data from real users in retail apps. The collected data can be analyzed through an insights platform, enabling the optimization of offers and campaigns.

The food giants in Germany are pushing their own apps. This is shown by a study by Murmuras, in which the food retail app behavior of the four major food retailer groups in Germany was recorded and analyzed.* In the first part, the general app usage of 945 users in Q4 2021 is compared with Q4 2022. In the second part of the article, the actions in the respective top apps such as Lidl Plus or EDEKA are evaluated.

Even during Christmas season, the ongoing crises affect many areas of the economy. Companies are saving on their marketing budgets, which is also reflected in mobile advertising. After years of increasing spending on mobile advertising, we saw a slight decline in ads in the social media apps Facebook and Instagram (last four weeks compared to last year). However, the strongest advertisers show an opposite trend. Amazon, REWE and Disney+ - top advertisers in Facebook - show more ad presence than in 2021. OTTO, Netflix and Warner Bros - top advertisers in Instagram - significantly increase their mobile reach compared to the previous year.

Fake news poses a central threat to the political process and social cohesion. They influence elections and lead people to nonsensical or even terrorist behavior. Therefore, in the project DeFaktS, Murmuras tries to empower the actual users to better reflect on news and social media posts and thus limit the spread of false information.

Advertising for city trips, price comparison for beach vacations, shopping for camping equipment - the topic of vacation is fully present in people's minds in the summer of 2022, despite current world events. In a recent study, we analyzed activities and content around the topic "vacation" from real in-app smartphone usage data and looked at advertising, browsing, and shopping behavior.

In part 2 of our tutorial series, we show you how to analyze long format smartphone usage data from the Murmuras Platform in R. You will learn to compute mean phone usage, average phone sessions per day, mean app usage durations, and more. You will also gain insight in basic processing of location data, and comparing mobility behavior of students and employed people.

This tutorial shows you how to analyze smartphone usage data from the Murmuras Platform in R. In Part 1, you will learn to identify most-used apps in your sample, compare app usage of women vs men, and plot monthly mean app usage duration of WhatsApp, Instagram and Youtube.

In addition to painted eggs and chocolate bunnies, Germans spent their 2022 Easter season using smartphone apps. We analyzed in-app behavioral data, taking a special look at ads seen and shopping behavior. The analysis is based on real in-app smartphone usage data from everyday life - without any questionnaires or cookies.

2023 is the end of third-party cookies in Chrome. As part of the Privacy Sandbox" initiative, Google wants to introduce a number of changes that should assure users of greater privacy and control over their data. But the new cookie rule in particular has caused an uproar in the advertising industry. How much tracking will still be possible?"

The Corona pandemic continues to shape people's everyday lives in 2021. We are continuing our article series on Christmas shopping behavior. Our analysis focuses on Black Week with Black Friday, in comparison to the previous weeks of November. The analysis is based on real in-app smartphone usage data from everyday life - not on questionnaires.

On Monday, October 4th all Facebook apps stopped working for around six hours. With Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger down, smartphone users were forced to use different apps, especially for communication. We investigated, how people changed their smartphone behavior.

We provide you with free tools to study participants’ behavior in real-time. Create a study on our web platform, collect smartphone usage, mobility, and questionnaire data via app and export it into your preferred statistics program.

Since both digital activities (e.g., app usage) and behavior in the physical world (GPS/mobility) can be captured via cell phones, this multi-channel technology is specifically suited for optimizing public transit planning.

Social media platforms like Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook dominated the most used apps of the past year. WhatsApp is

A widely-received 2010 study found happiness does not increase above an annual income of $75,000. A methodically better 2020 study based on smartphone-data challenges this finding. Who's right, and how did smartphone-data contribute to the new insights?

Corona has changed shopping and consumer behavior significantly. Due to lock-down (-light), people relied more on online and mobile shopping to buy gifts for Christmas. To study shopping trends before Christmas in 2020, Murmuras analyzed real-time shopping app usage & mobility behavior of 863 participants living in Germany. Data was collected from July till mid of December 2020 with participant's consent.

A large proportion of the working population still uses their smartphone after 11 pm. At the same time, 65% of phone alarm clocks ring before 7 am. In every fifth night, smartphone free time is less than 6 hours at a stretch. These are results from a Murmuras study with 860 participants from Germany from July until October 2020, where real smartphone data was analyzed.

Smartphone apps are supposed to play a key role in fighting the spread of coronavirus. We analyzed mobility behavior and smartphone app usage of 668 people, to find out whether users of Corona-Warn-App behave differently compared to people who do not use the app. Our results indicate that they do, but not in the way we expected.

As constant companions, smartphones provide unique insights into people's daily lives and behaviors. While big tech companies have been using these insights for over 10 years, the method is only now emerging in the academic world. But what exactly can be measured with smartphone data? Which academic researcher can actually benefit from using this method? And what about data privacy?

In both scientific and market research, surveys are among the top used data collection methods to get insights into human behavior. The questionnaire, as a research method, pioneered almost 200 years ago in London. While since then, the medium of conducting a survey has changed from paper-and-pen to online, the technique itself has essentially stayed the same. New technologies and neuroscience often offer more insightful ways to measure human behavior.

To get a better understanding of how the corona pandemic has impacted people’s lives during lockdown, we looked at smartphone behavior. Here, we describe how real-time app usage of 755 study participants from Germany has changed. We found several interesting trends when looking at the collected data since January 2020.