Most brands are coming up with apps to engage their users and make it easier for them to easily access any products or services. To have a successful app, analytics is important. Businesses should know their user behavior to make better choices for their apps. What you measure or track also matters. Tracking the right metrics from downloads, interactions, and loyalty will give you valuable insights into the performance of your app.
There are a lot of analytics tools and platforms that can help you measure app user behavior and provide you valuable insights about users and how they interact with your apps. However, the information and metrics provided by these tools can become overwhelming. So, it is crucial to know which KPIs and metrics you need to be tracking to get results relevant to your business.
Here is a list of some important app metrics and KPIs and examples of what business cases these metrics matter on that you can track to measure the success of your app.
Downloads
Tracking app downloads and installations is a basic metric that everyone tracks, It’s a good indicator of an app’s popularity. However, this metric will not be able to tell you the real success of your app. Many users may download your app and never use it or may uninstall it after a while.
Keeping that in mind it is still a good practice to have these figures as it will lay the foundation to track other metrics.
You can get a better picture if you use this metric (app downloads) for registrations, signups, and/or app downloads vs engaged users over some time.
If your goal is revenue, you can compare total number of downloads versus total revenue. This would give you an average lifetime value of each download. You can apply a similar concept to app users versus app downloads versus app revenue.
App Acquisition
App acquisition shows you where all the downloads are coming from. It allows you to see the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and channels. This will help you invest in the channels that are valuable and cut off those that are not generating any profits. This will ensure you invest your time, money and efforts in the right places.
A good way to look at this metric would be to compare engagement across various acquisition channels, cost of acquisition across various channels and ROI across the different acquisition channels. This can help you direct your budget towards the most profitable channels and reduce wasted spend on the least performing channels. However, keep in mind that there could be some channels that may be indirectly impacting the high-performing acquisition channels.
For example, a retargeting campaign may not be bringing new revenue or users but it might be impacting the engagement of already acquired users and thus helping you retain those paying users.
Want to build your own app marketing strategy? Read our blog on How To Build A Strong App Marketing Strategy.
Active Users
Everyone who downloads your app doesn’t need to be an active user. Active users frequently open and engage with your app. It is important to track the level of interest your users have in your app and this metric does just that. It shows you how useful your app is to users.
Google Analytics considers an active user as the one who has opened and interacted with your app within the last 30 days. Active users are segmented as Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU). DAU measures the number of users who have interacted with your app at least once a day. MAU measures the number of users who have used your app at least once a month.
Session Intervals
The average app session interval or length tells you how much time a user spends interacting with your app in a single session. This helps you find out how engaged your users are and is your app useful to them. If you want to improve your session interval metric, try to get the users to interact with your app daily. Present them with frequent offers, updates or any new features that will encourage them to engage with your app.
Screens
You can evaluate the performance of each screen in your app. This report will give you insights into screen metrics like the number of screen views, unique screen views, and percentage of exit from a screen.
Stickiness
The stickiness ratio shows how often your users return to the app. In order to calculate stickiness, you just need to divide DAU by MAU and multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage. The higher your percentage the more often your users return to your app. This means the closer your DAU is to your MAU the stickiness of your app is high.
Cohorts
One of the very common techniques to measure user engagement is called cohort analysis. A cohort is a group of users who share a common characteristic. For example, users with the same Acquisition dates belong to the same cohort. This helps you to isolate and examine cohort behavior.
You can use cohort analysis to see the response of individual cohorts to marketing efforts like emails or notifications. You can also see how the behavior of users changes from days to months. And you can also organize these users based on shared characteristics.
Based on these reports you can improve retention of your app and create long-term customers.
Event Reporting
Events are user interactions with your content that can be measured independently and don’t require a new screen to load. Downloads, ad clicks, and video plays can be measured as events. Event reports are customizable and will not include any data until you set it up.
While setting up Events, you can define up to five components or categories for each Event. Then you assign values to these categories and the data will then appear in the Events report. When you organize your Event Tracking well it becomes easier to read and interpret your data.
Retention Rate
App retention rate measures how many users you return to your app after a set period. People are constantly looking for new apps and engaging with a variety of content daily. Hence, keeping their attention amid all the competition can be challenging.
This metric can be especially useful if you add a new feature or update to your app. It can help you find out how successful these updates were, and did they retain the users.
Lifetime Value
An app Lifetime value (LTV) helps measure how much value each customer brings to your app.
LTV should always be greater than Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), that shows you how much acquiring new users costs you. If your LTV is not greater than CPA it means you are paying more for your customers. This metric is useful to determine if you are spending money on valuable customers or not.
App Churn
App churn can be used along with the retention metric. It measures how many users stopped using your app. App churn is more important if your best or most active users stop using your app as compared to the new users. Although losing new and occasional users does result in a missed opportunity.
If your app has a high churn rate you need to analyze what kind of users are leaving your app. In the case where most users are leaving soon after downloading the app, it means that you might have some problems with your app. Scan your app for any bugs, errors, or other performance issues. And if your users are leaving sometime after using your app that means they don’t find your app exiting anymore. Introduce new features or updates in your app that might provide long-term value to your customer and which can retain them.
Touch Heatmaps
Touch heatmaps track the areas on the screen which the user interacted the most with. They are useful to analyze which features the user interacts with the most and which they use the least. This can help you track the behavior of your users as they interact with your app. Using this metric, you can also fix certain errors that the users come across and make significant changes to your app. This can improve the overall user experience and encourage the users to spend more time on your app.
Net Promoter Score
An app’s Net Promoter Score is the possibility of a user referring the app to someone else. Net Promoter Score is measured on a scale of 1-10. The users who are on a 9-10 scale will promote the app, and the ones with 7-8 are passives. Whereas the ones below that are detractors and will not recommend it. Promoters are important to your app success as they can help you promote your app. To boost your promoter score you can focus on prioritizing customer support. You can also track the detractors and send them an email or in-app messages to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction with the app.
Attribution
Attribution helps you track the sources that brought users to your app. This metric is important as it can enable you to see which marketing campaign or channel encouraged the user to try your app. For example, if you used paid ads to promote your app and it successfully brought traffic to your app, then you can continue to invest in it. Attribution shows you which marketing campaigns are more effective than the rest. You can focus on the ones that work for you and save your time and resources on the less successful ones.
App Speed
Lastly, monitor app speed to see how fast your app loads and performs. Every user expects the app to load fast without lagging. Slow loading and discourage the user and push them to exit your app. They may stop using your app and look for similar apps that perform faster. To avoid this, make sure to keep monitoring your app speed. Your app developer can optimize your app or fix any errors that are affecting your app’s performance. There are performance monitoring tools that can use that show you the speed of your app. App speed is an important metric to track the performance of your app.
Every business is different hence you might want to use metrics that are relevant to your business. It is always good to check your business goals before you start tracking metrics. This will help you assess your requirements.
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