Mobile operating systems serve diverse purposes – generating revenue, connecting with people, raising brand awareness, selling items, services, and more.
We aim to share the most important app metrics every company should track to keep their software healthy, strong, and successful. Monitoring results helps entrepreneurs better understand customers, boost service performance, and increase retention at different stages of app lifecycle.
We will discuss metrics for measuring engagement, satisfaction, performance, and revenue indicators.
App Usage
Did you know that statistically 25% of all installed apps are used only once?
Today's competition is tough, therefore, tracking usage and engagement metrics is crucial to understand how your audience interacts with a platform and how to encourage people to use your apps more.
Let's explore key user engagement metrics you should consider.
Number of Installs
App installs are a reliable metric for measuring app success.
Getting a high number of installs means it’s time to use your marketing tools to define specific essentials.
To improve your app metrics for engagement, take a closer look at your operating system name, features, app icon, keywords, and the like. Remember, App Store algorithms deviate from Google Play metrics, so act accordingly.
Active Users
Interesting point: Not everyone who installs your app becomes an active user. Active users are considered those who consistently open the app and regularly engage with it.
Well, how to identify whether a user is an active user or not? This relates to the analytics tools you decide to use.
Google Analytics claims that if a person has set up and used a service within the last thirty days, then they are an active user.
The metric in question can be categorized into two subgroups: Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users.
Daily Active Users, or simply DAU, is the number of customers who enjoy your app and visit it at least once a day. And, Monthly Active Users, in short, MAU, is the number of customers who use your app at least once a month.
Tracking Active Users
Here is an example from Google Analytics.
As you see in this chart, you can filter the page to see the number of visitors who have used the app or website during a specified period.
Session Duration
You should consider session duration one of the most important app metrics to track. The metric is the time a person spends using an app after opening it.
Thus, you can easily motivate your people to use your website and app more.
Let’s say, mobile phone users spend a longer time using the application compared to computer users. This means you should adjust specific features of your mobile app – like screen display, scrolling, etc. – to encourage your customers who use mobile phones more often.
Maybe it's time to include a push notification system as part of your retention techniques. With such a move, you can create more engaging communications with your users.
Average Session Duration
The mentioned business metric can be used to assess usage trends to see if a particular group of customers consistently uses your service over a sustained period.
Why do you need this detail? With such information you can plan further apps to better serve your customer’s needs. From such a perspective, this metric is highly valuable for engagement.
Average Daily Session Duration for Daily Active Users (DAU)
Using the mobile service metric, it’s established how much a daily active user enjoys your app, thus there is another metric to measure your success. However, the engagement metric in question is only applicable in a few markets, for instance social media apps and e-commerce apps.
Please note, if you see customers open your app once a day, it doesn't mean users aren't sufficiently engaged.
Churn Rate
Churn rate measures app uninstalls and cancellations of your app subscriptions.
Increasing churn rates are detrimental, no matter what market segment you work in. Although, the biggest challenge with this business metric is that it’s quite difficult to identify the reasons why your people decide to leave your app for good. This might happen due to reduced usability, lack of fresh content, moving to competitors, experiencing technical issues, e.g. crashes, etc.
Abandonment Rate
Don't confuse abandonment rate with the previous one, as they have different indicators, despite both tracking usage and engagement metrics. An app is considered abandoned by someone who installed it but never used it or even registered.
Want to improve your mobile app's performance in this regard? Deeply examine your onboarding and login processes to figure out how to make them faster, smoother, and easier.
Apparently, a user has some interest in installing an app, but something prevents them from using it. Maybe it’s about the data you request from the audience.
It’s not smart to ask for excessive personal data from customers to allow them to use an app.
The best decision is to try to make the registration process easy.
Conversion Rate
Such a metric helps you weigh your profits by tracking specific metrics.
When planning to monetize in-app purchases, find ways to build simple and clear processes for the audience.
If it takes multiple clicks and searches through multiple pages for a person to order an item through your website or app, chances are the person can abandon a process halfway without paying you anything.
Why not review each step that customers take from the purchase origin to the final conversion? Try to keep those steps simple and straightforward.
It is essential to determine what specific points and steps cause abandonment. Then you know what to focus on in the first place. As soon as you solve these issues, you will see your conversion rate growing.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
This type of metric shows how much money you have spent for each app installation.
The main reason why you should track app acquisition costs is to define the right dedicated channels to boost your installs.
However, at times you want to have more specific figures on the costs of audience acquisition.
