Mobile applications are seemingly taking over the world. In 2017 alone, there were nearly 200 billion apps downloaded worldwide and that number is only expected to rise in the coming years. In addition to mobile apps, several different companies will release web apps that have a wide range of functions, as well.
In order to track the success of your app, you need to be aware of certain analytics and metrics, as they can tell you whether your app is becoming successful or slowly fading into obscurity. This article is going to go over a few of the most important metrics that matter for your app.
Retention Rate
While someone downloading your app is great, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. In fact, more than 75% of people don’t open an app after the first time. As a result, the amount of downloads you have isn’t indicative of how successful your app is. Instead, you should look at your retention rate as it can be a better indication of success.
Your retention rate is how many people return to your app after their initial visit. You should try to aim for around a 25% retention rate, but the appropriate rate for your app will depend on your industry. If you find your retention rate is low, you should look at it over a daily, weekly and monthly period, to see if you see any trends of reasons why it’s low. The single best way to increase retention isn’t to add more features or make it look better, it all has to do with making the user experience as engaging as possible.
Active Users
Finding out how many active users you have is perhaps the best way to see how impactful your app has been. If people use it actively, it has become a part of their lives and thus, they are among your most important users, and likely the source of the bulk of your profit. There are different segments of active users, such as daily active users and monthly active users, and different tools have different rules for what an “active user” is.
In order to increase the active users of your app, be sure to utilize features like push notifications, and be sure to perform frequent updates to ensure users always have new content and features to incentivize users.
One of the worst things for your active user numbers is the app crashing or being unavailable for one reason or another. With this in mind, you should be using a solution like Loggly to manage and store logs, which can help you to find issues or negative trends within your logs and fix them before they become an error to the end user.
Cost Per Acquisition
Gaining some interest in your app and getting your first few users is an exciting time, but at some point, you will need to begin to concern yourself with how much each user or customer costs you. Getting customers isn’t free, as you’ll be paying for marketing, advertising, PR, web hosting and more. Even costs like accounting, sending invoices and staff salaries can be considered the money you are spending to acquire new customers.
The amount you spend to get each customer is called cost per acquisition, and it is essentially the amount you spend to get an active/paying customer. Of course, you want your cost per acquisition to be as low as possible and this can be done through optimizing your marketing efforts, remarketing, abandoning unsuccessful campaigns and generating more “word of mouth” advertising.
Lifetime Value
While having any users at all is a good feeling, you eventually want to make some money and to do it, you will need users to pay for something, whether it is a subscription, in-app purchase or more. The total amount that you receive from a user throughout their time using your app is known as their lifetime value.
As you could imagine, it is important that your cost per acquisition is lower than the lifetime value of each customer. If not, as you gain more users, you will essentially be losing money over time, not making it. In order to increase your lifetime value, you need to be knowledgeable about what your users want in terms of updates and options and using this feedback to provide them with the content or features they want and would pay for.
Average Session Time
While people visiting and using your app is great, you also want them to be engaged as possible while visiting your app. Normally, the longer a person spends in your app, the more engaged they are. You want to track how long people use your app, and the longer a person stays within your app, the better.
So how do you increase average session time? Well, there are a few different things you can do. You can constantly add new content and updates, can “gamify” the experience to increase engagement and ensure your app is something people can use for long periods without boredom.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
The metric is all about evaluating users and measuring the potential growth of a business. Customers/users are generally broken down into three categories, which are: detractors, passives, and promoters. Detractors can hurt your app via negative word of mouth, passives are users who will use your app but won’t tell others and promoters are users who love what you do and will share this love with others.
Of course, your goal should be to have more promoters than detractors and this metric is measured between -100 to +100. The way this metric is calculated is simple, if you have 45% promoters and 20% detractors, your NPS will be +20. 0 is considered the average score, anything over 50 is considered excellent and anything under 0 is bad as it means you have more detractors than promoters, which will hurt your growth.
In conclusion, the apps we have listed and talked about within this article are some of the most important to track. By knowing these metrics, you will get a better sense of how successful your app is, whether it’s growing and so much more. Without consulting and utilizing metrics, tracking the success of your app can prove difficult. Hopefully, this article can inspire you to start tracking metrics for your app to give you the best chance of success.
