Put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a while and you’ll understand right away why monitoring your mobile app’s key metrics is incredibly important for your business.
Imagine you’re using an app on your smartphone for shopping, social networking, messaging, or some productivity task, and out of the blue, the app crashes while you were in the middle of something important…
How do you know if your users or target customers like your app compared to your competitor’s app? There are hundreds of thousands of apps on the apps marketplace, how do you get your market share?
These are some of the key questions that you’d need to address to determine the success of your mobile app.
To avoid ambiguity and make decision based on actionable insights, start analyzing and monitoring key metrics for your smartphone app.
So what are these metric? Although it depends on the nature of your business or app, largely, there are a few quintessential KPIs that every app’s success depends on. Here are six of the most important performance metrics to measure:
1. Total Downloads: To make your app a success, the very first step is to reach substantial downloads. Since the prime objective of any organization to build a broad user base, this is an essential metric for measuring user engagement.
Tracking the installation source of your app installs plays an imperative role in determining its reach and distribution. You might realize that you’re getting all your installs from organic searches or from a particular location. These insights would evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
2. Number of Active Users: Knowing how many downloads does significantly less than how many are currently using your app. It also gives an insight into your app’s dwell time.
To know the number of users, you can consider Active Users’ Metric (DAU) and (MAU).
DAU will tell you each user using the app. So each person is counted once, whether they use the app ten times a day or once a day.
MAU metric tells you the unique number of app users over a specific period (generally a month).
Pro Tip: Consider using Google Analytics (Google Play Console) for Android and iTunes Analytics for iOS to know who has opened and interacted with your app in the past one month.
3. Application Retention: This metric will tell you how many people are coming back to your app. You can look at a few different retention formulas but the most valuable is the percentage of users that return to your app in a specific period.
For instance, calculate the number of users that used your app in the current month or date range, and compare the numbers for the same group in the previous month or date range.
4.Don’t Overlook Ratings: It certainly stands tall above the rest.
You will get to know what people think of your app, and so can everyone else. The app stores are the best place to showcase user reviews. However, if you have poor ratings, your app’s image would be negatively impacted.
Ensure you interact with your users and gather feedback during the best testing phase to discover what needs to be fixed.
5. Prioritize Session Length: Session length is the duration of time a user spends on your app before closing it. This will help you determine the best time when you can throw a certain call to action or a push message or in-app purchase CTA to bring more engagement or additional revenue.
For instance, if the average active time spent on your app is 10 minutes and an ad appears after 15 minutes, you need to adjust your CTA to launch at the time of the maximum number of active users
6. Consider Devices & Operating System: Do you know what operating systems your customers use? Do they use tablets?
Well, tracking this data allows you to figure out how and where the majority of your users consume your app. Also, you could refine your app to avoid any pitfalls.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing and measuring the metrics of your mobile app is potentially important to keep and attain substantial customers. Utilizing these metrics will help improve your app and build a loyal user base.
