Monitoring the success of your mobile app

Nearly 68% of mobile applications are never used more than once. Creating an engaging user experience is becoming important as brands develop their mobile offerings and hope to meet user expectations. Tracking critical app engagement metrics and using those to inform actionable solutions. We’ve outlined the some metrics you should be measuring and employing to better understand users, improve app health and increase retention across the board.

Assuming that you have launched or are about to launch a native application on either iOS, Android, or both. Following is the comprehensive list of various ways you can measure success of your mobile application so that you can act fast to maximize and improve its value based on incoming data. Being a leading mobile app development company in India, we know what exactly it takes to make your mobile app development project a real success. We are providing a comprehensive list of all the different ways you can measure the success of your mobile application so that you could act fast to improve and maximize its value based on incoming data.

At the highest level, companies should come up with a mobile application marketing strategy that allows them to track by keeping following points as priority:

1) App Downloads

Everyone looks at this, but the metric itself is not really actionable. Here’s why:

The number of app downloads is the metric that’s most commonly-used to judge the performance of an app.  Downloads don’t mean anything at the end of the day. It’s a badge of honor at best. More than 20% of apps that are downloaded are only used once. When users uninstall an app after they’ve downloaded it, the download metric doesn’t change because in effect they did originally download the app. You lose up to 95% of all your app users in the first 90 days of an app download anyway. so overall download stats are meaningless. Literally, statistically.

2) Retention Rates

Great mobile app analytics metric that helps with targeted user campaigns and engaging current customers.

The metric is both a function of your users’ in-app behavior (covered later in the article) as well as a metric tied to in-app monetization. In its most basic definition, the retention rate is the percentage of users who return after their first visit.

Note that “visit” rather than “install”: users may install an app and never open it.

3) User Lifetime Value

Track this and you’ll have the best predictor of future sales.

Another key mobile app analytics metric is the lifetime value of a user.

In typical revenue reporting, you measure how often people spent money in your app based on a certain interval (day/week/month/quarter/year). And that’s a totally legitimate way of tracking revenue for any product — period. But LTV is far more important. This is because it helps track not just revenue per user, but also the potential and future revenue that a user can bring. As such, it becomes a predictive metric for future app

4) In-app Referrals

Encouraging and tracking referral codes and success rates is of critical importance to your app’s success.

Virality is a component of the Lifetime User Value metric, which is glancing at data points to see how often users organically share your application with their friends. However, in-app referrals are such an important factor in the overall success of your app that you should also track them separately.

5) App Performance Analytics

If your app performance isn’t good, a great design and user experience will not matter.

If you want your mobile app marketing strategy to be successful, you need to have an app performance monitoring tool. Every time, and I do mean EVERY time, an app

performs poorly (crashes, lags, errors, slow load times), all your other metrics will be impacted.

In the same report, Appdynamics lists the following performance-specific metrics as the minimum viable metrics to track:

• App Crashes
• App Latency
• End-to-End Application Latency
• App Load per Period
• Network Errors

6) App Ratings and Review Analytics

The overall success of your app will be significantly impacted by how people rate you and how you communicate with your customers when making improvements based on their feedback and ratings.

We live in a world where ratings and reviews represent one of the most important factors in making a purchase decision. 88% of users look at reviews before engaging any business.

As a company, you should always track this metric to ensure the overall satisfaction of your user base is high, and to track how reviews change as you respond to the constantly changing needs and expectations of your mobile users over time.

7) In-app feedback

Allowing users an easy way to report their pain points will lead to a better user experience and faster turnaround for fixing defects. Do it. Today.

An in-app feedback option is becoming more and more popular among companies with a mobile app presence, and for good reason (see examples above from Airbnb and Slack apps).

Returning users – especially the loyal ones – will give you feedback. It takes just a minute for a user to give you in-app feedback, and if you implement it correctly, your logs will include the details of the app version, the device and the operating system.

8) First-time User Drop-off Points

Tracking first-time user drop-off points, and then targeting campaigns to bring them back to the app and complete tasks, is a key mobile app marketing (analytical) for any mobile app.

This is a big one. Even when marketing does a good job and the user ends up downloading the app, it’s only half the battle. The “onboarding” of a customer is what takes time, finesse and constant deploy-measure-iterate sessions to get it right.

9) User time In App

Understanding how much time users spend inside your application will help you determine both their level of engagement with your mobile product and potential areas of improvement.

User time in app is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you want people to spend as much time in your app as possible  — this is particularly true of gaming, news or social apps.

10) Session Interval

The frequency with which users return to your app is critical for predicting future engagements and potential revenue.

This is another very critical metric. What is the frequency with which users return to your app? Do people interact with your app every day/week/month, or less frequently? This is critical for two main reasons.

First, frequency of engagement and conversion is an indicator of future expectations. The second reason why session interval is key is because you can then use it as a retargeting technique. The point is that the company realized my engagement pattern and retargeted me because I’d moved from my habits. That’s a powerful thing.

11) Event Tracking

Event tracking is the best way to ensure a very specific task within your mobile app works as expected.

Here’s the most basic definition of an event: an interaction that a user has with content / functionality on a page. Think of the annoying pop-up asking, “Do you like my app? Give me 5 stars on the marketplace,”  that every app has. That’s an event. So is my exasperated tapping on the button that allows me to dismiss the pop-up while thinking, “God I hate this so much, go away.” Event tracking is the best way to ensure a very specific task within your mobile app works as expected.

12) Funnel Tracking

You need to look at how people react with a funnel and their exit rates to find ways to improve it.

An event refers to a specific interaction with a piece of functionality on the app. A funnel refers to a set of interactions the user engages in, in sequential order, until a task is completed.

The checkout for any eCommerce websites is a funnel. The user goes from cart, to shipping/billing, to placing an order. Whether you have 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 steps in checkout, measuring this effectively is key. The real goal of funnel metrics is to measure the delta between users entering the funnel and those making it all the way to the bottom of the funnel. Depending upon the decrease noticed, you can make improvements at every step to decrease dropout rates. By looking at how people react within a funnel and their exit rates, you can find ways to improve the funnel performance (and hopefully decrease those rates).

If information is power, then data is power. Your mobile app is now one step closer to becoming a success story!

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