Launching a mobile app is only the beginning, and in today’s hyper competitive digital landscape, it has to be done right. App success means understanding how your app is working, engaging users and growing the business. For this reason, mobile app metrics become powerful. This article discusses the must have metrics for mobile app’s success particularly by looking at measuring user acquisition and overall growth that will help your app continue to grow.
If you have no understanding of what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are, then you are really flying blind. Although you may have a fully functionally rich and well-structured app, without knowing the required feedback metrics, you are unlikely to know if the app is resonating with the target audience or if it is retaining the users and generating the intended results. All these can cause wasted marketing spend and missed opportunities for improvement ultimately to a stagnated or failing app.
Today, we are going to guide you through some of the must monitor app user acquisition metrics and wider mobile app growth metrics. Knowing these metrics will allow you to learn about the user’s behavior, identify the areas which need to be optimized, and based on this information take decisions that will help drive sustainable growth.
Key Metrics for Tracking to Master the Art of User Acquisition
There is no lifeblood of any growing mobile app more important than getting new users into it. Not all acquisitions, however, are alike. If you would focus on the right app user acquisition metrics, you would be able to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts. There are some crucial ones to monitor here:
- App Installs: This is the most basic metric, representing the number of times your app has been downloaded. It is good to have a lot of installs, but you need to go deeper. Find out where they are being installed from. Are they paid (from advertising campaigns) or are they organic (from app store searches)? Breaking down the system will enable you to optimize your acquisition strategies.
- Cost Per Install (CPI): This metric calculates the average cost you incur for each new app install from your paid marketing campaigns. If your CPI is high it may tell you that although your targeting is correct your ad creative is ineffective, or your audience doesn’t fit the acquisition channel properly. Tracking CPI across different channels allows you to identify the most cost-effective ways to acquire users.
- Conversion Rate (Install to Registration/First Action): Install to Registration/First Action and other metrics are not critical to success. You want them to use it. The idea behind this metric is to understand the percentage of users who finish some key action once or immediately after any installation, by creating an account, moving through onboarding or performing some defined action within the app. This means that if you have a low conversion rate on your onboarding flow or if the user expectations are not met by the app’s initial experience, there is significant friction in the onboarding flow itself.
- User Acquisition Cost (UAC): This is a broader metric that encompasses all costs associated with acquiring a new user, including marketing spend, sales efforts (if applicable), and any other related expenses. Understanding your UAC is crucial for determining the overall profitability of your user acquisition efforts.
- Organic vs. Paid User Acquisition: As mentioned earlier, differentiating between organic and paid installs is vital. A healthy growth strategy relies on a strong organic presence, driven by app store optimization (ASO), word-of-mouth, and brand recognition. Monitoring the ratio of organic to paid users helps you understand the long-term sustainability of your acquisition efforts. A high reliance on paid acquisition can be costly in the long run.
Essential Mobile App Growth Metrics for Fueling Sustainable Growth
With the users acquired, a new focus involves maintaining the users, getting them engaged, and finally growing out of them. These mobile app growth metrics of your mobile app give you insights on the viability of your app for the long run:
- Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): This counts the number of unique users using your app daily or monthly. If you are seeing a growing trend in DAU and MAU that your app is showing value and is still interesting to users. You can get the idea of how often users return to your app by analyzing the ratio between DAU and MAU (stickiness ratio).
- User Retention Rate: The most crucial ones are metrics concerning user Acquisition Rate; the percentage of users acquiring your App from the beginning of time (this includes all free apps that don’t have a big Trial as Acquisition, but Number of Acquisitions is still a relevant metric). A strong indication of long term value and user satisfaction is high retention rates. The low retention indicates that the users are churning, and you need to find out why.
- Churn Rate: The inverse of retention, churn rate represents the percentage of users who stop using your app within a specific timeframe. Understanding your churn rate helps you identify potential issues with user experience, content, or value proposition. Analyzing churn by cohort (groups of users acquired at the same time) can reveal patterns and help you pinpoint when and why users are dropping off.
- Session Length and Frequency: This will help you see how well your content is being consumed by your audience and calculate if there’s a possibility that your users are engaging with your content only once or a couple of times. Such metrics will tell you if the user is getting better involved because of your value added content or they just happen to come across it unexpectedly the same day.
- User Lifetime Value (LTV): It’s a metric that estimates how much your user base is going to make for you over its entire user lifetime. Knowing your LTV is important so you can figure how profitable your user acquisition efforts will be, as well as how you can set your marketing budget. In general, a healthy app will have an LTV far greater than its UAC.
- Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): The Average Revenue Per User indicates the average revenue earned from each active user over a particular phase. It allows you to track the monetization effectiveness from your app (monetize ARPU), discovering the ways of revenue generation through in app purchases, subscriptions or advertising.
- Virality and Referral Rate: If your app has some features encouraging people to invite others, you will have to monitor your virality and referral rate. High referral rate suggests the organic growth of your app is on track and your users love the app and are extremely ‘fingers right’ and enthusiastic to share about the app with their peers.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
Keeping track of all these metrics for a mobile app’s success will not be enough. The true worth of data lies in its analysis and how those trends can be interpreted and acted upon in a way that brings about meaningful business outcomes. A good example is if you see a high churn rate occurring in the first week; it might be worth reviewing your onboarding process, or studying usability problem that is causing users to leave. Likewise, if a specific acquisition channel possesses a low CPI but in addition has a low retention rate, you should reconsider the type of users bought on that channel.
Regularly monitoring these mobile app growth metrics and app user acquisition metrics will empower you to:
- Optimize your marketing campaigns
- Improve user experience
- Refine your monetization strategy
- Make data-driven product decisions
- Measure the impact of your efforts
In conclusion, understanding and actively monitoring your mobile app metrics is not just a good practice, it’s a necessity for sustainable growth in today’s competitive app market. By focusing on key app user acquisition metrics and broader mobile app growth metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your users, optimize your strategies, and ultimately unlock the full potential of your app. Mobile measurement partners deliver decisions, driven by accurate data, which are the cornerstone of mobile app success, and it encourages app developers and marketers to embrace the power of these essential metrics. Partnering with a reliable MMP may enhance your campaigns.
