It took your team months to plan, strategize, develop, design, and market your application so you can deliver best-in-class performance to the users.
Hence, hoping that your customers, subscribers, or users like the app is natural. Or, you expect it to generate at least a decent revenue to walk in the path of making it a success.
But how do you measure success?
How do you know your mobile application is progressing towards your desired goals?
Well, it’s possible if you determine mobile KPIs!
Let’s start!
What are Mobile KPIs?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are certain metrics or parameters that help you determine how your mobile application is performing, future predictions, fix issues, and improve its overall functionality to reap better ROI.
Some mobile KPIs are:
- Business metrics
- Performance metrics
- Engagement metrics
- User-centric metrics
A study showcases that about 80-90% of downloaded applications are only used once before users delete them.
Hence, you need to measure the performance of your app and improve every area where you can.
Determining these parameters will help you guide your development, design, and marketing teams in the right direction where they can increase the better value proposition to users. It can also attract the resources and attention of more shareholders, buyers, and investors.
Ultimately, your mobile app will generate more ROI to you, in addition to better brand awareness.
So, let’s breakdown each of these mobile KPIs and understand how they can help you achieve your goal.
- Business metrics
Your app can be considered successful if it can generate decent revenue and ROI. For this, you need to calculate some business metrics such as cost for every acquisition or retention, lifetime value, etc.
Business metrics are necessary to determine the monetization potential of your mobile application. They help you make data-driven decisions in addition to predicting financial problems that might surface.
So, let’s review what business metrics you are required to measure in order to achieve better app success.
1. Cost per acquisition
Cost per acquisition means how much investment you have made to acquire new subscribers or users.It’s essential to track cost per acquisition because once your app is ready, there are certain costs associated that drive people to install your app, be it marketing efforts or anything else. You need to calculate the average cost you spent on each app download.
Start by calculating costs on app development, design, maintenance, and marketing efforts for each download over a certain time period. This time period can be the same as the time period of your revenue measurement. And it can depend on the nature and type of your business.
Ideally, this cost per acquisition must be as low as possible. And, it must also be lesser than customer lifetime value, which we will discuss next.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
After you acquire a customer, you need to determine how much financial value those customers can generate for your business.
To be precise, it focuses on measuring the amount of money you can expect to derive from consumers on average.
CLTV is an indicator that helps you gauge whether or not you are spending more money to acquire customers than generating value out of them. Your CLTV must be more than the cost per acquisition if you want to remain in the profit quadrant.
- Performance metrics
The mobile KPIs based on performance focus the way your app operates. It is important to measure these metrics because they help you gain deeper insight into all the functionalities and operations of your mobile app, along with the issues that may arise.
By determining performance metrics, you can better optimize your application. You can fix issues like frequent crashes, longer loading periods, etc. and make it seamless for the users.
This way, your customers enjoy using your application, and chances of retaining users increase more. For this, you need to track some performance metrics as explained below:
1. Crash rate
You must keep an eye on your mobile app to determine how many times it crashes in a day, how often, doing what activity, how many users, and more. You can further breakdown this based on the device like what is the number of crashes on Android devices or iOS, and so on.
Frequent crashes disrupt the user experience, frustrates them more, or may even cause data loss. These are enough reasons to drive the users away, hence, affecting your ROI.
But, if you monitor this metric, it will highlight the potential issues, and your team can fix them sooner. You can also measure deeper insights, including crash costs.
2. Application loading speed
Application loading speed means how fast your mobile app loads along in accordance with its features. It is important as nobody likes a slow app that takes forever to load.
You could revisit the past where we had to roll our heads wondering when this page will load. But gone are those days; we have technologies that ensure it no longer must be the case. Otherwise, people start abandoning slow-loading apps.
Ideally, your app must load within 2 seconds. But if it is higher than that, consider optimizing this subject to reap better profits out of your app.
3. API latency
API latency refers to the time an application takes to make a user request to an API and receive a response from it.
Latency must be minimum in order for your app to serve your customers well as no one likes waiting these days. Many app makers are now optimizing their apps for one second of latency, as zero is not yet possible.
If it takes over 3-4 seconds, you need to work seriously on the API latency to provide users with better usability.
- Engagement metrics
The ways users interact with your mobile app is another essential metric you need to track. This is done to ensure they utilize your app and remain your loyal subscribers for you to get better success rates.
For this, you need to understand the usage patterns, in-app behaviour, how much time they use the app, how long they use it, and more.
Monitoring these insights help you improve your app functionality, fix certain areas, optimize it so users can best utilize all the features.
This way, you can have a larger user base and better app monetization strategy for your application. Hence, measure the metrics like:
1. Retention rate
Retention rate here means how many users revisit your mobile app in a given timeframe. It’s not necessary that they will use it every day, but might use it when in need. So, you need to monitor your retention rates as well per month, year, or quarter.
Another way of measuring your retention rate is to push an update notification and watch your users respond to it.
2. Session length
In the world of mobile applications, session length means how much time your subscribers or users spend using your application in a single session. You can calculate it by marking the time when a user launches it, to the time they close it.
When you track app session length, you can discover potential revenue streams via app flows. The goal here is to find a way through which the users spend more time on your app if you serve certain services that require this user behaviour like social media.
But the case can be totally opposite for other industries like Uber. Here, the goal would be to help users find a ride quickly to serve them better.
Hence, session length is not universal and can vary from one industry to another. This is why you need to keep calculating it on average to understand whether your users like your app or not and present more relevant content for them.
3. Session interval
Similar to the session length, there is one more metric called session interval. It is the time lapse between two app sessions. It will give you an idea of how often users open your mobile application and use it.
This metric is great for industries where users do not need to open the app every day or at least not like social media. They use your app when they need it. Use this metric to optimize your user experience while encouraging them for more openings with useful more materials.
For example, you may gain insight like tablet users tend to have long session intervals. It’s the sign that you need to optimize your app design for tablets.
4. Time-in app
Track time-in app metrics to understand how long users spend in your mobile application over a certain period of time. This metric helps you measure user engagement and usage trends.
Use this data to learn what a user does with your mobile app, what sections they love exploring, and more. This way, you can guide your developers to develop and design upcoming app versions based on these trends and user expectations.
For example, if users from a specific location use your mobile app for longer durations, you can check screen flow patterns of those users, how many purchases they make or just explore the app.
This data helps you add more value to users and drives better user experience for that location. You can follow the same procedure to determine the in-app time for other user segments and improve your app engagement.
- User-centric metrics
To get a better understanding of your app user base, you need to monitor user-centric metrics. Measure how large your user base is, how frequently they use your mobile app, and where they are located on the global map.
These insights help you understand user behaviour, which your app development team can utilize to create more personalized elements in the app. As a result of this, retention rates and engagement rates increase.
Therefore, consider measuring user-centric metrics such as:
1. Active Users
One of the most crucial metrics you need to measure is how many active users engage with your mobile app.
According to a report, about 28% of applications are uninstalled within 30 days of their installation.
It implies that not only attracting users to your app is necessary but maintaining their trust with powerful usability works in the long run.
For this, there are two things to measure Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU). These things help you understand the importance of user engagement for your mobile app by reflecting the total number of users who engage with your mobile app daily and monthly.
Use the data to work in the areas requiring improvement. However, DAU and MAU may depend on the industry. Mobile applications for social media like Facebook will have higher DAU and MAU, but for healthcare, food delivery, etc., things might change.
2. Acquisition and Retention
The number of new users who installed your mobile application on their devices is what we are referring by ‘acquisition’. It may happen through paid campaigns, organic search, or word-of-mouth campaigns.
Track how many users you acquired per day or month, through which marketing channel, and from which location. It will help you guide your marketing efforts on the right path.
3. Churn rate
Tracking churn rates are as important as your acquisition and retention rates. It is actually just the opposite of retention rate. It is the rate with which users uninstall your mobile application or cancel its subscription.
You need to keep an eye on this metric because it directly affects your revenue and business. The reasons can be many like poor usability, app crashes, lack of fresh content, better app in the market, and more.
However, sometimes it becomes difficult to understand the exact reasons. But if you keep a sharp eye on all the metrics, it will be easier to spot issues and fix them. Thus, you can work on getting better retention rates with the help of this insight.
Conclusion
Tracking metrics associated with your mobile app’s performance, user experience, engagement, and cost expenditure is important.
If you only focus on development, design, maintenance, and marketing without measuring how your users and subscribers are responding to your app, you will never know where you are lacking and why you are not achieving the desired profit out of it.
Thus, keep an eye on these 12 mobile application KPIs to improve your application in 360 degrees and fix issues to provide a better user experience. And when all these things are met, you can expect to witness better ROI and profit margins.
Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.
