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When you run a mobile campaign, whether it is for acquiring new users or re-engaging the ones you already have, you need to analyze the performance of the campaign, and to do that you need to interpret the metrics. Without fully understanding and monitoring the performance metrics you will never know what might be going well or wrong on them, this also extends to user activity in your app. Having a good understanding of the metrics and what they can tell you is essential to tackle the problems, create new strategies and make your app grow.
But the more the mobile industry evolves, the more metrics we have and having so many metrics coming from different places and platforms can be a bit confusing and overwhelming. That’s why we decided to create this post explaining a few important KPIs and metrics for the industry that are commonly used and that is a must for you as an app marketer to know.
Organic Conversion Rate/Paid Conversion Rate: It is basically the rate at which the non-paid channels convert a user. There are several channels such as organic searches, word-of-mouth, social media mentions, etc… Measuring this KPI gives you an idea of what kind of results people that have a real interest in your app can generate since they did not receive any type of marketing activity to influence them to perform an action. It’s important to have this metric as a benchmark.
Paid ones on the other hand are the opposite, is the rate you convert users from paid channels such as programmatic, ad networks, social media ads, etc… It is important to know the different Conversion Rates from the different paid channels of your campaigns, having a high conversion rate in a channel is a clear sign that the users are open to your app and that you are targeting accurately.
Uninstalls: This one is quite self-explanatory. Users might like your app for a few days, weeks, months but after a while not that much, it is something completely normal for people to uninstall apps, but be aware that this metric is extremely important. Having a high uninstall rate might be a clear sign that something in your app is not working and you need to work fast to understand what it is and solve it, otherwise you can lose a lot of users.
Churn Rate: It is basically the percentage of users who stop using the app in a selected period of time. For example, if in February you had 300 users and at the end of the month you had 150, your churn rate is 50%. This one is also a very relevant metric to see how successful your app is over time.
Retention Rate: It is the metric that measures how many users keep on using your app over a period of time, normally is measured in days. High retention means that the user is very interested in your app and what it provides since he keeps coming back. It is one of the most important metrics for generating revenue in an app, since the more a user uses an app the more the app has the possibility to monetize. Re-engagement campaigns, push notifications, new features, and other efforts are used to raise this metric.
DAU (Daily Active Users) and MAU (Monthly active users): Those are the most active users your app can have they use your app every day and every month. The DAU and MAU are great metrics of the success of your app, they are strictly related to growth and engagement.
Stickiness: This metric is has been used more and more lately, it is the number of times a user opens your app. Social media apps and messaging ones have a high stickiness since there is a huge community using it and they interact with each other.
Stickiness can be calculated like this:
Stickiness=(Daily active users/monthly active users).
ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): With this metric, you will be able to understand how much the users are spending on your app. Keeping an eye on this metric is great to see if there are any seasonalities tendencies or even if changes on the app impact the revenue generated.
CLV(Customer Lifetime Value): The CLV is perhaps one of the most important metrics of your app, it represents how much a customer spends during his lifetime using the app. The Customer Lifetime Value is extremely related to the marketing efforts since sets the base of how much you can pay per user. Having the possibility to understand the CLV per media source is a great strategy to see where to invest.
There is a lot of types of CLV formulas, you just need to find which one suits your app best or even build your own. In this blog post, you’ll find some great simple ways to do it.
Now you are ready to interpret some key metrics of your app and campaigns, let`s get to work and make your app grow! If you need any support or customize a strategy to increase any of the relevant metrics mention above, Rocket Lab is here for you!
