By Brooke Larson, Manager of Account Enablement
The unpleasant truth is that 22% of apps downloaded are never used more than once. This means that even after you successfully attract someone to download your app, you need to ensure that the app will meet their expectations – or plainly, that they will use it. If an app is only used once, upon download, it would indicate that the app didn’t meet the users expectations – which is why they never returned to use the app again.
Measuring and optimizing for the right engagement metrics is the key to attaining and keeping users. And whether your business model is driven by in-app advertising, purchases, or paid subscriptions, driving your revenue is fundamentally dependent on personalization and engagement. The following metrics are critical to this optimization process and we’ll explain why.
Users
Why it’s important to measure: First, you need to understand your users. You need a baseline to understand where users are coming from and what behaviors they exhibit. Typically, app measurement is tracked in terms of DAU (daily average users) , WAU (weekly average users) or MAU (monthly average users). Using advanced analytics you can look at retention to see who your most active users are.
What you can do with the data: By segmenting your data, you can create a baseline from which to optimize your efforts. This means understanding how to monetize users, and how to find users that may not have even downloaded your app yet, so you can drive the behaviors you want and test to see if your optimizations are successful.
For the first time ever, mobile devices accounted for 55% of Internet usage in the US, with mobile apps making up 47% of that total, surpassing PCs.
Session Length
Why it’s important to measure: This metric is important to understand who is spending the most time in your app and to understand why? You can also see this metric grow over time, which would indicate increased engagement.
What you can do with the data: For example, if you have a commerce component in your app, you need to understand how long the checkout takes and see if users are staying on your site long enough to complete this action. If they are not, how do you entice them to stay longer?
Unfortunately, data shows that in the U.S. the average session length is actually declining by 12.5% for 2013.
Session Interval
Why it’s important to measure: This is the time between the users first experience with your app and the next. This is critical to understand the value that they derive from the experience. However, context is also important as some apps may naturally elicit different engagement frequency.
What you can do with the data: By understanding the gap can help you to determine further marketing or push notifications that may be needed to get your users to engage.
Time in App:
Why it’s important to measure: This metric let’s you know how much time your users spend in your app over a period of time. This engagement metric measures behavior over time to give you a clear view of user patterns, allowing you to easily identify how often users are engaging with your app. Users typically spend more time in social apps.
What you can do with the data: If a certain segment of your users is consistently opening your app for long periods of time, you need to dig into the “why?” Are they all following a similar screen flow? Are they making more purchases, or doing research? If yours is a gaming app, does their time in app increase each day around a certain time?
The average consumer actively uses 6.5 apps throughout a 30-day period.
In my next post I will provide 4 more key metrics for App measurement: Acquistions, Screen flow, Retention and Lifetime value.
But for today, the best way to get started is:
1) Take a look at your highly engaged users and identify the behavior that they exhibit that are different from your less active users.
2) Create user segments around device, retention, location, purchase frequency or other key attributes that enable you to trend this data over time
3) Look to your fans and most engaged users and use these behaviors to inform your segmentation and marketing efforts – since your goal is to get more of your users to behave like this group.
