A mobile app or web app is essential for most businesses to engage their customers effectively in this digital age. But how do you know – how well your apps are serving their purpose? The answer is ‘success metrics.‘
Success metrics tell you how well your customers are using your apps. It can paint a picture for you if you use it properly. For an app to succeed, you need to find the perfect mix of quantitative results and qualitative ideas to release updates and features that add value to your customers.
Your app’s success depends on how well you track and measure web and mobile app engagement metrics like the app’s performance, user experience, behavioral analytics, etc. Metrics provide you with quantitative results. These results can help you develop qualitative ideas to improve your app. These ideas can be released as updates in your app, and the loop of measurement and continuous improvement goes on until you reach your desired outcome.
Keeping an eye on the app’s success metrics should be a priority for you. This article will help you understand how founders can use the different web and mobile app engagement metrics to measure their app’s success.
Metrics are the performance indicators that help the business measure its growth in different segments like customer engagement rate, installation, churn rate, etc., that indicate the app’s success.
If you own a car, you know how important it is to do the periodic service. In the service, the mechanic analyzes the ‘metrics’ of the car like the condition of brake pads, air filter quality, etc. This analysis lets you know whether or not you need to make modifications to your car. Without periodic checkups, you are putting yourself in danger. The same is the concept behind startup metrics for your mobile and web apps. You need to evaluate it constantly to progress in your business.
Similarly, it’s a necessity for every company to define its web and mobile app engagement metrics and have a close watch so that they can analyze its growth.
Some of the key startup metrics to measure your web and mobile app engagements are:
North star metrics can be defined as guide metrics that accurately measure a company’s long-term success. It is the most important metric that matters as it directly reflects the company’s value and the product that brings value to the company. These success metrics for mobile and web apps vary for different companies based on the type of product a company sells.
A North star metric should always define a product’s progress, its revenue statistics, and the company’s customer value. For example, Instagram’s north star metrics would be its monthly active users, and Saavan’s would be the number of minutes played. Hence these metrics vary based on the product and goals of a company or the business.
It indicates how your app or product makes money for the business. It is the quantitative measurement of the productivity and performance of a business. It focuses on the company’s financial health, which aims to increase its profitability. They are the descriptive statistics used by the founders and the investors to highlight the areas for improvement.
Paid downloads, ad impressions or clicks, in-app purchases, and subscriptions help make money. The average amount of money generated per person multiplied by the size of the total base can give the product’s monetary value.
Customers also involve costs, and these costs can be determined by dividing the gross revenue by the price of advertisement and other related expenses. It is the overall sales and marketing cost required to acquire a customer.
CAC= all marketing expenses/ number of acquired customers
This measures the net profit customers can generate, and most successful apps have a higher CLC and CAC ratio.
Return of investments calculates the amount or the profit you make after spending on paid ads, app development costs, marketing costs, etc.
MRR is the measure of the recurring revenue of your subscription business. It measures how much revenue the product can generate in one month based on new users and existing ones. Some examples of MRR include local SEO services, razors, blades, printers, and ink. etc
The lifetime value is the present value of the future net profit generated by the customer relationship. It helps measure the customer’s long-term value after accounting for customer acquisition costs (CAC).
LTV Calculation
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User engagement metrics involve when, where, and how the users engage with your mobile or web application. They help us evaluate how many people joined, their time on the page, their sign-up, pages they visited, etc. Some of the metrics in this area are:
These success metrics for your mobile and web apps help to understand how useful or engaging your app is to the users of your app.DAU or daily active users determine the number of unique users who come to your app daily, and MAU or monthly active users calculate the number of users engaging the app in a month. The figures you get through these success metrics for your mobile and web apps help to craft limited-time and conversion-targeted campaigns.
The stickiness ratio helps us measure how much value your app users derive from your mobile app, generally measured over months. This calculation includes both DAUs and MAUs, and a higher percentage would indicate that more people found your mobile app engaging and valuable.
Stickiness Ratio = Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU) x 100
The retention rate determines the number of people who return to the app after a specific period. This means that people will tend to return to it whenever you create an app of value.
It tracks the number of times the app has been opened, indicating its popularity. It is defined as the interactions which occur within a given period by a person or group of people.
The daily active users can determine the future growth of an app. This is often considered the primary measure to determine the development and engagement of successful apps.
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User happiness metrics help in understanding why the users unsubscribe from the app. These metrics are self-explanatory as happy customers communicate directly about their happiness.
A review shows that the customer has engaged with your app and their honest reviews help the product improve based on the complaints and appreciations.
Though ratings take less time than writing a review, having a good number of ratings is always good. You must introduce premium versions of the app if the reviews are positive and find a solution to bridge the gap when the ratings are poor.
It measures the rate at which the users unsubscribe or uninstall the app, which indirectly helps the business improve the app. Finding the exact point at which the user unsubscribed or uninstalled the app will give an idea to make the application better and highlight the places for improvement.
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Vanity metrics do not add to the overall productivity of the product and do not translate into something meaningful for the business; however, it will make you look good to others.
For example, the number of views on a reel or likes on a post on social media does not translate into sales. They are hollow metrics that can look nice on the surface but hold little substance.
Innovation is a systematic practice that should be measured timely in your business.
ROI metrics measure resource investments and financial returns. ROI metrics give innovation management fiscal discipline and help recognize the value of strategic initiatives, programs, and overall investment in innovation.
Organizational capability metrics focus on the process of innovation and gear towards building repeatable and sustainable approaches to invention and re-invention.
Leadership metrics address the behaviors that senior managers and leaders must show to help to support a culture of innovation within the organization.
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For small businesses and startups, many affordable tools can be plugged in directly to the business solutions to measure the company’s performance quite simply.
Some of the important tools are given below:
Mixpanel measures user behavior, and interactions help to analyze product usage. Mixpanel uses a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor called jq to understand the path of users, steps they undertake, the time they spend on a single step, etc.
Google has a number of tools like Data Studio, Google Analytics, etc., which helps with data analytics, data visualization, dashboarding, etc. Gsheets from google can be used to analyze ideas and data, which measures the user happiness by calculating the user drop-offs, user scroll depth, etc.
Chartmogul is an analytics tool that helps in visualizing indicators like MRR. Average revenue, churn rate, etc. It is a kind of spreadsheet that helps automate subscription revenue and customer reporting.
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Some tools, such as Crashlytics and fabric, can be highly beneficial for measuring growth from a tech perspective. Crashlytics is a crash reporting tool that helps in giving insights into app issues. On the other hand, Fabrics is a functionality expansion of mobile app analytics. It allows the users to make intelligent decisions and save time.
Reliable web and mobile app engagement metrics tools help you better understand your business and allow you to improve without ingratiating yourself in every aspect of your daily operations. Most startup owners know that they can improve their products by keeping track of their internal metrics. These tools and metrics will help you successfully move forward with your software development process.
Successfully developing a product involves what yields results and what doesn’t and how to measure, what to measure and how to make the needful changes. Once the business model is identified, it is better to understand that the metrics are relevant to your business.
Both the startup founders and product owners should understand the concept of profits, and this can be only measured with the efficient use of the metrics that can help them measure their progress. A profitable business only sells products that people need, use, and pay for. Similarly, people starting a new business will need to build a startup product that can solve customer requirements and are worthy of their financial commitment.
All these can be only attained after having proper financial and analytics metrics, which can help measure the key performance index of the products offered. Hence, these metrics are the critical building blocks of the success of a product for both startup founders and product owners.
If you plan to launch a web or mobile app, consult with a reliable web or mobile app development company to gain better insight into the right web or mobile app engagement metrics to track based on your business requirements.
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The moral of the story is that metrics matter, and checking the app performance helps us analyze where the product or application lacking behind. They help the startups in their mobile app branding and help in building a marketing plan which can engage the target audience.
The metrics mentioned above will help you increase the installation rate and boost the app conversion rate. All you need to do is to choose the right web or mobile app engagement metrics required for your app to set you on a path of growth and improvement for your business.
Reach out to us today for a no-obligation consultation