The Buzinga PodcastEp 5: The 5 App Metrics That Are Crucial To Your App’s Success

• Hey guys, Logan Merrick here and you’re listening to episode 5 of The Buzinga Podcast:

• The number 1 resource for startups building and growing their business in the tech space.

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The Buzinga PodcastEp 5: The 5 App Metrics That Are Crucial To Your App’s Success

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• How you can listen to this podcast:

1. On iTunes2. Through any podcast app on your smartphone3. Listen on our blog at buzinga.com.au/buzz with

shownotes for each episode.4. Watch with accompanying slides on Youtube5. Just read the slides on Slideshare

What we’re talking about todayApp metrics

• “It’s not enough anymore to just capture data – everyone is collecting data, and most people aren’t doing anything with it.” Matt Denman, City Lead and Data Nerd at Uber Melbourne – at our 1st Pollinate event

• Vanity metrics like downloads aren’t indicative of how much users are actually engaging in your app.

• Data will form the backbone of your future app updates and marketing strategies.

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In this episode…

1. Acquisition metrics2. Engagement metrics3. Behaviour metrics4. Quality metrics5. Retention metrics

We’ll also cover how to improve each of these metrics.

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1. Acquisition Metrics

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• Acquisitions represent the amount of people who have downloaded and installed your app.

• They show whether your user base is growing and where your users are coming from.

1. Acquisition Metrics

What you can find out from acquisition metrics:

• What channels are the new acquisitions coming from? This will show you where to pour more of your ad budget into.

• What is the percent of downloads that turned into opens? This will show you which ad networks (eg Facebook) are bringing in the highest value users, not necessarily the greatest number of users.

• What is your cost per acquisition? This will reveal the return on investment for each acquisition campaign

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1. Acquisition Metrics

What you can find out from acquisition metrics (continued…)

• How are your app store ratings and reviews? This will reveal public perception of your app, giving you qualitative (anecdotal) feedback

• What is your conversion rate of app store traffic to downloads? You may need to optimise your description/screenshots to push conversions.

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1. Acquisition Metrics

The 1 big takeaway from acquisition metrics:

• The real value of acquisition metrics is in analysing how your acquisition campaigns are performing.

• Where are the new acquisitions coming from? Eg: Organic search, word-of-mouth, paid campaigns or in-app referrals?

• Acquisition reports also track ROI for these campaigns.

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1. Acquisition Metrics

• To reduce cost per customer acquisition (or CPA), you need to be constantly A/B testing and monitoring the impact of your marketing efforts.

• This is actually a long term strategy.

• You may find in your analysis that you get more downloads from paid acquisition campaigns, but your users who found you through organic search are higher life-time value customers.

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1. Acquisition Metrics

• Make sure you have enough users for your data to be statistically significant

• You can’t confidently draw trends in user behaviour from 100 users over 30 days.

• The minimum number of monthly downloads for accurate data analysis is 3,000.

• Bonus: 5 Customer Acquisition Strategies To Reel In Your First 5000 Users

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2. Engagement Metrics

• Engagement metrics show if your users are getting value from your app - and if you’re getting value from them, more importantly!

• Engagement can be broken down into 4 parts…

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2. Engagement metrics

1. Active users

• People who have downloaded your app and have exhibited behaviour that you define as ‘actively engaged’.

• Do they have any common characteristics? Perhaps you can re-position your branding to target more people who fall in these high-value demographics.

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1. Active users

2. Engagement metrics

2. Session length

• This will give you insights to unlock greater revenue potential.

• For example, if your funnel takes 5 minutes to complete and the average session time is only 4 minutes, you either need to:

1. make the funnel shorter or 2. optimise certain steps to push customers further down.

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2. Session length

2. Engagement metrics

3. Goals completed

• Each app has its own goals, depending on the industry and vertical it operates in.

• Eg: It may be to get checkout transactions (retail apps) or get shares on social media (media apps).

• Tracking the number of users who complete these goals will show which screens/funnels you need to spend more time optimising.

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3. Goals completed

2. Engagement metrics

4. User loyalty –

• This is shown via data like frequency of app launches and session intervals between launches.

• When you know the typical time lapse between app launches, you can better time your prompts (push notifications, in-app messages and more) to encourage regular opens.

• Bonus: 6 Proven Ways To Make Your Push Notifications Irresistible To Open

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4. User loyalty

2. Engagement metrics

The 1 big takeaway from engagement metrics:

• The greatest value in engagement metrics is they reveal the characteristics of your most engaged users

• We call these highest value users ‘power users’.

• What are these users doing differently to everyone else that they’re getting so much value from your app?

• Eg: They’re all following a similar screen flow, or they’re making more purchases, or they’re inviting friends to join.

• By identifying what drives their high level engagement, you can identify what strategies will be most effective at replicating their behavior in your disengaged users.

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3. Behaviour metrics

• Behaviour metrics essentially cover all the broad activities that users are performing in your app.

• It will reveal which features are giving users the most value and which you should optimise in the next update or get rid of completely.

• Bonus: Why More Features Aren’t The Answer To Slow App Growth

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3. Behaviour metrics

• When you’ve identified optimal behaviour, you can analyse people exhibiting that behaviour and hunt for patterns.

• Is a good (or bad) behaviour correlated with where the user was acquired? Lifecycle stage? Frequency of opens in the first week?

• How can you push more users down the funnel to complete the action or event you want them to?

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3. Behaviour metrics

Examples of behavioural data:

• What screens, buttons, features are users spending the most and least time on? Use this data to improve UX in future updates

• What % of people completed a desired event or action? • What % of push notifications are opened? A/B test

different copy, timing and offers to see which are more enticing to customers.

• What kind of in-app events are attributed to that push notification? It’s great that they opened it, but we want action here!

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4. Quality metrics

• Quality metrics refer to the quality of the code. Technical/user issues can be tracked & measured using 3 sub-metrics:

1. Automatic crash-report - Ask your developer to set up automatic crash-reporting inside of your application.2. Manual user feedback 3. App store reviews

• The first two options should be implemented into the application from the get-go. The 3rd needs to be monitored over time.

• PLEASE NOTE: bugs are a normal part of software dev.

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5. Retention metrics

• Retention is measured as the % of people who return to your app after their first visit.

• In essence, if you have 100 users this month and in 30 days you managed to retain 80 of them then your retention rate is 80% (or 20% churn-rate).

• Retention is one of the biggest issues facing app developer’s today. According to Localytics, 58% of users who download your app won’t use it after 30 days.

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5. Retention metrics

• An important sub-metric of retention you need to monitor is your users’ life-time value (LTV).

• If your retention rate is low, then hitting critical mass becomes an expensive ordeal.

• A high retention rate increases the average LTV because you get a longer lasting user, but the cost per acquisition stays the same.

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5. Retention metrics

Take this example:

1. You acquire two users at $1.50 each ($3.00) with a combined LTV of $5.00. Your profit = $1.00 per user.

2. You acquire one user at $1.50 with an LTV of $5.00 Your profit = $3.50 per user.

There are two ways to fix the LTV:

2. Increase revenue per user: The user generates more revenue for you during the time they are active in your app.

2. Increase long term active engagement: The user stays active on the application for longer.

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The wrap up

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• Clearly defined data lets you make accurate decisions.

• Raw, un-segmented, inaccurate data let’s you make guesses.

• Your job is to set up a system that reports the data you need to know in order to make these executive decisions.

Further resources

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• Hope this has been engaging!

• If you want to learn more about app metrics then check out our blog, I’ve included 3 relevant blogs in the show notes:

1. 4 Steps To Using App Data “The Uber Way”2. How To Measure Your App’s Success3. How To Gain Actionable Insights From The Top 5 App M

etrics

Thanks for listening!

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• For more of this please subscribe to iTunes, watch on Youtube with accompanying slides or on our blog at buzinga.com.au/buzz

• See you on the next episode!