The team from Kumulos share the most important things that mobile app owners should be tracking for mobile app success

Mobile app KPIs are so important and yet often they are not defined clearly.  At Kumulos, we like to ensure that mobile app owner’s know what to measure to make sure they have the analytics to help them boost engagement.

To help, we’ve pulled together the four must-have mobile app KPIs. These are the most important things you need to regularly track to make sure you drive mobile app success.

How are your users using your app?

What time during the day are app users most active? Find out and you’ll know when is a good time to reach them with push notifications and/or in-app messaging.

How many times a day do they use your app and for how long each time?

Is average session length rising or falling?

Depending on the context of your app, a rising session length could in fact be a bad indicator. If the purpose of the app is to provide small amounts of information quickly – e.g. is my train on time? In that case, users want to be in and out of the app fast. However, if it’s a social media app, you obviously want the session lengths (and session frequency) to be rising to show that user engagement is increasing.

And what about the macro-trends across your entire user base? Are number of sessions per day increasing (your users are becoming more engaged) or falling (you are losing the attention of your users)?

Modelling your apps ‘ideal’ user and then benchmarking all your users against that profile is a great way to model the desired behaviour with your app and then try to understand why all your users aren’t behaving that way.

Using this as a mobile app KPI and measuring the trend over time will help you to see if more of your users are conforming to your ‘ideal’ user will let you see if you are increasing user engagement.

Which users are still on old versions of your app?

It’s essential to know the distribution across the versions of your app.  Those stuck on earlier app versions are most likely to churn. This is because they will not be getting the best in app experience. They won’t be able to enjoy any of the new features you’ve added to the app over the last few months. Planning push campaigns & in-app messaging to encourage users to update to the latest version will increase user stickiness and user retention.

How well are you retaining users after they have downloaded?

What are your user retention rates for the app?

How many days after they first downloaded the app, are they still using the app?

If you know this, you can put strategies in place to target users X numbers of days after they first download the app. Showing users the value they will get from continuing to use the app, via push notifications, will have a big impact on driving up retention. In addition, you need to be on top of the technical performance of the app. For example, if the user experience is poor, or, the app is loading slowly, then no matter how good your notification retention campaign is, users will still leave. So, you must be on top of the complete picture and not just snapshots.

How well are your push notification campaigns performing?

It’s good you are using push notifications to encourage and engage your users. But do you know what the unsubscribe rates are like?  Are you over communicating?

Could you be under-communicating and missing a trick to drive up the performance of your app?

What’s the delivery rate of your notifications (are all the notifications you send actually getting to your users)?

What’s the tap through rate?

Are users engaging with the messages you are sending?

These are all very important indications on how well you are interacting with your users, encouraging active users, who will stay engaged and be retained for longer, making your app more successful.

Make sure that you continually monitor notification subscription rates and have that as a mobile app KPI. Also tracking unsubscribe rates as well as notification open rates will give you a good understanding of how well you are engaging with users.

Use these mobile app KPIs to build meaningful insights to optimise your app

So, we have covered the four must-have mobile app KPIs so you know how your app is performing. Covering all of these will ensure you have complete visibility and deep understanding of how your app is performing. It will also let you build meaningful insights into how you can optimize the apps performance and drive even better results.

So, if you are looking for a messaging system that can help draw all this together then take a look at Kumulos mobile messaging. We give you a single pane of glass to manage push notifications and in-app messaging with all of the analytics too.

Contact us today for a no-obligation free trial of Kumulos.