Essential Mobile App Metrics to Measure

When you launch a new app, it's important to measure and analyze metrics to find out how your app is performing. It's not enough to just have an app. To make your product or service successful, you need to know what works and what doesn't so that you can adjust accordingly. 

While there might be other aspects of your business that you need to tend to and monitor, your app metrics are just as important as your general business metrics at the end of the day. 

Just getting started with your app and aren’t sure which metrics make sense to measure? Ultimately, it comes down to what your goals and KPIs are, along with the type of app you have. However, there are a few basic metrics that make sense for nearly every app owner to measure.

Let’s discuss the importance of measuring mobile app metrics and why it's important for overall business success.

Why Is It Important to Measure Mobile App Metrics?

What's the point of measuring app metrics and stats? Maybe you ask yourself this question every time you see that "analytics" tab. Well, it turns out there are many benefits to tracking these numbers. 

In fact, you might be wasting a lot of time if you're not paying attention to your analytics dashboard. Here are just a few reasons why it is important to measure mobile app metrics: 

• Tracking user behavior tells you what users want in your app
• Monitoring performance lets you know how well your marketing efforts are working
• Seeing patterns helps with business decisions
• It can help make sure things run smoothly on an operational level
• Tracking data leads to insights about future opportunities for growth in different areas like new features or designs

How Can You Use Metrics to Measure Success

There are a lot of different ways to measure mobile app metrics, but understanding the basics is key. 

There are two main types of data that you can measure in this case: "in-app" and "out-of-app." In-app metrics measure how users interact with your app while they're in it. Out-of-app metrics measure what happens when people leave your app and do other things on their phone. 

Which type you use will depend on what kind of information you want to know about your audience and how they engage with your product or service. 

However, regardless of the type of metric or even the individual metrics themselves that you choose to measure, one thing’s for certain: you have to actually implement changes based on the data you receive.

Gathering data means nothing if you’re not using it to make changes. And, those changes don’t always have to be bad. If you see that something seems to be working, a change in this sense could mean funneling more money into that area of development, for example. However, the fact that you’re making a change or taking an action based on the data you’re receiving is the key.

Key Metrics for Measuring Success

It's important for developers to understand all aspects of an application before finalizing their design process because without analytics, one can't see whether or not a user clicked on the button that says “start”.

As an investor, founder, or even core member of the team, you’ve obviously got a lot of skin in the game. We get it; we have been in your shoes. However, after decades of experience, we’ve found that it’s best to ensure that you’re not distracting yourself with metrics that either don’t matter or that don’t matter to you.

So, while we’ll list off a few of the key app metrics you should be measuring below, it’s important to keep in mind that AppFit is designed, in part, to help keep you and your team focused. This is why we intentionally only offer you an overview of 12 key metrics and three active goals.

By focusing on these metrics, which we’ve included based on years and years of experience working with founders, investors, and app creators across a variety of industries, we believe that you’ll be able to spend more time focusing on what really matters and less time on the things that don’t.

1. Installs

Of course you’re interested in installs; you’re an app! This is likely where your marketing team really starts to measure the effects of their campaigns after taking users through a funnel of awareness, consideration, and then conversion. 

Tracking the number of downloads can be particularly useful for that team as it will help them understand what they’re doing right or, in the case that you notice a week to week drop in installs, what might need to be improved.

2. Signups

Past installs, signups refer to any user who fully completed registration. This is important as it’s a metric that will really help you gain insight into your app’s UX and registration process. 

If you’re seeing lots of installs and few signups then it’s a good sign that there’s something wrong with the registration flow or that you’re making the signup process too complex and difficult.

3. Active Users

Once users download the app and complete registration, it’s important to keep track of how many users are actually active. Having 10,000 users but only 50 active ones doesn’t equal a successful app.

When you measure active users you’re able to understand what needs to be improved (or, hopefully, done the same) in order to engage users within the app. This is helpful for those in charge of in-app copy in the form of CTAs, chats, etc. and even email campaigns that encourage user engagement well after they’re onboarded.

4. Session Length

Depending on the type of app that you have, it might be helpful to measure the length of each session. This is a critical metric to measure if you’re looking to understand how engaged your users are while using your app. 

Over time, you can use this metric to understand behaviors and patterns. Once you see, for example, that certain users are staying in-app way longer than others, you’re able to work backwards and figure out why that is. Are they receiving a certain pop-up message? Are the screens different?

Creating Your Own Metrics Dashboard

Not sure how to merge all of these different metrics in an efficient manner so that you can easily access them whenever you need? With AppFit, you can create your own custom metrics dashboard that will provide you with a quick overview of all of the important metrics you should be monitoring and none that you don’t need. 

Avoid distraction, increase efficiency, and stay on top of changes in your business with features that allow you to not only measure the effectiveness of your work but also to leave notes for colleagues and other departments so that everybody is on the same page.

Imagine heading into a weekly roundup where everybody can open their phone and see a complete overview of all of the most relevant statistics in one place. There’s no wasting time while someone tries to log into Google Analytics and another person works to pull the relevant data from Amplitude. Everything is in one place and everybody has access to it. It couldn’t be easier to monitor the health of your business.

Contact us for more information on how we can onboard you and your team.