Effective Ways To Measure Your Mobile App Marketing Performance

It is famously said, “what gets measured gets improved.”

As a mobile marketer, you put in a lot of efforts and consistency to make your mobile application go viral. App marketing is like any other business; you deal in a particular product and to calculate what profits you earn at the end of the month, you keep a track of all the products being bought and sold.

But what if you stop doing it? All the work you are putting in to improve your business will go to the dogs if you do not keep a track of your performance and success.

Importance Of Measuring Mobile App Marketing Performance?

With over 5 million apps in app stores, every mobile app marketer strives to stand out by gathering the most number of installs for their application.

Consider marketing as a tool for building relationships, while engaging both social and technical strategies. Like any relationship you want to capitalize on, you want to get a sense of how things are going, to figure out what’s working and what’s not. There would be tons of questions that you would be asking yourself.

• Which audience is interested in your app?
• What is the reason they are downloading it?
• Are they using it after installation?
• What ASO(App Store Optimization)  practice has been the most effective?
• Is the pricing structure suitable for the target audience?

By gauging your app performance and keeping the right marketing strategy, you not only understand where and what your company is doing well but also what needs to be changed.

How To Measure Mobile App Marketing Performance?

Now that you know why measuring your app marketing is important, let’s start with determining the most useful KPIs(Key Marketing Indicators) and metrics you should track to measure your app’s success.

Here you go!

1.) Downloads:

The base of app marketing is to drive users to your App Store page, eventually convincing them to download the app. As a critical app marketing metrics, this surrounds not only the number of downloads but also your users’ profile, response rate, and its source.

If you keep a track of the type of audience your app is receiving, it would be much easier for you to define the target niche and strategize on your mobile app marketing performance accordingly.

The rate of installation for your app is an effective metrics to indicate your app’s performance against your competition.

2.) Activation:

To measure mobile app marketing performance, it is essential to keep a track of the actual number of users who actually tend to use your app after the installation process.

There is no single metrics to calculate the engagement that your app converges on a daily basis, instead, it can be tracked from compiling data from other metrics such as session length, intervals, opt-ins, app screens, and app interactions.

The biggest mobile apps generate the most impressive engagement data so on the conclusion, your mobile app engagement defines the loyalty of the customers and the quality of use that your app receives.

3.) Retention:

As the name suggests, this metric gives you an idea of the percentage of customers you are retaining through your app. This is also one of the most relevant metrics that define the long-term success of your mobile application.

A study shows that among millions of apps available to download in both the app stores, 85% of all smartphone usage is dedicated to five apps or less. Besides that, 4 out of 5 users never use that app again 72 hours after first installing it.

The retention rate is highly based on the value your app provides to its users. A high retention rate means that the users are loving your app and using it on a daily basis. While low retention means your app barely provides anything of value to its users.

Calculating retention will also reflect your app’s messaging, onboarding, and UX as how effective it is in keeping users around.

4.) Churn Rate:

Churn rate refers to the percentage of users who decides to ditch your app or quit using it, within a particular time frame. Your churn rate should always be lower than your growth or retention rate.

The formula for calculating churn rate is 1- Retention rate

Some of the reasons that might lead users to ditch your app are:

• Complicated sign-up process
• Battery usage
• Frequent push notifications
• Unexpected app quits
• Less value for your users
• Unjustified permission requests
• Too much loading time
• Ineffective user interface

You should keep a regular tab on such things, collect users’ feedbacks and solve their queries as soon as possible to decrease the churn rate.

5.) Cost Per Acquisition (CPA):

Of course, making users download your app and retaining them should be your primary focus, but you should also be accountable for how much this process is costing you in all.

If you do not calculate your CPA, you would be at risk of throwing your UA and marketing budgets off the drain on incompetent activities, while considering the fact that average user acquisition costs are on its all-time high.

For calculating your CPA, you have to just divide your UA costs by the number of users generated.

6.) Lifetime Value (LTV):

LTV refers to the value that your app users bring to you over a period of time. This KPI metrics depends upon the number of purchases your users make, the average value of those purchases and the average time users kept using your app.

Here’s your LTV formula:

LTV= average value of a conversion x average number of conversions in a time frame x average customer lifetime

The approach to calculate LTV is aimed towards figuring out how much revenue or profit you can expect from the average customer during the time they serve as a loyal customer.

A firm like Uber calculates their lifetime value on the amounts spent by its customers whereas Facebook evaluates it according to the revenue generated from ads.

The basis mobile app marketing strategy here is that your LTV should be greater than your CPA, to avoid being in the danger zone.

7.) CPI and CPLU:

Cost Per Install(CPI), as part of paid marketing, refers to the amount of money you spend in order to acquire one install. In this campaign, publishers place digital advertisements across different social media channels to drive installations of the advertised application.

CPI can be calculated on the following formula:

Cost per install = expenditure on ads ÷ total installs

Cost Per Loyal User(CPLU) is the money spent on acquiring a loyal or active user. It is calculated by dividing the total expenditure on paid ads by the number of acquired users who use the app repeatedly.

CPLU is considered more effective of the two metrics because you spend your money in obtaining a loyal user rather than just paying for casual installs.

To examine the overall ROI of the paid ads, compare the CPLU with the average lifetime value per user.

8.) ARPU And ARPPU:

The Average Revenue Per User(ARPU) is a metric that correlates to the purchases and average spending habits of your customer.

Since it is the ratio between the lifetime revenue of the app to the number of lifetime users, it helps you estimate the value that a single user has generated since the launch of the app.

ARPU or Current LTV = lifetime revenue of your app/number of lifetime users of your app.

You can further calculate the impact paid users have on revenue by using the formula for ARPPU.

ARPPU = revenue / number of paying users

9.) Stickness:

As the name suggests, this KPI lets you calculate how often customers return to use your app. But do we have a formula for this too?

Yes, to calculate stickness, divide Daily Active Users(DAU) by Monthly Active Users(MAU) to get a percentage. The higher this percentage, the more often users tend to return to your app.

10.) Return On Investment

The most important element of mobile app marketing strategy is to keep a track of return on investment(ROI) of your overall marketing efforts.

Getting a clear picture of ROI is notoriously difficult and you need to measure the cost of the investment in a campaign and how these costs have impacted profits.

ROI = (gain from investment – cost of investment) ÷ cost of investment

For example, if you want to calculate the ROI of a promotional email campaign, you have to tally the cost of building and sending that campaign and enter that cost into the given formula along with the revenue gained from carrying out that campaign.

Conclusion:

Measuring mobile app marketing is more than just calculating your app’s income. Data review and user retention is also an integral part of your growth strategy.

Mobile app marketing analytics analyzes the ‘big picture’ by providing a detailed outlook of the individual channels being held. Various parameters and variables might be confusing for beginners at first glance. That is why it is important for all app marketers to keep a track of the most basic KPIs, understand how they work and turn these metrics into a recipe for success.

About the Author:

Jack of all trades. Covering the journalism field, Vikram Khajuria writes at MobileAppDaily and keeps surfing the trends to understand tech and inventions better. Don’t forget his driving skills, he is a professional car rallyist. Life has just got better. Breathe it!!

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