If you are looking for metrics of mobile application, you've come to the right place.
After a couple of months having sharing sessions with startup up colleagues who realized their ideas via application, I decided to start writing some important metrics of mobile application for reference.
Initially some of our talented founders thought that once you have tech-labs/developers realizing your ideas with great UI and bunch of features/functionalities, having revenue source identified, user segment identified, investor’s funding, the works has done, the world going to be beautiful, but actually it just started.
Once your apps ready, we need to make people aware that our apps is available in the play store, and acquisition phase is started. Typically cost per installed/CPA is around US$3, say we need to have app install based of 100,000 subscribers, it may cost roughly US$ 300,000. There are many ways to use this CPA, it can be member get member, giving benefits i.e for telco apps free SIM card delivery, free 10GB data on 1st month when user installed and use it.
But our business challenge not stop there when people install, they have to use it, make the app user become active user.
First metrics will be the unique Daily Active User or DAU, Weekly Active User/WAU or Monthly Active User or MAU. The definition of DAU can be vary depends or your product, it can be like, how many user login and make any chargeable action, like purchase a service within the apps and generate revenue within a day, a week or a month.
In some cases in telco, for example in digital telco application — install apps, does not mean active user because user needs to:
- Choose data plan, apps plan, voice plan, messaging plan, any add-on
- Select the new mobile number you like
- Fill out personal details for SIM card delivery
- Pay
- Telco back office process the request and send the SIM card
- Waiting for the SIM to reach our address
- Activate the SIM card and lastly
- Your are online!
Think about if you have bad UI/UX or non-frictionless user journey, apps stability, imagine people just download/installed our apps, use it once then un-install your apps! The investment just wasted right?
I remember that statistically in Indonesia, smartphone user kept only the frequently used apps, its around 10 applications they kept due to their smartphone memory limitation, se we really have to be mindful to make sure people install, use it, keep going back and using it and generating revenue.
Second metrics, we need to know, how long our app user use and stay with our application or session/unique user in a day, #daily session/DAU
We also want to know in which menu or sub menu our users stays and the duration of user stays on each menu.
Third metrics is revenue generated per user or ARPU/Average Revenue Per User is the total revenue generated divided by total number of user
Fourth metrics is Retention rate as: # of people in cohort who use your app within a set period of time / # of people in that same cohort who used your app within a previously set time. For example: 100 people from your November new user cohort used your app in December / 1,000 users in November new user cohort = your retention rate is 10%
Fifth metrics is Churn rate as how many user left your apps, it can be calculated as: 1- Retention Rate= churn rate. Using example above: 1 —10%= 90% churn rate
Sixth metrics is Stickiness rate to see how many people come back and use our apps within same time period, its calculated like: DAU/MAU for example we have 10,000 DAU/20,000 MAU= 50% stickiness
Eight metrics is Life Time Value or LTV can be defined as how valuable is the app user within time period compare to the revenue generated from that particular user. There are may ways to calculate but lets use LTV= ARPU x 1/Churn rate. For example, the ARPU is $1.35 and monthly churn rate is 60%, LTV = $1.35 x 1/.60= $2.25
Ninth metrics is CPA: Cost Per Acquisiton is the cost to acquired new installed/ # acquired user/conversion as mentioned earlier to acquired 100,000 new users, marketing spends US$ 300,000 so the CPA is US$ 3
Tenth metrics is approach on ROI where we expect LTV > CPA to indicate that your app user generating more money that the cost to acquire them . For example if the CPA is US$3 and the LTV is US$ 2.25, describe that cost to get new app user is bigger than the average revenue per user generated, so we need to consider better marketing strategy/approach so the business can sustain.
Eleventh metrics is app rating to show apps user satisfaction and review in the app store.
There are other metrics such as abandonment rate, funnel tracking, viralness, average order value/AOV, Gross Merchandise Value/GMV, App stability/crashes, App speed, App latency, App loadtime, average visit time, average screen view/visit, App session interval, App event tracking for important features, App heatmap, Support response, First response, NPS, App attribution, App store ranking.
Yes, still a lot work to be done to make successful and great mobile app, there are no silver bullet, we need to keep on trying!
