As the old Peter Drucker quote goes, “what gets measured, gets managed.”
Today’s app developers understand the importance of paying attention to metrics like installs, cost per acquisition and average revenue per user. These metrics all play an important role in helping make any app a success, but do they deserve the bulk of your attention?
Apptentive’s new app marketing guide, The New App Marketing Metrics, makes the case that the metrics many app developers and marketers pay attention to right now might not deserve the focus they currently receive.
Instead, app developers and marketers should pay attention to six other app marketing metrics — six newer, more effective metrics for judging an app’s success. We’ve listed the six metrics that deserve your attention below to help you keep a closer eye on your app’s growth and development.
Uninstalls
Few things are as exciting for an app developer as a huge number of daily downloads, installs and registrations. After all, what metrics is a more effective measure of your app’s growth than its installation volume?
The problem with only monitoring your app’s installs is that you focus entirely on the acquisition side of the picture. Installs are all about acquisition — uninstalls are a long-term metrics that give you a look into your app’s ability to retain users.
The longer you can retain users, the more you’ll earn through advertising or in-app sales. Keep an eye on your app’s uninstalls and you’ll gain a greater understanding of its true growth over a long period, not just its day-to-day user acquisition.
The silent majority
What do you use to judge customer feedback? Most app developers look at reviews to find out what their users and customers think. This is great for getting a broad idea of issues that affect your app, but it doesn’t provide truly representative feedback for several reasons.
The first is that users that leave reviews are far more likely to have negative feedback on your app than positive. After all, satisfied users rarely, if ever, comment. The second is that reviews aren’t easy to leave — the process of leaving an App Store review takes six steps in total.
Instead of listening to the vocal minority of your users that leave negative feedback, listen to the silent majority of satisfied, loyal users. You can gain this feedback with user surveys and metrics like Net Promoter Score.
Return on ad spend
Do you optimize your advertising campaigns around cost per install? Focusing on your average cost per install is a great way to learn how much you spend on each new user, but it’s far from a perfect metric.
After all, your cost per install doesn’t tell you anything about profitability. Nor does it tell you any valuable information about your app’s ability to grow and reach new people. It also doesn’t take into account the fact that not all users are equally valuable from a revenue perspective.
Instead of optimizing your marketing efforts around a specific cost per install, optimize for a high return on ad spend. A high cost per install can still result in a profit, provided you target the right audience.
Criticism
As Robi Ganguly says, “negative reviews are the holy grail of customer feedback.”
You’ll learn a great deal about your app’s strengths from positive reviews. You’ll learn far more about its weaknesses by paying attention to negative, critical reviews that focus entirely on its flaws.
As an app developer, it’s easy to write off negative reviews as the product of unhappy people or a disillusioned audience. After all, how can a few critical users have anything of value to offer if your app receives a huge volume of four and five star reviews from the rest of its audience.
The answer is a lot. Even the most popular, acclaimed apps update frequently to improve their weaknesses and fix their bugs. Instead of ignoring negative reviews, pay attention to the flaws that users point out and make fixing them a major priority of your next release.
Message quality
As a marketer, it’s easy to view all push notifications as equally important for users. This makes it easy to quantify results and assign a certain value to each notification you send out, whether it’s purchases made, ad spend generated or any other important metric.
The reality, however, is that not all push notifications are equally valuable. More than one trillion push notifications were sent out in 2014, and many app users now view these messages not as important alerts or communications, but as annoying spam.
Instead of viewing push notifications as a commodity and bombarding your users to achieve a certain frequency, focus on quality. Deliver contextual, helpful messages that create real value for your users instead of typical low value, high frequency push notifications.
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
One of the metrics most app developers and marketers pay the most attention to is ARPU, or average revenue per user. ARPU is a great “quick look” metric for determining how much your app makes from each of its users, on average.
Just like cost per install, however, it’s not a perfect metric. Not all of your users will generate a similar amount of revenue. Outliers on both sides of the mean can cost you money or generate a huge share of your revenue, whether through in-app sales or ad impressions.
Instead of paying attention to average revenue per user, focus your monetization efforts on your app’s CLV, or customer lifetime value. This offers a more precise, accurate measure of what you can expect to earn from each of your users over the long term.
Are you paying attention to the right metrics?
Creating reliable, predictable growth for your mobile app is all about the numbers. By focusing on the right metrics, you can better understand your audience and optimize your app for steady growth in users, retention and revenue.
Learn more about how you can use the six metrics above in Apptentive’s free guide, The New App Marketing Metrics.
MyCrowd QA is a self-service QA testing platform for companies to test their mobile apps and software. Utilizing a pay-per-bug model, customers only pay for the bugs our testers find.
