An application has to go through different stages like ideation, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Once an app is officially released for users, it is important to monitor and track its performance. The next question would be how to measure mobile app performance. For any kind of app, there are many metrics to measure its performance and determine its success. Initially, you may feel exhausted to track them as there may be less number of downloads. But, tracking consistently will help you understand how your marketing and sales strategies are working and what are the areas that need improvement.
Importance Of Tracking Sales Apps Performance Metrics
Sales apps can be divided into different categories like CRM apps, sales engagement tools, sales training apps, field employee tracking apps, sales prospecting apps, etc. These apps are important for improving the sales of a business and the sales team’s productivity. The key advantages of tracking their performance metrics are:
- To know how well your marketing strategies are working
- To know the shortcomings users face
- To understand the app performance after upgrades and bug fixes
- To find out how long a user stays in the app
- To know the areas of improvement
- To sense customer churn and devise measures to control it
- To create an action plan for getting more user downloads
- To assess the acquisition, retention, and engagement costs
Top 6 App Success Metrics
The success of an application depends on various factors like UI/UX, good design, user-friendliness, smooth functioning, ROI (Return On Investment), page loading speed and quality, average session length, conversion rate, etc. While some of these are purely based on the user experience, others are directly related to revenue generation.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, right? Hence, based on the type of business you run and what matters to you the most, select the right, feasible mobile app performance metrics and track them consistently. Here are the top 6 metrics that you can use to measure the growth of sales apps:
- Acquisition
The acquisition is basically the total number of users who downloaded your app organically, through referrals, social media ads, or any other paid ad campaigns. It is important to monitor user activities in your app, and whether they got what they expected/searched for. Also cost per acquisition (CPA) should be calculated to know the total costs you spend for acquiring a customer.
For example, if you are running a paid ad campaign, CPA can be calculated as
CPA = Total Cost Of Campaign / No.Of Users Acquired
This metric is most useful during the initial phase when you need to keep track of every penny invested to know how it works. Also, acquisition cost helps you to understand user behavior based on which you can adjust your marketing budget and try to get more organic traffic.
- Retention
The second most important app success metrics is the retention rate. Once a user downloads your app, it’s important that they use it for longer periods of time. As we all know, retention is always economical compared to acquisition. To make a user glued to your app, it should be engaging, informative, and appealing. Retention rates can be calculated for a definite time like weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly. For example, let’s say you are calculating the monthly retention rate, then
Retention Rate = (No.of users on day 30 ➗ No.of users on day 1) x 100%
- Lifetime Value
Lifetime value is the total revenue generated during the period a user stays with your app i.e from installing to uninstalling the app. This is an important revenue-based app success metric that determines the ROI for a particular customer. Customer Lifetime Value CLV is an indicator of how much you spend on acquiring customers vs how much you earn from them. Make sure the CLV is much higher than the Customer acquisition costs.
- Average Session Length
Once a user opens your app, how long he is staying in it before closing it is the average session length. If the average session duration is high, you can understand that your app is more engaging and adds value to your users. Based on this value, you can enhance the features, and revamp your app often to create a catchy and interactive UI. Also, work consistently with bug fixes and software updates to ensure the smooth functioning of the app.
- Churn Rate
The churn rate is defined as the rate at which the users uninstall/stop using your app. It is obvious that a high churn rate is a threat to your business and hence runs towards reducing this value. It is exactly the opposite of the retention rate. Also, analyze what kind of customers are leaving, whether long-term users or short-term users. Short-term users are those who downloaded the app on impulse but do not really need it. So, make sure the long-term users stay with the app.
- Daily Active Users (DAU)
DAU is simply the number of users active in your app daily. This is a basic engagement measure of mobile app performance. Monthly active users MAU, and DAU, along with the average session length give you a complete picture of your app’s users’ engagement.
Endnotes
Measuring a mobile app’s performance is as important as building a good application. An app’s success depends on many factors like looks, ease of use, value, seamless functionality, etc. Choose the metrics based on your priority. If your priority is revenue, focus on measuring the metrics that are directly related to ROI. Sales applications are of great use to businesses today and it’s obvious that measuring their growth with the right metrics will be an added advantage.
