A Key Performance Indicator — is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate an organization’s success or a particular activity in which it engages.
Below you can find Mobile App KPIs that will help you measure your Mobile App performance.
Retention Rate
Retention is perhaps the most important KPI for mobile marketers; after all, users can’t engage with your app if they’re not using it anymore. Understanding if and when churn is happening is the first step to reducing it, and keeping more of your audience coming back.
There are a number of different ways to define retention—but for our purposes, we’ll look at range retention, which compares the number of users from a previous week, month, or other date range against the next equivalent date range, allowing you to see how many users have been retained. Calculating range retention, therefore, is simply a matter of dividing the number of users from a recent time frame (say, the past month) by the number of users from a previous time frame (say, the month prior to that).
Retention Rate = number of Users in the cohort who use the App in a set time period / number of Users in the cohort who use the App in a previous time period
Churn Rate
While retention rate gives you a picture of how many of your customers you’re keeping around, your churn rate measures the side of the equation—namely, how many app users are departing in a given period. Accordingly, calculating your churn is simple: All you have to do is subtract your retention rate from one, like so:
Churn Rate = 1 – Retention Rate
Monthly Active Users (MAU)
For most apps, understanding how many monthly active users (MAU) you have is a great way to get a general sense of what your engaged audience looks like. This metric counts someone as a MAU if they log an app session either in a particular month or for a specific 30-day period that can be defined as a month, depending on how your company measures things. While you should think of MAU as a directional signal—since, of course, a customer can fail to use your app for a month and still come back—staying on top of whether your MAU count is rising or falling can give you a high-level sense of whether your customer acquisition and retention efforts are bearing fruit.
MAU = number of Users who opened the App in a month
Daily Active Users (DAU)
For some brands, while knowing how many people use their app each month is interesting, knowing how many people engage each day gives them a window into how many highly-engaged customers they have. After all, users downloading and keeping your app is one thing, but your engagement efforts are going to bear more fruit if your audience is actively making use of it on a regular basis.
Because this refers to each individual person using your app, not to the number of sessions, each person is counted just one time, regardless of if they use the app once per day or hundreds of times per day. Another thing to keep in mind? DAU can be calculated for a specific day (say, yesterday’s DAU), or averaged over a timeframe.
DAU = number of Users who opened the App in a day
Daily Sessions Per Daily Active User
Once you’ve got a picture of how many people are engaging with your app per day, it’s possible to drill down even further to see what that daily engagement really looks like. By examining how many times a day an app is being accessed by users, brands get a more nuanced view of their audience’s daily engagement; that’s important because, for most apps, at least a couple of sessions a day is a desirable level of user activity.
To calculate daily sessions per DAU, brands need to track both the number of total sessions and the number of daily active users, and then divide the former by the latter.
Daily Sessions / DAU = number of Daily Sessions / number of DAU
Stickiness
Daily sessions per DAU provide a micro-level look at repeat user activity, but stickiness expands that picture further by incorporating a more monthly perspective. By dividing DAU by MAU, you get stickiness; that is, a metric that tells you how engaged—and likely to return—your audience is. The closer MAU And DAU are to each other, the more effectively your app is at bringing users back over and over again.
Stickness = DAU / MAU
Average Session Length
Session length is a pretty straightforward KPI. It measures how much time, on average, users are spending on your app in each session. Put a different way, it’s how long the app is open in front of each user. You can calculate this metric by dividing the total amount of time spent in your app by the total number of users who logged sessions in a given time period, in order to get a better understanding of whether users are usually engaging for 10 quick seconds or lingering in your app for minutes on end.
Average Session Length = total amount of time spent in App (minutes) / total number of Users
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Running campaigns to acquire new app users requires monetary investment, and when it comes time for accounting, it’s helpful to know just how much is being spent on each audience member that you acquire. Cost per acquisition (CPA) provides this clarity by dividing the costs associated with a given campaign by the number of acquisitions that took place during its run, allowing you to compare the relative impact of different campaigns and activations and helping your company to manage your marketing spend in thoughtful ways.
CPA = Costs ($) / number of Acquisitions
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Convincing users to download and open an app is only half the battle. Typically, there will be a next step in that process that leads to value or revenue generation for your organization—whether that’s when a customer signs up for a subscription or makes a purchase. Customer lifetime value (LTV) helps decipher this aspect of the brand-customer relationship by taking a look at how much value can be generated from the average user over the course of their time spent as a customer. The greater it is in relation to CPA, the bigger bang you’re getting for your acquisition buck. To determine LTV, we take the total user spend in dollars associated with your app and divide it by the total number of buyers to date.
LTV = total user spend ($) / total number of buyers to date
Return on Investment
This is kind of the holy grail of mobile marketing KPIs. Knowing how much value is generated by a campaign compared to how much was spent on it can be a key and critical tool in determining future strategy. Unfortunately, sussing it out can be a bit tricky due to the cloudiness of the variables involved. For example, you can look at the revenue generated by conversions through a particular campaign, but there may be factors affecting why that happened that have nothing to do with the campaign itself.
Still, it’s possible to calculate return on investment (ROI) as long as there’s internal alignment on what’s being valued as return (profit, net revenue, etc.) and what the investment costs of the campaign were.
ROI = (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment
