The Most Important Metrics for Measuring App Success

It can seem like all the work is done once you have an app developed and ready for people to download it, but that’s just the beginning.

After you have an app developed, it’s extremely important to measure its success regularly. This will help you determine your overall ROI, and also see areas where you might need to make changes. You’re going to have to do regular maintenance on your app as well.

So how do you know whether or not your app is performing well? What are the key metrics that demonstrate app success?

While the list certainly isn’t exhaustive, the following are some of the most important app success metrics.

Downloads

Downloads are one of the easiest metrics to track, but unfortunately, a lot of people and businesses think this is the only one they should be looking at.

Yes, you want people downloading your app, otherwise, what’s the point? However, there needs to be a lot more than just downloading it to call your app successful.

If you’re at a point where you’re not seeing a lot of downloads, the app itself isn’t likely the problem.

Instead, you should use these metrics as an indication you’re not marketing it well, that your app store listing is off, or that you haven’t done enough to optimize it in the app store.

User Engagement

Sometimes it seems like the only metric people use to determine whether or not their app is successful are new users, and this isn’t giving a complete picture of what’s happening, as was touched on above.

New users are great, but what’s really important is what’s happening after people are downloading your app.

You want to be able to see how engaged users are with your app, and specifically where they’re engaged. Then, once you start measuring metrics related to engagement, it’s much easier to see how you can better monetize the actions of your users.

Specifically when it comes to user engagement look how many people are actually using the app each day and month.

Session Intervals

Another important metric that’s related to the larger concept of user engagement are session intervals, which refer to the time your users are going between their sessions on your app.

You can see if people are going long periods of time between each session, or whether these are short periods, which is ideal.

If you use this data and see that people are going long periods of time and not opening your app, you can start thinking of ways to prompt them to use it more frequently, such as using push notifications.

Time Users Are Spending in the App

Finally, you also want to look at how much time your users are spending within your app.

If they’re opening and then quickly closing it, this indicates an engagement problem.

You can also use the longer sessions as a way to evaluate where changes could be made. Look at your users who are spending more time in the app and see what they’re doing there, and how you could extend this to other users.