October 12, 2017
It’s easy to assume that user acquisition is the central metric for determining mobile app success, but without active users, high download rates mean nothing.
Mobile app engagement and mobile app retention are two metrics that provide genuine insight into the success of an application. Low app engagement and retention are a recipe for failure, while high engagement and retention equals the opposite.
Engagement — describes how active users are on the application. While this is a somewhat subjective metric, Localytics describes highly engaged users as those that have 10+ sessions per month.
Retention — while again a fairly subjective term, the industry benchmark is the percentage of an app’s users who return to the app within 3 months of their first session.
The average of these two combined determines an app’s “stickiness” — how engaged and loyal users are for a particular app. For those that are concerned primarily with user conversions and/or monetization, the most important objective is to keep users engaged and ensure repeat usage.
Graph via Localytics
