Originally published at thinktank.personagraph.com.

Mobile apps are able to produce a treasure of data for app developers to see how they are performing. However, there is a crucial condition: the owner of the app needs to understand how to use this data to convert it to actionable information. First time app developers are being confronted with a flood of metrics, marketing jargon and abbreviations that often come across as fuzzy and are explained differently by different people. Here is an overview of metrics that reflect exactly how much people love (or hate) your app and measure user engagement:

DAU, WAU and MAU. These abbreviations stand for Daily-, Weekly-, and Monthly Active Users respectively. These metrics have been used for years by websites and reflect the most basic way of measuring app usage. It shows the unique amount of users within a given amount of time.

New users (downloads) are the people that just downloaded an app and have used it for the first time. This is a basic way to measure if your activities to promote the app are paying off and your reach is growing.

Time in app, not to be confused with session length, means the total amount of minutes users spend using your app in a given time period. Generally speaking, the more time they spend the more users like your app.

Uninstalls are an important sign of your app’s performance. You can measure total uninstalls as well as uninstalls per week or month to track how it is performing over time.

Feature usage indicates if your app is used to its full potential. Features that are neglected by users are often superfluous to most users or too hard to find. Make critical assessments about which features are essential for your users and which are just a sideshow. This information tells you where the value of your app is created.

LTV stands for Lifetime (Customer) Value and is defined as the total value of an app user over the app’s or user’s lifetime. Similarly as subtracting CPI from ARPU, LTV needs to be higher than the CPI of your marketing campaign for it to make sense to start such campaign. Investigating which customer segment has the highest LTV for your app is essential for your bottom line.

Retention is defined as the percentage of users that use your app again in a given time period after they have downloaded and launched it for the first time. This is a crucial metric since a high retention rate shows that users love to use your app, and vice versa for a low retention rate.

Session length indicates the number of minutes a user spends using the app per interaction. It measures the time between the first and last activity of a user in an app. App owners can choose to set a timeout to define after how much idle time a session ends.

Recency is a metric that reflects how much time expires between two sessions. Generally, the less time between sessions, the more likely the app falls into favor, although the absolute amount of time can vary between different types of apps.

Reviews are a valuable resource to uncover explicit thoughts of users. The users that take the time to do a review are generally more than averagely interested in your app category (power users) or are either extremely positive or extremely negative. Both the amount as well as the favorability of reviews are important to keep track of.

Conversion tracking is a good way of keeping track of what percentage of your users are doing what you want them to do in your app because you can define a conversion as a user achieving a goal you set yourself. This can be a registration, in-app purchase, subscription, level up, etc.

eCPM is a fundamental metric for apps that are monetized through showing ads. It stands for effective cost per thousand impressions, which measures how much money you receive for every thousand times an ad is seen by a user.

ARPU means Average Revenue Per User and is ideal to measure whether your updates are having a positive effect on users’ spending. For example, you can compare the ARPU of the 30 days before your update was pushed live with the ARPU of the 30 days after and determine the effects. Also, subtractCPI (Cost Per Install) from ARPU to see if all your developing and marketing efforts are profitable.

Though useful by themselves, combining these metrics can tell you an even more detailed story about how your app is doing. According to Srujan Akula, Head of SMB at Personagraph, “One thing that’s key to understanding if your app is really liked by your users and an indicator of success is Activation. Activation is what happens when the user opens your app for the first time – how much time does the user spend, what kind of actions does the user take, how soon does he come back and launch the app a second time? ”

For most developers, it isn’t necessary to measure all the metrics described above, every app is different and might have a different ideal set of performance metrics. However, it is important to keep tracking your app’s performance over time and compare new versions with old versions to see if your technical improvement efforts are paying off.

While these metrics are inherently important, Personagraph multiplies their value by identifying the users that love your app. Demographics, interests and intents inferred by machine learning algorithms can be used to acquire the right users: those that will increase your ARPU and decrease your CPI. This is what we call actionable information.