Tracking Your iOS App Performance
Woohoo! You finally got your shiny new app published on the App Store.
As initial downloads start to roll in, you’re feeling excited and accomplished. Your first users are playing around and you can’t help but smile.
But you’re not finished yet.
Surely you want to continue growing with a goal of reaching a larger audience and more potential customers, right? But in order to do that, it’s crucial you understand what drives downloads and how you can improve those metrics.
That’s why you’ve got to start measuring your progress and see where you’re lagging.
The iOS App Store is a massive marketplace with more than 2 million apps, and provides countless opportunities for companies and individuals alike to reach future users. However, with such an enormous volume of apps, it can be quite difficult to find your “sweet spot” — the best place to attract potential customers.
One of the first steps you need to consider in your pursuit of having a well-recognized app is to prepare a description, screenshots (video is even better!) and to choose proper keywords. This can be a tricky and time-consuming process, but there are a lot of good guides online which can help you achieve this.
Your next move?
Navigating the wilderness, a.k.a. the App Store.
But how do you know if the keywords you chose are the right ones? What’s the best way to keep track of how your app views or downloads change when you swap out a keyword or description? Which metrics in particular are best to keep an eye on?
We’ve got your answers right here.
Defining the Metrics That Matter to You
The only way to improve any income you’re expecting from the App Store is to first define a set of metrics which will help us measure our performance against our goals. In order to do that, let’s take a look at how a typical user downloads and eventually pays (either by the price for our app or later via a subscription, etc.) for our app:
- The user browses the App Store and sees our app
- He or she then taps on the app to see a more detailed description
- This is where the user hits ‘Get’’
- Once it’s downloaded, the app is opened by the user
- The user spends time in the app and eventually pays
*Depending whether or not the user reached (2) via direct search (by entering the name of our app in the search field), (1) may or may not occur.*
Time to Visualize
Now let’s translate the 5 steps above into key metrics and find a visualization for them:
These are the 5 most important metrics every App Store Analyst should pay attention to in order to track how their app is doing.
If we examine the funnel above, we can easily see where the biggest drop offs are. These are the areas where we should focus on first as they can help us reduce the overall conversion most significantly. Improving each conversion step is a whole other issue on its own, but here’s a quick hack for each step:
- Too few impressions? Try promoting your app more on different channels like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.
- To increase page views, your title and first screenshot (remember: video is better!) are critical.
- Unit downloads are very hard to improve because some users just browse and don’t intend to download in the first place. Providing good visuals and a clear “what’s in it for the user” description can help.
- After the download phase, it’s all about the “stickiness” of your app.
Integrating a Mobile Dashboard with Databox
Now that we’ve established a set of metrics and a clear goal on how to measure success, it’s important to stay persistent and always know how your app is responding to changes that are introduced.
Enter Databox.
Databox provides a ready-to-ship integration with Apple’s iTunes Connect portal, where everything you’d ever need to know about your app’s performance is available for measuring.
The initial template is equipped with all the metrics mentioned above and a few other essentials, so no analytical work on your end required to get up and running quickly. However, it’s important to point out that you can customize the template as needed (different visualizations, time intervals, metrics, etc.), since we pull everything available on the official iTunes Connect portal.
If you want to see it in action for yourself, this is a good starting point to help you get up and running with Databox.
Don’t forget that when you’re building an app, you’ve got to consider more than just iOS users. Android is a huge platform and in order to really be able to grow, it’s a must to support both platforms.
No sweat though, because Databox has you covered there too.
We also offer a Google Play Developer Console integration, which provides everything you need to keep track of how your Android app is doing. This is where Databox really shines — every metric is a few swipes away. By comparing the two platforms, you can really see what’s going on and where your focus is required.
With Databox Designer, you can combine different metrics to see how your overall app business is doing.
We are always thinking mobile-first, but in addition to ensuring your data travels with you in your pocket, all of these metrics can be easily delivered to your office on a big TV screen, Apple Watch and even right in your Slack channels.
If you work for a company and want to be truly data-driven, easy access to key metrics is a necessary starting point. Empowering everyone in your organization to make data-driven decisions will happen more cost-effectively if you find ways to democratize access to data and sharing relevant business insights.
Next time you’re planning your mobile app launch, think about how you want your conversion funnel to look like. With the right approach, you can avoid a lot of problems early on! With the right set of metrics and a tool which leaves you with nothing but clear data to action, your next release will be even better!
If you have any questions or want to share your feedback with us, please feel free to use the Comments section below or tweet us @DataboxHQ.
