3 Essential Customer Experience Metrics for Your Mobile App Marketing Campaign

According to eMarketer, the global mobile advertising market will surpass $100 billion in spending in 2016. That’s a lot of money, and if businesses are going to invest that much in their app promotion, they need to know exactly what they are doing.

How can you know if your app marketing campaign is successful? There are various mobile marketing metrics that are meant to make it easy for you. But the challenge of measuring the efficacy of mobile app marketing is that there are probably too many metrics. That may be the reason why, according to Gartner’s Data-Driven Marketing survey, only 18 percent of companies either aren’t investing in mobile analytics.

But is learning about your mobile marketing analytics really that complicated? Let’s begin by looking at what metrics mobile marketers report they actually use..

Here are the top four metrics, and the percentage of mobile marketers who report using them:

• number of downloads (76%)
• recurrent usage (48%)
• time spent (41%)
• revenue or leads generated (40%)

At Yalantis we know that tracking the right metrics can make the difference between product success and failure. Mobile products are different from web-based applications and require a different approach. Our experience tells us that a great user experience and high-quality code aren’t enough for your app to succeed. It’s your customers and their feelings that matter the most, and that’s why a well-planned social media marketing campaign is essential for your app promotion.

[58 percent of manufacturers are either piloting or planning to invest in mobile technologies and applications, followed by big data analytics (49 percent). Source: Smallbusinessfrontiers.com]

To build your marketing campaign you need a set of reliable data, and that’s where social media marketing metrics come in.

Here’s our pick of metrics that are critical for mobile app marketing — but are often overlooked.

1. Social Reach

In social media, reach indicates the maximum number of people who could have been exposed to a message. Knowing how wide your audience is helps you understand if your marketing campaign targets right people. If you know your goal in customer acquisition, social reach will help you see how close your are to that goal. Social reach is especially useful when combined with other engagement metrics. For example, you can calculate engagement percentages by picking an engagement metric like number of retweets and dividing it by reach.

How to measure your app campaign social reach

Here are some tools that will help you.

Buffer is a well-known tool that will make your SMM Manager’s life much easier. Buffer is best known for scheduling tweets. Also, every time you post a message you can see the number of clicks and retweets next to it. Another appealing feature that Buffer offers is called “Potential.” This feature shows you an estimated total number of people who might have seen your post based on how many followers you have and their audiences.

The free version of Buffer allows for one Twitter and one Facebook account and limits the number of queued posts, but paid versions start at only $10 per month.

Another useful tool for social reach measurement, Facebook Insights, will be particularly helpful if your app has a busy Facebook page. Facebook Insights is Facebook’s own analytics tool that helps you with measuring the impact of your product’s Facebook Page. Since it’s an in-house tool, Facebook can provide better analysis than many third-party services that try to lump Facebook analytics in with the rest of the social sphere. Facebook Insights lets you see how many Facebook users viewed your post, clicked, re-shared or liked.

[Facebook insights. Source: Kissmetrics]

Hootsuite is another great tool for measuring social reach, and Buffer’s strongest competitor. Hootsuite offers a very popular social media dashboard that allows you to download reports that put your activity and reach into easy-to-understand graphs. Hootsuite Pro is a real bargain at just $5.99 per month. The Pro version offers integration with Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and unlimited social media accounts, among other perks.

2. Customer sentiment

Customer sentiment is a metric that is designed to show you how your customers perceive your product and how they react to it on an emotional level. Pure data are sometimes misleading. Sometimes we share things on social media because we’re outraged or irritated by it. In other words, social media shares are necessarily the equivalent of five-star reviews of your product. Knowing the number of people you’ve reached through social media is not enough.

Customer sentiment looks beyond the number of likes and shares on social media to help your really understand if your marketing campaign is effective.

How can you track something as elusive as people’s emotions?

Here’s a list of tools that will come in handy.

• Google Alerts gives you email updates about the latest relevant search results from Google. It’s an invaluable tool for content marketing, and is a good place to start if you want to track trends and influential competitors.
• People Browser is a tool that helps you find all mentions of your brand, industry and competitors. With People Browser you can compare the number of brand and product mentions before, during and after your marketing campaign.
• Social Mention is similar to Google Alerts, but focuses on social media. Social Mention will help you track mentions for specific keywords in videos, blogs, microblogs, events, bookmarks, comments, news, Q&As, hashtags and even audio. . The best part is that this tool also indicates if mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.
• Mention is another social media monitoring tool that tracks millions of online sources in multiple languages and gives you information about your brand’s popularity. Mention offers three different programs for individuals, small businesses and enterprise with prices from $29 and up per month.

[Mention. Source: Mention.com]

3. User Demographics

User demographics is a metric takes into account data such as age, gender, nationality or race. As a metric, User Demographics can tell you how often and for how long certain group use your app, and what devices they prefer using it on.

Demographic data can tell you if your app is popular with its target audience, reveal new markets that may be receptive to your app, and indicate opportunities for growth through app localization. Proper analysis of user demographics helps you optimize your app marketing and monetization strategies.

Check our article about ASO to learn about the importance of localization for your app promotion.

Most popular app analytics platforms like Flurry and App Annie offer tools that allow you to analyse user demographics in detail.

When you know who uses your app, you know exactly how to present your product in the optimal way that will convince your users to spend money, look at ads, and keep using the app. Once you know who you’re communicating with, building a loyal audience suddenly becomes much easier. This is why demographic data is crucial for successful mobile app marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing can be an invaluable part of your marketing strategy, but to make the most out of it you need to prioritize your efforts. Tracking social reach, customer sentiment and user demographics will provide you with useful insights into how well your marketing campaign is doing and how it can be improved.

Originally published at yalantis.com.