5 Crucial Metrics to Watch When Launching Your Mobile App

Safeguard Your App Launch by Carefully Tracking These Critical Metrics.

Launching your app can be extremely stressful. You’ve brought together specialized teams from Front End, Back End, Design, Marketing and it’s finally coming to a head, launch day is near. You are excited for the surge of user data that will flood your analytics for optimizations, but where do you focus? Fortunately, there are some metrics available that will help you quickly analyze and then optimize your mobile app’s performance at launch or during a major update.

1. (ANR) App Not Responding

Few things are more frustrating to users than opening their favorite app, attempting to interact with it . . . and having it crash repeatedly. An app that is not responding is one of the key reasons that people delete mobile apps, and it can seriously affect your user retention rates. The App Not Responding (ANR) metric allows you to drill down into affected users and sessions, determining if there are commonalities that can be addressed in a quick patch. You’ll especially want to review this metric after a significant upgrade, as there could be an unexpected bug introduced by new code.

2. Crashes

Apps not responding and crashed sessions are slightly different metrics — but they both add up to big frustrations for your users. There are a variety of tools that can be leveraged to determine when sessions are crashing, and also analyze any common factors such as connection type or speed, interaction with a specific screen or gesture. You can often see the number of users affected, and the ratio of affected users to crashes can give you an idea about whether people are trying again and still seeing a crash.

3. Onboarding Drop-Offs & Exit Rates

Are your users getting frustrated before they even get into the meat and potatoes of your app? The onboarding hurdle is one of the biggest issues noted by users when they’re downloading a new app for the first time. Keeping your registration as simple as possible and only requiring exactly the information that you need to gather from users is crucial.

Once you have opted them into your app and shown that your app delivers value, then you can expand the relationship with your customers in a less intrusive way than an extensive registration or onboarding process. Consider integrating third-party login options such as a social login or Google login, so users don’t feel as though they have to create yet another registration profile — and another secure password to remember.

4. Time Spent in App

It could be argued that this is the only app that truly matters for engagement. Without question, you’ll never truly understand user behavior and engagement without a firm grasp on the time people are spending in your app. Are they successfully completing their transactions, watching a video or playing a game? Without understanding the average time that your users are spending in your app on an ongoing basis, it’s difficult to answer these questions.

5. User Retention Rate

Localytics stats show that the three-month user retention rate continues to rise, with the average app user launching an app at least 11 times. The industry average for three-month retention is around forty percent. If your rates are significantly off that figure, it may be time to examine the value that your mobile app is providing to your user base.

By the third month, retention rates begin to drop to down around 25%, but this is still a significant amount of engagement with existing customers. You can help drive engagement by adding interactive elements such as push notifications and other non-intrusive methods of communicating actively with your user base. In fact, in-app notifications are so successful in driving engagement that app open rates are nearly double for individuals who have enabled these notifications.

Creating a successful mobile app can be extremely rewarding, but app creation is truly only the first step. Once you have launched your app into the marketplace, then the true work of tweaking and optimizing your app for success begins. Focus intently on the user experience and listen closely to customers — as the metrics will clue you in to challenges, and users can help provide suggestions for resolution.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +436,678 people.

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