In this episode of The Buzinga Podcast, Logan discusses the 5 most important metrics for measuring your app's performance, as well as HOW to improve each of them.

1. The Buzinga Podcast
Ep 5: The 5 App Metrics That Are Crucial To Your App’s Success
• Hey guys, Logan Merrick here and you’re listening to
episode 5 of The Buzinga Podcast:
• The number 1 resource for startups building and growing
their business in the tech space.
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2. The Buzinga Podcast
Ep 5: The 5 App Metrics That Are Crucial To Your App’s Success
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• How you can listen to this podcast:
1. On iTunes
2. Through any podcast app on your smartphone
3. Listen on our blog at buzinga.com.au/buzz with
shownotes for each episode.
4. Watch with accompanying slides on Youtube
5. Just read the slides on Slideshare

3. What we’re talking about today
App metrics
• “It’s not enough anymore to just capture data – everyone
is collecting data, and most people aren’t doing anything
with it.” Matt Denman, City Lead and Data Nerd at
Uber Melbourne – at our 1st Pollinate event
• Vanity metrics like downloads aren’t indicative of how
much users are actually engaging in your app.
• Data will form the backbone of your future app updates
and marketing strategies.
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4. In this episode…
1. Acquisition metrics
2. Engagement metrics
3. Behaviour metrics
4. Quality metrics
5. Retention metrics
We’ll also cover how to improve each of these metrics.
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5. 1. Acquisition Metrics
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• Acquisitions represent the amount of people who have
downloaded and installed your app.
• They show whether your user base is growing and where
your users are coming from.

6. 1. Acquisition Metrics
What you can find out from acquisition metrics:
• What channels are the new acquisitions coming from? This will show
you where to pour more of your ad budget into.
• What is the percent of downloads that turned into opens? This will
show you which ad networks (eg Facebook) are bringing in the
highest value users, not necessarily the greatest number of users.
• What is your cost per acquisition? This will reveal the return on
investment for each acquisition campaign
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7. 1. Acquisition Metrics
What you can find out from acquisition metrics (continued…)
• How are your app store ratings and reviews? This will reveal public
perception of your app, giving you qualitative (anecdotal) feedback
• What is your conversion rate of app store traffic to downloads? You
may need to optimise your description/screenshots to push
conversions.
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8. 1. Acquisition Metrics
The 1 big takeaway from acquisition metrics:
• The real value of acquisition metrics is in analysing how your
acquisition campaigns are performing.
• Where are the new acquisitions coming from? Eg: Organic search,
word-of-mouth, paid campaigns or in-app referrals?
• Acquisition reports also track ROI for these campaigns.
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9. 1. Acquisition Metrics
• To reduce cost per customer acquisition (or CPA), you need to be
constantly A/B testing and monitoring the impact of your marketing
efforts.
• This is actually a long term strategy.
• You may find in your analysis that you get more downloads from paid
acquisition campaigns, but your users who found you through organic
search are higher life-time value customers.
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10. 1. Acquisition Metrics
• Make sure you have enough users for your data to be statistically
significant
• You can’t confidently draw trends in user behaviour from 100 users
over 30 days.
• The minimum number of monthly downloads for accurate data
analysis is 3,000.
• Bonus: 5 Customer Acquisition Strategies To Reel In Your First 5000
Users
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11. 2. Engagement Metrics
• Engagement metrics show if your users are getting value
from your app - and if you’re getting value from them,
more importantly!
• Engagement can be broken down into 4 parts…
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12. 2. Engagement metrics
1. Active users
• People who have downloaded your app and have
exhibited behaviour that you define as ‘actively
engaged’.
• Do they have any common characteristics? Perhaps you
can re-position your branding to target more people who
fall in these high-value demographics.
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1. Active users

13. 2. Engagement metrics
2. Session length
• This will give you insights to unlock greater revenue
potential.
• For example, if your funnel takes 5 minutes to complete
and the average session time is only 4 minutes, you
either need to:
1. make the funnel shorter or
2. optimise certain steps to push customers further down.
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2. Session length

14. 2. Engagement metrics
3. Goals completed
• Each app has its own goals, depending on the industry
and vertical it operates in.
• Eg: It may be to get checkout transactions (retail apps) or
get shares on social media (media apps).
• Tracking the number of users who complete these goals
will show which screens/funnels you need to spend
more time optimising.
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3. Goals completed

15. 2. Engagement metrics
4. User loyalty –
• This is shown via data like frequency of app launches and
session intervals between launches.
• When you know the typical time lapse between app
launches, you can better time your prompts (push
notifications, in-app messages and more) to encourage
regular opens.
• Bonus: 6 Proven Ways To Make Your Push Notifications
Irresistible To Open
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4. User loyalty

16. 2. Engagement metrics
The 1 big takeaway from engagement metrics:
• The greatest value in engagement metrics is they reveal
the characteristics of your most engaged users
• We call these highest value users ‘power users’.
• What are these users doing differently to everyone else
that they’re getting so much value from your app?
• Eg: They’re all following a similar screen flow, or they’re
making more purchases, or they’re inviting friends to
join.
• By identifying what drives their high level engagement,
you can identify what strategies will be most effective at
replicating their behavior in your disengaged users.
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17. 3. Behaviour metrics
• Behaviour metrics essentially cover all the broad
activities that users are performing in your app.
• It will reveal which features are giving users the most
value and which you should optimise in the next update
or get rid of completely.
• Bonus: Why More Features Aren’t The Answer To Slow
App Growth
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18. 3. Behaviour metrics
• When you’ve identified optimal behaviour, you can
analyse people exhibiting that behaviour and hunt for
patterns.
• Is a good (or bad) behaviour correlated with where the
user was acquired? Lifecycle stage? Frequency of opens
in the first week?
• How can you push more users down the funnel to
complete the action or event you want them to?
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19. 3. Behaviour metrics
Examples of behavioural data:
• What screens, buttons, features are users spending the
most and least time on? Use this data to improve UX in
future updates
• What % of people completed a desired event or action?
• What % of push notifications are opened? A/B test
different copy, timing and offers to see which are more
enticing to customers.
• What kind of in-app events are attributed to that push
notification? It’s great that they opened it, but we want
action here!
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20. 4. Quality metrics
• Quality metrics refer to the quality of the code.
Technical/user issues can be tracked & measured using 3
sub-metrics:
1. Automatic crash-report - Ask your developer to set up
automatic crash-reporting inside of your application.
2. Manual user feedback
3. App store reviews
• The first two options should be implemented into the
application from the get-go. The 3rd needs to be
monitored over time.
• PLEASE NOTE: bugs are a normal part of software dev.
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21. 5. Retention metrics
• Retention is measured as the % of people who return to
your app after their first visit.
• In essence, if you have 100 users this month and in 30
days you managed to retain 80 of them then your
retention rate is 80% (or 20% churn-rate).
• Retention is one of the biggest issues facing app
developer’s today. According to Localytics, 58% of users
who download your app won’t use it after 30 days.
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22. 5. Retention metrics
• An important sub-metric of retention you need to
monitor is your users’ life-time value (LTV).
• If your retention rate is low, then hitting critical mass
becomes an expensive ordeal.
• A high retention rate increases the average LTV because
you get a longer lasting user, but the cost per acquisition
stays the same.
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23. 5. Retention metrics
Take this example:
1. You acquire two users at $1.50 each ($3.00) with a
combined LTV of $5.00. Your profit = $1.00 per user.
2. You acquire one user at $1.50 with an LTV of $5.00 Your
profit = $3.50 per user.
There are two ways to fix the LTV:
1. Increase revenue per user: The user generates more
revenue for you during the time they are active in your
app.
2. Increase long term active engagement: The user stays
active on the application for longer.
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24. The wrap up
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• Clearly defined data lets you make accurate decisions.
• Raw, un-segmented, inaccurate data let’s you make
guesses.
• Your job is to set up a system that reports the data you
need to know in order to make these executive
decisions.

25. Further resources
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• Hope this has been engaging!
• If you want to learn more about app metrics then check
out our blog, I’ve included 3 relevant blogs in the show
notes:
1. 4 Steps To Using App Data “The Uber Way”
2. How To Measure Your App’s Success
3. How To Gain Actionable Insights From The Top 5 App
Metrics

26. Thanks for listening!
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• For more of this please subscribe to iTunes, watch on
Youtube with accompanying slides or on our blog at
buzinga.com.au/buzz
• See you on the next episode!