App store optimization success: Top five KPIs you must measure
Top five leading metrics that you need to measure App Store Optimization (ASO) success, user engagement, user retention, and business conversion.
Top five leading metrics that you need to measure App Store Optimization (ASO) success, user engagement, user retention, and business conversion.
Across two major app marketplaces, there are already more than two million mobile apps and still counting. Mobile apps have made inroads across all nooks and corners of our daily lives and enterprise operations. But despite all these, not all mobile apps are equally successful, and there is a multitude of apps that struggle to survive as businesses. Perhaps, App Store Optimization (ASO) is something that app creators must consider.
Naturally, app publishers and marketers worldwide consider it extremely important to monitor several metrics concerning user engagement, user retention, and business conversion. Here we will explain the five leading metrics that you need to track for measuring the success of your app in app stores.
The most important thing for any app to get traction in app marketplaces is to become easily discoverable and visible to the target audience. Whether coming into search results or getting featured or hitting top charts, in one way or the other, your app needs to be discoverable and visible to the audience. This is also the principal objective of App Store Optimization (ASO).
Some metrics to keep track of discoverability of the app include the following.
Where in the search result, your app appears against a target keyword refers to your search ranking.
The ranking of your app in various top charts by categories or by parameters such as Free, Premium, and others.
Where your app in the respective category ranks refers to the category ranking.
Whether the app is listed among the top apps featured by the App Store or Play Store.
All these metrics that can easily be tracked can reveal your app’s discoverability in the app marketplaces.
This is one of the most important metrics to measure the traction and engagement of a mobile app. The number of active users for a mobile app directly shows the audience engagement and how it evolves. When this metric shows growth, that means the app is getting more traction. The active user metrics can further be categorized into four metrics as per audience engagement in different time spans.
This metric refers to the number of users using the app on a particular day.
The number of users using the app in a single month is divided by the number of days in a month.
The number of users using the app in a single week.
The number of users using the app in a particular month.
Whether calculated on a monthly, daily, or weekly basis, the number of users hardly gives an idea of the business conversion or the kind of revenue they generate for the app. The Lifetime Value or LTV is the metric that helps measure the gross revenue generated by a user over a period of time. This metric is more closely related to the bottom line of an app and hence is very important.
Though you can easily track user session time on a weekly, daily, or monthly basis and track their CTR and impressions, measuring the business conversion remains difficult. This is where this metric comes as handy as it allows evaluating the total sum outcome of the entire app marketing efforts.
Another important metric closely related to the bottom line and revenue is the user acquisition cost. Your total marketing budget spent on user acquisition can be divided by the total number of users to get an idea of the cost of acquisition. The metric further can be divided on a monthly and yearly basis and can be seen whether the cost of acquisition is growing or decreasing.
Your app is easily visible and discoverable as per the various visibility metrics we have discussed. Now the question is, does this visibility convert into app downloads. After discovering your app downloads the app, how many of the visitors is a crucial metric to measure the success of your App Store Optimization and app marketing?
Some of the key methods to boost App Store Optimization and conversion include using great app title, engaging app description powered by screenshots, images and video content, app reviews, and app ratings.
App market conversion can be tracked through the important measurement metric called Click-through rate (CTR). The proportion of people who, after landing on your app marketplace snippet clicks to go into the product page, is expressed in percentage, and it is called the conversion rate. It is an unmistakable part of the conversion funnel that app marketers need to monitor on a regular basis.
To improve the conversion rate, fortunately, you have an array of sophisticated A/B testing tools that helps you to evaluate the impact of various aspects of your app listing and accordingly fees helpful suggestions to improve conversion rate.
While these metrics are already well known and are regularly tracked by the app marketers around the world, you need to make sure to use a good analytics engine to track your audience engagement and business conversion more accurately.
Juned Ghanchi is Co-founder of IndianAppDevelopers, a mobile app development company builds iOS and Android mobile apps for startups to big brands. Juned has over a decade of experience across Software consulting, App solutions, and App development.