We are all part of a digitally advanced era where an average mobile app loses around 77% of its users within just 3 days of downloading the app, and around 90% after just the first 30 days. Keeping this and a number of other mobile-related stats into consideration, organizations, digital marketers and app developers need to pay a lot of focus to one of the most important mobile app elements – app engagement.
In this read, we will have a look at the different ways to measure app engagement (or user engagement) and how it can impact the overall profitability of a business entity in the modern technological sphere.
Before we go into the details of calculating, measuring or making comparisons using app engagement numbers, we first need to understand what it really means – specifically in the context of mobile apps.
In the simplest of definitions, mobile app engagement tells you the overall value of your business, product or service from a user’s perspective. It gives a clear picture of how frequently or how long a potential or existing user likes to engage with your mobile app.
According to Esteban Kolsky, 72% of users tend to share a positive experience with 6 or more people. On the contrary, 13% of unhappy users will share their experience with 15 people or even more. With the ever-increasing mobile app competition in the world of mobile apps in recent times, user engagement has become one of the key factors that define an app’s overall success or failure.
It is imperative to understand the fact that measuring user engagement varies from one business to another, from one industry to another. There are a lot of internal or external factors that will determine the way an organization measures it’s app’s user engagement over a certain time period.
Having said that, we have picked the top most important average mobile user engagement metrics that you – being a business owner, app developer or a product manager – need to pay heed to:
The first step in achieving success in your mobile app is trying to meet certain goals in terms of the app’s total number of downloads. This is one of the most important metrics as far as user engagement is concerned. This is split into two parts:
Conversion rate – this is the percentage of app users that download an app once they have viewed the app page. This gives a clearer picture of how well an app page is able to convince a user to download the app.
Install Rate – this is the percentage of users that download an app directly from the app store results without visiting your app page. This metric gives a better idea of how well an app stands out in the main search results section of an app store.
Knowing your app’s active users can determine the overall growth of your app within a certain time frame. Marketers and business owners can have a better understanding of these numbers by viewing the Daily Active Users (DAUs), Weekly Active Users (WAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
It can be further segmented in terms of region, age, gender, device, etc.
The session duration metric tells you about the time a user spends between the first and the last activity he performs. Developers usually set a session timeout that indicates a user is idle after a certain time period and that the session has ended.
Session duration largely depends on the industry or the nature of your business model. For example, banking and finance apps will not have lengthy session durations as compared to learning or entertainment apps.
This is the metric that tells you about the time between two app sessions. This is a useful number if you want to know the time your user takes to return to your mobile app. If this number is gradually increasing over time, you might want to revisit and have a look at all the app’s parameters to ensure everything is working the way it should.
A screen flow analysis gives an idea of the number of visits per screen or a section of an app, number of exits and the navigational flow between screens. This number helps you in identifying your user’s behavioral patterns in various app sections.
This tracking information helps developers and app managers to go back and redo certain parameters if a specific action is not leading to a desired result.
These two metrics are relevant as they tell you about the times or reason why a user returns to your mobile app. The retention rate is usually defined as the percentage of users that return to your app in the last 30, 60 or 90 days.
On the other hand, stickiness is the metric that tells you about the app activities that are attracting your users back to your app. This metric comes in quite handy when you want to know which specific sections or activities are contributing towards user engagement.
This metric is the opposite of user retention as it tells you about the percentage of users who quit using your app and never return. Developers and app managers should be well-informed about the sections or steps of an app funnel that is resulting in users to leave for good.
For marketers and sales personnel, knowing the various channels from where users are coming is an important user engagement element. User acquisitions can stem from various sources such as organic search, paid search, referrals, social media campaigns, etc.
Once you know which channels are giving you the highest number of new acquisitions and those that are not, you will be better-positioned to make smart marketing investments in future.
The lifetime value is an estimated revenue projection that you can make from a user’s expected lifetime with your product or service. Or in other words, it is the total revenue that you can earn from a retained user before he falls under the churn category.
Organizations need to monetize their digital channels to the maximum, and have accurate estimates to tell them where they stand financially.
Conversion rate tells you about the number of successful actions of your users in terms of app sign ups, transactions, form filling, in-app purchases, etc. There are numerous actionable sections in an app and as a developer or an app manager, you would assign certain targets to yourself in a specific time period.
In order to have a thorough visibility of your targets being achieved or not, conversion rates is what you will need to look at as you will be able to calculate these numbers at each step of your funneled data and know precisely where the users are quitting or dropping off.
Now that we are aware of the most effective app engagement KPIs and metrics that will affect your app’s overall growth, let us have a look at some of the best tools to measure these metrics and give you the insights that you need:
Whether it’s about monitoring active users, impressions, installs, mobile attribution, fraud prevention or any other mobile-related metric – the following app engagement tools will do the job for you:
It is not rare even for experienced developers, marketers or app managers to formulate a user engagement strategy that might not be the most efficient one – keeping into consideration the various internal and external factors that affect a business model. Here are some of the common mistakes that you need to be vigilant of:
Measuring User Engagement in Totality – Measuring overall user engagement might be useful, but not very actionable. For example, looking at an overall 15-day active user count number is less actionable than looking at 15-day active users who transacted in a specific app section.
Reporting Total User Count – Having more users is different from having more usage. For a banking app, a number that says ‘500,000 transactions per week’ looks more fancy. However, a more meaningful number would be ‘8.5 transactions per user per week.’
Measuring All Metrics At Once – It is never a good idea to measure all metrics at once. You will be bombarding your resources and management staff with information that you might not even need in a given time period or it might be irrelevant to the nature of your business in general.
Ignoring the Difference between Business and Consumer Apps – Know that apps that are used by employees at workplaces will have very different user engagement figures and behaviors as compared to consumer product apps. The main difference is the choice and freedom to use a specific app. If an employee is instructed to use an app for work, he or she will not have much choice and might be forcefully using it over a certain time period.
User retention and user acquisition are two important parameters for user engagement. However, most marketers and experts believe that if you have to choose one of these two to focus on and build a marketing strategy around it, you should always go with user retention.
The sole reason for this is the fact that the cost of retaining an existing user offsets the cost of acquiring a new one.
As the marketing saying goes ‘don’t spend money to lose money’. This is exactly what you might be doing when you focus too much on bringing in a new user rather than ensuring that your current users stay with your product or service. According to a report, most online businesses bring less than 20% of customers back to make another purchase within a 6-month time period.
There is no app engagement metric that can be deemed as less important than another metric. However, these numbers and measuring tools only become effective once you have a thorough understanding of your own business model, your users’ expectations and an app’s growth potential in the most impactful areas, rather than investing your resources in irrelevant data or KPIs.
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Back in 2008, there were 500 apps on Apple’s App Store’s first official version – today, there are more than 2.2 million iOS apps. It is redundant to say that we have come a long way since the past decade in terms of app usage and development.
With over 5 billion mobile users in the world and an internet penetration rate of 57%, the app business is, undoubtedly, one of the biggest digital sectors in the world at present. However, these ever-increasing numbers also mean something else – competition is on the rise, too.
From a developer’s or a UI/UX designer’s perspective, there are certain app performance measurement metrics that are vital to an app’s overall success or failure. These metrics include user engagement, daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU), churn rate, etc. Yes, these numbers and stats are imperative – however, another element that is important is your app or your product adoption from a user or potential buyer’s perspective.
Today, we will have a look at one of the models that talks about product adoption, and talk about its adaption or relevance in the mobile app industry. This model is commonly known as the new product adoption curve, or simply, product adoption curve.
In the simplest of definitions, the new product adoption curve is one of the globally recognized and accepted models that shows who buys your product or service and when. This model was introduced in 1962 by a professor named Everett Rogers, in his famous book Diffusion of Innovations.
According to Rogers, every human being will not adopt an idea or a proposition right away, even if it comes with obvious and visible benefits. He identified some key personality traits and behavioral patterns that contribute towards an individual’s acceptance to a new product or an innovation. The human behavior, according to him, is split into the following elements:
Let us have a look at each of these elements in detail and how they can be incorporated in the mobile app context in relevance to app adoption.
According to this model, the first group of people who buy or consume your product are called the innovators. These are the individuals who are usually part of the younger age group, have means and resources to take financial risks, belong to the highest social class, have a good amount of access to scientific sources and can easily interact with fellow innovators.
Keeping the app business in mind, these innovators can be the very first users who download and install your app, even when you haven’t promoted or advertised your app yet. This group is willing to take risks and this is the same group who, once an app sees the light of day, will have the most information and product knowledge.
The second-fastest category is the early adopters. This group consists of those individuals who adopt an innovation after the innovators do. Falling just behind the innovators, this group is believed to have the highest amount of product awareness, relevant business knowledge, belong to a higher social class, have financial freedom and are more advanced than the rest of the categories explained below.
In the context of mobile apps, these could be the users who download and install your app just a few days after you have released your app’s first stable version. They might not install it right away, since they might wait for your app’s reviews in the app store or look up for more information on your app before downloading it.
This group of people go for a product after a certain period of time. They will prefer to wait for a while, may be due to financial constraints, alternatives available, lack of product awareness or education. However, they are slow but they still manage to get convinced to go for a product once the innovators and early adopters go for it.
Now, being an app developer, you can think of those users who might be part of your own social circle, your friends, family members, work colleagues from your same age bracket, etc. These people will not rush towards using your app as they might have a laid-back attitude towards product acceptance or adoption.
People who belong to this category will buy or consume a product after the majority of the society’s members have already bought it. This group or cohort will show signs of skepticism for a good amount of time, before they finally decide to go for a product. This segment is believed to be part of a below average social class, have limited financial freedom, low product awareness and are less educated than the above three groups.
In mobile app context, these are the users who might have reservations regarding your app, possible due to the fact that they have not read about your app’s features and benefits, and have their opinion formed through what they read or heard over social media or other inauthentic sources of information.
This group of individuals are the ones who would consume a product at the very last. People who belong to this group show no signs of opinion leadership whatsoever. Usually, these individuals belong to the older age bracket within a society and are very non-receptive to change. They might value their traditional, cultural or religious beliefs, have the lowest financial freedom and have almost zero contact with other group types.
If you are the owner of a social media or an entertainment app, this could be your users who have little to no knowledge about your app and all the various aspects related to it. Other people might have to educate them about the usage of the app itself, let alone the app’s purpose, usability and adoption. In this graphical representation, these groups will experience a bell-shaped curve. The blue line shows the users adapting to a new app or a product, while the yellow line shows the total market share of 100%.
In order to make the most of this model in terms of user acceptance and adoption, there are a few steps that you can take:
Make sure that you are identifying and making timely decisions based on which stage of the adoption curve your app is currently at. For example, when your app is quite new on the app store, your user demographics and cohorts will be different. One year down the road, you will have new cohorts with different reasons to use your app. Your marketing and advertising campaigns should be relevant to the age and/or other factors that are related to your mobile app.
There is a point known as the ‘chasm’ in a product adoption curve. It is usually the point that can either let you succeed or make you go through a failure rather quickly. The above image shows the chasm stage, usually it is at the beginning of this curve. It could mean your app making early in-roads in the app store. You will need to be at your very best as far as business decisions are concerned. A very slight mistake at this stage could cost you a lot.
The innovators and early adopters might have been rather easy for you to deal with, however, moving on towards other groups will take some effort to convince. Make sure your marketing campaigns are conveying the right message to your potential buyers and giving them value for their money instead of just fluff talk.
Usually the second largest group in an adoption curve, laggards are not supposed to be left behind or forgotten. Since they are the last ones who will get onboard with your app or product, you will need to come up with a lot of reasoning to convince them.
However, once you are able to convince this specific group, you might be getting a lot more in return since the ones who are close to them would know that they didn’t go for your product for a certain period of time, but eventually they did – giving an impression that your app is worth giving a shot!
We hope we answered all of your questions regarding the new product adoption curve. If you still want to find ways to maximise the user experience in your app, then you can read our article on the differences between Heuristics and usability testing. This will give you a guide on how to use the most popular UX frameworks to evaluate the usability of your app. Or, here are some more of our best UX-centric articles:
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