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Congratulations, you’ve launched your app! But now what? Launching your app is really just the beginning. To ensure your app’s long-term success, you will track and analyze key performance metrics.

Measuring the success of your app has several benefits. It helps you understand how your app is being used, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions about future development. It can also help you showcase the value of your app to investors, partners, and other stakeholders.

So what should you be tracking? Let’s review some app success metrics, tools and resources for tracking those metrics, and best practices for measuring your app’s success.

App success metrics worth considering

There are many metrics you could track for your app. Your goal for your app will determine which metrics are best to track. Here are a few popular metrics to consider.

  • Number of downloads and active users: User counts give you an idea of how many people are using your app. This is particularly important if you need to show your app’s value to investors or other stakeholders, who will care about user adoption if your business is in its infancy (or if you’re “pre-revenue”).

  • Engagement metrics: Engagement metrics give you insight into how users are interacting with your app. Some common engagement metrics include time spent in the app, number of sessions, and number of screens viewed. Companies like to track engagement when their business model is based on advertising revenue or continued user growth.

  • Retention rate: Retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue to use your app over time. A high retention rate is a good indicator that your app is providing lasting value to users.

  • Conversion rate: Conversion rate measures how many users are achieving a specific goal (e.g. making a purchase or booking a reservation). Understanding your conversion rate can help you decide whether it makes more sense to invest in user acquisition or feature enhancements.

  • Revenue: If your app exists to generate revenue, revenue should be a key metric. Revenue is the most meaningful metric for self-funded clients as the business is dependent on app-generated revenue.

  • Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction may feel more difficult to quantify than other metrics, but it’s possible to measure. You can measure customer satisfaction through surveys, reviews, and other feedback channels. Customer satisfaction is a good indicator of how well your app is meeting user needs.

Tools for tracking app success

There are many tools and resources available for tracking your app’s success. At the end of the day, you should use whatever works best for your team and your desired workflow.

Our go-to analytics tool is Google Analytics. It’s a free, widely-used tool that provides a wealth of data on user behavior. Mobile apps can implement Google Analytics through Firebase Google Analytics is particularly useful for tracking user engagement and revenue.

As a custom app development agency, we’ve also built custom reports and dashboards directly into our clients’ apps. We often include administrative dashboards in web apps to help clients with customer support tasks, reporting on key metrics, and other administrative tasks. Charting libraries like Chart.js are great for building custom charts from your own data. A custom dashboard that keeps user data within your own ecosystem and away from third parties is an appealing option for privacy-centric applications.

Regardless of the tools you use for tracking, remember to review your metrics regularly. Maintain a weekly product management calendar to schedule activities you should be doing, and include reviewing your metrics in that calendar. Reviewing metrics more frequently than weekly is unnecessary and can lead to over-analyzing your data. In fact, during slower times of year or between significant feature releases, you may only want to review your metrics every few weeks or even monthly.

Best practices for tracking your app’s success

Tracking the success of your app is crucial, but metrics are best when they offer actionable information. Here are some best practices to consider when tracking your app’s success:

Define what success means for your app

Before you start tracking any metrics, identify what success looks like for your app. Different apps will have different definitions of success, so start by defining your own specific goals. What is the most important thing your app should accomplish? Answer that question and then back into metrics that tell you whether you’re accomplishing what you set out to do.

Use tools and resources that are relevant to your app

There are many tools and resources available for tracking app performance. For example, if you are an e-commerce app, tracking revenue and conversion rate may be more relevant to your goals than tracking time spent in the app.

Regularly review your app’s metrics

Setting a regular schedule to check and analyze your app’s performance data is crucial. This can be daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your needs. The key is to be consistent and make sure you are staying on top of your app’s performance.

Don’t rely solely on metrics

While metrics can help you track your app success, they will not bring you success on their own. Seek out user feedback and use that to inform your decisions about the future of your app. Further, some companies go too far in optimizing for metrics and lose sight of the user experience. Some once-popular apps have fallen in popularity due to over-optimization for metrics like gamification to drive micro-transactions.

Finding success with your app

In conclusion, regularly tracking and analyzing your app’s performance data is crucial for understanding its success. Using tools like Google Analytics and following best practices can help you get the most out of your metrics.

Remember that metrics are indicators of trends, not goals in and of themselves. Optimizing for metrics without considering the user experience can lead to negative consequences. Additionally, metrics are not the only way to measure the success of your app. Customer feedback, user testing, and other forms of data can also be valuable to review when making decisions about your app.

By regularly tracking and analyzing your app’s success, you can make informed decisions about how to improve and grow your product.