In today’s digital age, where the market is witnessing countless apps with high-end features and functionalities, successfully stirring user engagement is nothing less than a challenge. Hence, you need to develop a habit of checking your mobile app performance after launching it to understand its flaws and shortcomings.
Once you know the mobile app performance metrics, you can optimize your app and accelerate its overall performance and functioning. These metrics also help to understand the user choices, thereby offering a better user experience.
But before learning about the key app engagement metrics, let’s understand what mobile application performance exactly means.
What is Mobile App Performance?
Mobile application performance can be referred to as the ability of an app to interact with a mobile device under various situations, loads, and possibilities. This performance depends on multiple factors, including server, device, network, and how the app is developed. What’s more interesting is how users perceive it.
You can analyze your app performance by clearly defining its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These mobile app KPIs can be defined as a prerequisite to be included in a development strategy for getting a detailed insight into your app’s overall progress. It also helps when calculating the valuation of your app.
To be precise, here’s a compilation of some KPIs you need to consider while monitoring your mobile app performance.
1 User Growth Rate
This KPI tells you about the growth in the user base and what are the factors affecting it. You can calculate it by taking the difference between this month’s and last month’s total number of users and dividing it by the previous month’s total.
2 Mobile downloads
If your aim is to track the overall popularity of your mobile application, then this KPI is the most reliable one. It efficiently represents the total number of app downloads on total devices.
3 App Installs
It’s not necessary that the users who download the app shall complete the process of installing it. As such, this KPI lets you track the actual installations for your app on the devices that your users have.
4 App Uninstalls
You don’t want to lose your valuable user base, and to maintain that, keeping track of app uninstalls is a must. With this KPI, you can know the reasons behind the uninstalls, whether done in groups or by a previously stable user base.
5 App Registration
This KPI leads to business growth by representing how many users are interested in your product or service. Additionally, it collects user data that can be used to optimize PPC and social media campaigns or future market upgrades.
6 App Subscription
If you offer any new content or information to your users, this KPI proves beneficial to track the signups and total subscriptions. You can learn about the average subscription length and how long it takes a user to subscribe after installation.
7 App Crash
Gaining information about the number of crashes that occur across the user journey is necessary to enhance your mobile app performance. This KPI does the same alongside displaying the cause of the crash.
8 App Upgrades
This KPI represents the number and timing of upgrades and helps you to plan your support and maintenance services accordingly. You can also identify which users are using a basic version and what percentage of users upgrade.
9 Retention Rate
The retention rate decides the positive implication for future revenue and growth from the app. It reflects the total number of users that come back on the app after a particular period of time.
10 Total Sessions
This KPI shows the data related to the people who are visiting your app daily and monthly. It represents the popularity of your mobile app; the higher the sessions, the more user engagement.
11 Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV indicates the total amount of revenue generated for the mobile application by your users to date. It helps your brand to understand its value, market presence and get insights into prospective revenue.
12 Cohort Analysis
With this KPI, you can source information related to your user base that is grouped into various collectives like location, demographics, in-app behaviors, etc. This helps to fulfill the needs of current and future customers.
Why is Mobile App Performance Important?
When you keep an eye on various mobile app analytics metrics related to your app, you can avoid potential risks and be ready for sudden changes. By tracking the right metrics, you can implement a foolproof mobile app optimization strategy to ensure that there are no anomalies in the performance. For instance, to know why a user has uninstalled your app, you need to closely monitor its KPIs to offer a better experience than before. And this experience is all to win customer loyalty and observe sustainability.
The major significance of app performance measurement is that it helps to create optimal solutions for internal issues. You gain all the crucial information on how people use your app, how your app responds to user requests, etc. Measuring the overall performance of your app helps your in-house/ onsite teams to plan or make changes to their development, deployment, and marketing strategies accordingly. Your teams would already have the solutions to solve specific issues beforehand.
For a business that is particular about its budget distribution and revenue generation, understanding the payment behavior of users can be crucial. That’s when monitoring the app’s performance can help it to make the right decisions.
Here’re some quick statistics to define why you need to monitor your app performance.
- 80% of businesses use customer satisfaction scores to analyze customer experience and improve it accordingly.
- As per the research, 36 % of people say the company is not good if they have a slow mobile app.
- About 21 % of users abandon the app after first use.
- 1 out of 26 users popostcomplaint when they face app issues, and 91% of unsatisfied customers churn without any feedback.
- 13% of people shall tell 15 others or more about their bad experiences.
How to Improve Your Mobile App Performance?
You should have a robust app performance improvement strategy in place if you want to cater to the requirements of your user base successfully. The below-given factors should drive this strategy to obtain optimal results.
1 Reduce Application Size
Mobile app size plays a vital role in app performance and download frequency. If the mobile app is heavy in size, there’s a high possibility that people avoid downloading it as it would consume excess space on their device. So, it’s better to minimize the application size by removing unused resources, reducing library size, reusing code, etc.
2 Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Leveraging CDN has a proven track record of enhancing app performance. It plays a vital role in reducing the navigation path and improving speed. Besides, it helps your brand ensure a faster flow of information between the different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and makes the process safe.
3 Define Networking
When it comes to loading, always give the first preference to texts and introduce the images simultaneously. This would boost performance rationally. You also need to avoid duplicate content requests and focus on changing your content delivery according to the available network quality and conditions.
4 Develop a Functional App
Instead of creating a fancy or much-animated app, push your developers to create a fully functional app. Such animations would increase the loading time and keep your users annoyed. As such, follow the thumb rule of keeping your app design as minimalistic as possible.
5 Use an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) System
With APM, you can monitor the overall performance and consistency of your application. This system helps you tackle all the issues in real-time and give an in-depth report of the overall performance. It helps to diagnose complex app performance issues to match the necessary app objectives.
6 Optimize Images
You can improve the overall performance of your app by using vector images. Ensure that your app casters to dynamic image sizes. You can also apply image caching to procure faster loading times and a better user experience. Another way to optimize your images is by using libraries like Picasso, Fresco, etc.
7 Optimize Screen Size
Push your developers to build apps that specifically focus on small and medium-sized screens. Develop the habit of implementing adaptive UI flows to increase visualization. Optimize your apps for Medium Dots Per Inch (MDPI) and High Dots Per Inch (HDPI). You can also use emulator configurations.
8 Avoid Latency Issues
Low latency can result in producing certain errors or lead to complete app failure and impact user engagement. However, you can effectively combat these issues by limiting third-party latency sources during poor network quality. Use less-to-no latency killer APIs to keep your app up and running.
Essential Tools to Improve your Mobile App Performance
To track all the defined KPIs for your app, you need mobile app analytics tools. These tracking tools help in measuring overall user behavior and other factors like downloads, retention, etc. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1 Mix Panel
Mix panel is one of the best tools to provide app analytics. With this tool and data insight, you can retain or engage more users. Get the real-time insight of your app users. Set the KPI’s and do the A/B testing for all your targeted goals.
2 Google Analytics
Google offers analytics for mobile applications too. This platform is free and covers all basic needs of your analytics, and tracks app performance in real-time. You can elevate your user engagement with its high-end features, such as navigation visualization.
3 Flurry
Flurry is a free professional mobile analytic tool; it provides event tracking, behavior segmentation, and user journey insight. With such a tool, you can monitor, analyze, and improve your existing application performance at ease.
4 App Store Connect
It’s a suite of web-based tools that helps you track complete mobile app metrics for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and iMessage. You can discover which users install your app while browsing on the App Store, various user engagement metrics, and much more.
Wrapping it up,
With all the above, you would have surely understood the importance of measuring mobile app performance and how it helps your brand earn the needed reputation. It not only optimizes the user experience but also leads to better conversions in the longer run. Just make sure you closely observe your KPIs and use the appropriate tools and technologies to satisfy all the stakeholders.
Author's Bio
Nitin Lahoti is the Co-Founder and Director at Mobisoft Infotech. He has 15 years of experience in Design, Business Development and Startups. His expertise is in Product Ideation, UX/UI design, Startup consulting and mentoring. He prefers business readings and loves traveling.
