Mobile App Analytics 101: Best KPIs For App Measuring

Tiago Valente
2 min readJan 6, 2021

Since 2021 just kick-off, it’s time to define objectives for your products. Therefore here are some of the best KPIs for App Measuring and Mobile App Analytics Best Practices that you should track 👇 🧵

Before all, the first main driver question is: What are you looking for?

The data that you’ll collect from your apps will only take meaning when you know clearly what your goals are. Identify your goal first and then work towards measuring those goals.

Less is more. If you have multiple goals, you will end up with useless data outputs from your app.
Define ONE single goal per-app vertical. That goal should translate to the success of your app.

e.g.
Goal: in-app product purchase
KPI: conversion %

(How to define an app vision, strategy, and goals, that might be a whole new topic for another day)
Now, getting into the KPIs…

Focus on 3 main Dimensions:

A) Acquisition
B) Engagement (& Retention)
C) Revenue
A) ACQUISITION

Don’t know what’s ASO?! Check @nickjsheriff posts since he has great stuff on this.

The better your app ASO, the lower will be your CPI/CAC.

B) ENGAGEMENT (& RETENTION)

  • DAU/WAU/MAU (Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users) — these are the basic foundation metrics.
  • Stickiness or Retention Rate (RR) — % of users who find your app interesting enough to stick around (using it again for a period of time).

Stickiness = DAU / MAU | The closer DAU is to MAU, the better your app is.

Retention Rate (RR) = ((CE — CN) / CS)) X 100
CE (# Customer end of a period)
CN (# New Customers acquired over a period)
CS (# Customer at start of a period)

The higher the number, the better.
Usually, the depth of the session is tracked against the funnel of the app user journey to understand how far users go within the session.

Excuse saying, keeping this number low is important.

Requires a 3rd party SDK to monitor user screen behavior.

C) REVENUE

The definition of conversion differs from app to app and is attached to your App Goal.

If you’re not monetizing your app, you can have an alternative to this matric as

Average Return per User

where Return = to your “Conversion” definition.

There are plenty of other KPIs and metrics to be tracked, however, these are, not only the most universal but also effective metrics to track an app properly, IMO. 🙂

What you’ll be measuring? What else you will be tracking? 🙂

Originally published at https://tiagovalente.pt on January 6, 2021.

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Tiago Valente

Product Manager & apps lover! Enjoy (& write about) building products, personal finance & Self-dev. Subscribe here > Tiagovalente.pt