Mobile App Analytics: 6 Ways to Measure User Engagement

To make a mobile app as sticky as possible, developers need to understand what keeps users engaged. Six areas to track with your mobile app analytics solution:

1. Are users coming back?
People who download your app and only use it once aren’t engaged, limiting your opportunities to gain traction in the app store and monetize. Initially, look at where drop-off is happening and improve the experience. Once you have more users, begin to look at demographics such as gender, geography, language and age to discover who’s returning. As you get to know your users, you can better target content, promotions and app functionality to meet their needs.

2. What’s the average session duration?
How much time are users spending with your app each day? For a news app, a good amount of time may be 20 minutes. For social games, several two-minute sessions per day can indicate high levels of engagement.  If users spend less time with your app than expected, start digging into why.

3. What’s grabbing users’ attention?
Engaged users interact a lot, moving around your app, looking at different areas and completing tasks. To iterate more efficiently, focus on improving popular features and drop functionality ignored by users. A few things to track:

• User actions per session
• Tasks completed, photos stored, songs downloaded, etc.
• Links clicked per visit
• Specific areas of your app visited each session

4. Do you spot any patterns?
 Certain user demographics may drop off after a few days while others are still going strong 6 months down the road. Look for patterns indicating which kinds of users are in it for the long haul, measuring user retention at regular intervals (for example, at the 1 month, 3 month and 6 month marks). This helps you identify your target user and is vital for successful marketing.

5. Is your app crashing?
Stability is paramount to mobile app success. If there’s a specific action or screen where your app crashes, quickly put in a fix to keep users happy.

6. What are users saying?
Feedback may come from a vocal minority, but good or bad, it can help you develop features and functionality that keep the majority of users coming back.

You set the rules

Every app is different, so it’s important to measure user engagement in your own terms. With an in-app analytics solution like Kii Analytics, define metrics specific to your app, track events generated from mobile devices and look at data across instances (mobile devices, web, etc) to truly get the big picture.

Check out our previous posts from this Analytics series for more info:

• Mobile App Analytics: How to Evaluate User Behavior
• Driving mobile app performance
• Using Kii Analytics to improve app store success (video)