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Mobile app engagement is not a joke. If you are a mobile app startup, be it B2B or B2C, you need a few things in place and these things are app installs, app retention, app engagement, app monetization. Today, we are going to speak about one of the things that can make or break an app owner’s life — app engagement.

Just a random fact: 25% of downloaded apps aren’t used more than once.

Scary? You don’t want to have that app no one wants to use, right? We know how you are feeling about it all. So, let’s discuss a few no bullshit ways of measuring mobile app engagement.

Track ALL your users

A lot of app makers out there make this common mistake of tracking only the new users. Why do you do this, guys? Why not track them ALL? Or you think your old users are going to stick with you forever? Nope, dears. They are not! Especially if you do not consider what they like and hate about your app.

Tracking users allows segmenting audiences and tracking specific user behavior. This way, you will be able to also launch cool app marketing campaigns.

There are different ways you can measure user data. First of all, look at your Monthly Active Users (MAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), and even Daily Active Users (DAU). Use this data in a flexible manner, break it out by device model, gender, age, demography, country/location, app version etc. Use any possible filters to filter out users and to segment them into comprehensive groups. Use the data wisely. There is no use of an app that has a lot of downloads and little or no engagement.

Look at session length

The session length is basically the time frame between the opening and closing of the app by the user. This metric shows how much time the user interacts with your app or spends in it. If the sessions take long, then this means the users are more engaged. But note that one session length might be considered long enough for one app and it can be considered too short for another one. It all depends on your niche. So, make sure you know what you are measuring.

Consider the intervals between the sessions

Long sessions are perfect but there is another thing to measure about them — the intervals between user sessions. An interval is the time between two consecutive sessions. If the interval takes too long, then you should start worrying. But here again, it all depends on the niche your app is in. If it’s a gym workout app and people use it once or twice a month instead of 2–3 times a week, then you should do something about it. But if it’s an insurance app, 1–2 sessions per user per month might be just good.

Analyze and understand navigation paths

Being able to browse through navigation paths is a great feature that not all app analytics tools offer. We at Inapptics have decided that our customers should have the chance to explore them. The screen flows we present to our users show an aggregation of similar user sessions in bulk. These are the sessions that have the same start and end point and can be sorted by length, popularity, recency of occurrences and more.

Screen flows help see the big picture. Due to them, you do not have to go to each and every user session to analyze it separately. Instead, you can look at a particular screen flow and see what users did while interacting with your app and what kind of navigation path they have chosen. Of course, there is a functionality to browse through individual user sessions, if you are interested.

This sort of data will allow you to get a clear understanding of problem areas. You will thus be able to understand your app users’ browsing habits, measure engagement and boost it by making a few changes in the UX of your app.

Track app crashes

App crashes are the technical errors that your app users come across with whenever there is an unexpected problem connected with the servers, or the internet or simply with your developers’ bad work.

Whatever the reason, crashes are horrible for mobile app engagement. They might eventually lead to low engagement or even app uninstallation especially if they continue to exist for a long time. So, tracking app crashes will help you address the issues on time and to avoid sad consequences.

At the end

Measuring mobile app engagement is the key to keeping users and transforming regular users into paying. The truth is that you can never create a customized app experience if you have no idea about user behavior. So, make sure you armor yourself with the right app analytics tools and start measuring!

Curious to know what users do in your app? Try Inapptics for free and visually see every actions users do in your app, e.g. where they tap, how they navigate, what they did that caused the crash you can’t reproduce and more.

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Originally published at blog.inapptics.com on February 6, 2018.

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5 No Bullshit Ways of Measuring Mobile App Engagement was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 No Bullshit Ways of Measuring Mobile App Engagement

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