Top 8 Metrics to measure User Engagement on a Web/Mobile App

User-Interaction

       User Engagement is one of the important KPI in evaluating a web/mobile app. It includes all interactive scenarios, that user could perform on any given Web/Mobile application. This could be different for different applications, For example In a twitter app, posting a tweet is a user engagement. Likewise In Instagram, posting a photo, etc.
     User Engagement metrics are super critical to understand how web/mobile app perform for different targeted users in a given interval of time. It helps us to understand primary areas in application that matters most to these users, which further helps to continuosly iterate and improve the workflow within the app. Any successful web/mobile app would have user engagement metrics inbuilt to it.
In this blog we will discuss mainly about different user engagement metrics and its terminologies.

User Engagement Metrics

  1. NEW REGISTRATION

    Rate of new users registering to use our app is very important in evaluating app growth. In the webapp world, it is how many users who are newly adding into the system. However in mobile app world, it is how many downloads and installs in a given interval of time. This metric plays a vital role in evaluating app success and contributes significantly in marketing and advertising. Below is the snapshot from Playstore console which shows app install statistics for the last 30 days.
    installs_user_graphic.jpg

  2. ACTIVE USERS

    Active Users are the users who actively use the app after installation/registration. Active users can be tracked via GoogleAnalytics/Fabric tool.  Below is Google analytics  snapshot for monitoring Active users.
    Active Users.png
    1. DAU – Daily Active User Metrics, these metrics tells how many users logged into our app in a given day.
    2. WAU – Weekly Active User Metrics, these metrics tells how many users logged into our app in a given week. This can be calculated as an aggregate sum of DAU’s for that given week.
    3. MAU – Monthly Active User Metrics, these metrics tells how many users logged into our app in a given month. This can be calculated as an aggregate sum of DAU’s for that given month.Likewise, it is possible to capture active user metrics for any given n days/weeks/months time.

      Stickiness

      Stickiness reveals how our app plays critical role in user’s lives, it is when user logs multiple times in a day rather than just once. this is not a result of good marketing, it is just when app is built in such a way that users can’t resist coming back. (Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter apps have more stickiness as users access them multiple times a day)
          For most internet products, stickiness is calculated as ratio of DAU to MAU. It means if Stickiness is 50%, average users in our app are logging 15 days in a month.
      Stickiness = DAU/MAU

  3. SESSION LENGTH

    Session Length is amount of time user spends in our app in one session. This is important to evaluate overall user experience and helps us keep track on primary areas user spent most of his time, so marketing team can focus these areas to campaign, also these primary section of interests can be considered to improve iteratively since it is crucial to users. Also session length plays important role in understanding user actions specific to different roles.
    Session intervals is another metrics that could be useful to calculate time interval of two consecutive user sessions. this metric is useful to analyze factors that will improve app stickiness and performance.

  4. RETENTION RATE

    Retention Rate is percentage of users returning to use our app in a given interval of time. Calculating retention rate over 1, 7, 15 and 30 days determines app sustainibility in the market. this primarily focuses on number of users who return back after registering. This metric measures user likeliness of using app more frequently.  This is  important as it provide feedback on how our app is keeping users engaged,  that would further help in analyzing areas of improving over all user experience,  which further generates good business revenue.                                                                                                                                         Retention Rate.png

  5. VIEW FLOWS

    View Flow metrics helps us to capture user time on specific view of our Web/Mobile application. this typically tracks user’s flow of action during his session. This metric helps business to fine tune some workflow actions performed by target users, which would greatly help improving overall user experience. This metric also helps in optimizing view transition times and helps marketing team for campaigning based on which view, the user spent most of his time.

  6. CRASH REPORTS



    Crash Report metrics keeps track of incidents when app was unresponsive during an user session. This metric identifies possible fault areas in the app and provides feedback on improving performance of an application. Crashes are often unexpected, however it should be thoroughly tested before deploying to higher environments.

  7. TOTAL TIME SPENT

    This metric provides total time spent by users accessing our app. It is a great factor to understand if users are really liking the app. it provides performance metrics and leads to optimization.  (More Time Spent  = More Awesomeness).  

  8. TOTAL REVENUE GENERATED




    This metric may not be applicable for all apps, but this could be crucial for some gaming and ecommerce applications, where we need to keep track of revenues generated based on products marketed in the  application. This could be used to rank products in the product catalog and can be used as product recommendations, which greatly contributes to business.

Conclusion

           Most mobile apps lose about 70-80% users in their first week after it has been installed (Similarly about 60-70% users after user registration in a web application). so monitoring just with DAU would be misleading. Many companies focus fully on delivering core values rather building tools that provide feedback. It is  equally important to spend time on building tools that faciliate user engagement metrics which will further improve app throughput and business revenue. Different applications need different type of metrics based on business and may not be universal for all type of business. These metrics are truly beneficial in understanding the behavior of app to end users and provides great insights on improving the overall user experience.

Further Reading

  1. Implementation details on generating User Engagement score can be found here
  2. How to track User Engagement via Google Analytics can be found here
  3. 3 Steps to Measure User Engagement into your Web Application here
  4. 10 ways to increase User Engagement in Mobile apps here
Thanks for reading to the end!
If you think I’ve missed something, or if you have a different view, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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