What are the Key Analytics Metrics You Should Track?
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You’ve been in the marketing business for long enough to know that data and analytics are the waves of the present and of the future. You’re fully aware that there are just about endless amounts of data that we can collect and track these days, and you’re equally aware that close to 100% of the most successful companies in the world are taking advantage of data to build their brands and grow their success.
What you’re perhaps LESS certain about is precise which data and which metrics you and your company should be paying the closest attention to. Regardless of whether you’re just entering the data analytics revolution or whether you’re just looking to optimize an already streamlined process, it’s critical to make sure that you’re looking at the metrics most likely to accelerate your company’s growth. We’ve helpfully compiled a quick hit list of the most important key analytics to help your company achieve its goals.
What are Analytics Metrics and Why are They Important?
Teams that design products and services use analytics to measure and optimize them. To do this, they use metrics, which are simply performance indicators of problem points and advantageous solutions.
Analytics metrics are critical because without them, companies can’t tell how successful their applications are, or whether they’re successful or not. Companies rely on metrics to tell them this. Application metrics allow companies to identify problems more accurately and take immediate action. This means that whether your product is at the beginning of production/implementation or has been around a long time, analytics can help you track how to optimize the customer experience through every step of their journey.
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Ok so Which Metrics Should you Focus on Most?
Here we’ll go over metrics for each of the following points so that you can optimize your product or services: User acquisition, user interaction, user retention, user engagement, user uninstalls, and user drop-offs. There are always other metrics, and always other things you can look at and ways to dig down into the minutiae of your company or your digital product’s performance. But here’s a good starting point for the most important metrics depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
User Acquisition
- App Attribution: This is essentially the magic sauce previously unavailable to marketers. It tells you whether user engagement or installs are related specifically to a user’s reaction to an advertisement and how a user behaves after installing the app. This helps your business see not just how advertising is working, but to help segment off your customers into those who do (or don’t) respond well and to see how users react to in-app features.
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA): This metric simply shows you how much it’s costing you to acquire a single paying customer, particularly if you’re tying the metric to a specific campaign or channel. Think of it as a more specified ROI so you can see what investments are worthwhile and which aren’t.
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU): This is a great way to see how much your average customer is spending per subscription. It digs down into each individual customers’ spending habits to see how much revenue you’re generating customer by customer and averaging it out for you.
- Lifetime Value (LTV): LTV is a way of extrapolating how much revenue each customer is currently producing and extending it out to their lifespans as a customer. Basically, it tells you how much each customer is worth to your business so you can forecast budgets and resources more accurately and effectively. LTV changes quite a bit depending on the type of customer. For example, a major client that appears to be likely to be with you for the long haul – even after only a short time after acquisition – can have a massive impact on the expenses of the company across a number of different categories, supporting the lifetime value of that client. It’s an important calculation to get right so that you know what a particular client is worth both in the present and down the road.
- Activation Metrics: These include Activation Rates and Retention Rates, and tell you what percentage of your customers are spurred on to becoming permanent customers once they come in contact with a particular event, download, or whatever you track. You can see how long they remain your customer and how actions you take hurt or help activation and retention.
User Interaction
- Number of Events: Events show how users discovered the application, a user’s movements across various channels, page views, click numbers, and other such actions that involve actions/events involving the application.Â
- Installs and First Opens: One way to tell how successful your app is coming by tracking the number of installs, which helps track how, when and why new users are acquired. First opens then goes on to track what happens the first time your user opens the app. How long do they stay there and how do they use it? This lets you know just how each particular user intends to engage with your app following their learning about the app and actually downloading it.
- Session Tracking: Tracking session data is the way to figure out exactly how users use your app and move through the user funnel. Sessions are displayed by the device, location, and time so that you can track how, when and from where your users are using the app following installation.
- Conversion Rate: Monitoring the conversion rates of user interactions when analyzing sessions lets you know exactly how well your webpage and apps are performing. Conversion rates are very simply the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. Thus, improving your conversion rates means you’ll have more conversions even if the traffic remains constant.
Key Takeaways
You can measure just about everything these days, but unless you know exactly what you’re measuring and why none of it will help you optimize your business. Tools like Dataroid help you avoid any painstaking data entry yourself, and give you the results you need to know how your app is performing. Here we’ve listed a few simple metrics to track so that you can bring your business to the next level. Of course your specific data provider can make a difference and it’s important to know how to model appropriately, but if we limit to just a few metrics, here’s as good a starting place as any. Focus first on user interactions and user acquisitions so that you know how you acquire new users, how you retain them, and the ways they like to interact most with your app. Once you’ve done that, there are myriad ways to dig deeper and deeper into the details of how your app performs so that you can make sure your app is fully optimized for its audience going into the future, some of which we’ll go into in our next piece, so make sure you keep reading!
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