When tracking your DAU’s just isn’t enough.
In the mobile world, companies are defined by their vanity metrics. How many monthly active users do you have? What’s your retention like? How many downloads do you have?
These kind of metrics, while certainly surface level are usually what guides the Silicon Valley Mindset of, “get users today, make money off them tomorrow”. It is seriously crazy. Companies will amass millions of users, but still have no revenue model on how they’re going to monetize those users, yet somehow have raised millions in funding.
Let’s take a deeper look.
In mobile, DAU’s (daily active users) is often the standard by which app developers are judged. While the industry has yet to define a concrete term for ‘DAU’ analytics companies like Flurry use a rolling average, where a user is considered active if they’ve opened the app at least once in the past 7 days. Another would consider a user active if they use the app on a particular day. In any case, to determine mobile success one would need to settle on what a DAU is.
The first thing you should know is that you’re expected to lose 2/3rds of your users on day 1. Data from W3i shows most apps have a retention rate of 31% the first day, 14% after 7 days and 6% after a full 30 days.
With such fickle users, this is why mobile developers judge and are judged on DAU’s.
Moving on, once developers effectively understand what to look for in an ideal user, they need to understand how to design their app in a way that attracts those users and keeps their attention. Iteration is key for stable user retention. The next step would be to scale towards more aggressive user acquisition such as PPI (Pay pay install) and track where the majority of revenue is coming from.
This model is especially effective in mobile gaming.
The shelf life of a mobile game differs significantly from that of a console game. While AAA console games can keep users engaged for months on end, mobile games almost always see a significant drop in users after day one (as illustrated in the image above).
Giving users some in-app currency off the bat to help them learn about the app or game and how it’s played will surely boost retention.
The key is ‘just enough’ not too much so that users feel they’re getting a valuable game experience. Updating your app is another good idea, an update can get a dormant or non-active user back to the app by checking out the new content.
NOTE: When you update your app your reviews are cleared (moved rather) to the “previous updates tab” also your ASO is reset.
As the mobile market continues to grow, most will begin to move their focus towards actionable metrics to determine what loyalty and engagement strategies are actually working. That’s where you should be now.
Kevin is an Online and Mobile Marketing Strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes over the last 6 years. You can follow Kevin on any of the social platforms below.
