As an entrepreneur, you shelled out your valuable time and invested hard-earned money in creating your app, and now you need to start evaluating how well it’s performing in real-time. There is an array of app KPIs and engagement metrics that need to be tracked to measure and scale the success of your application. One of them is ‘User Engagement.’

“User engagement metric is contains two different elements: User and Engagement. This provides us with significant information about the true usage and performance of the app, our active users, their behavior, and how exactly they are interacting with the app all in real-time.”

In this blog post, we have broken down the user engagement metric and also covered its elements like Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), and retention rate. These assist you in boosting the performance of your app while attaining pre-defined objectives such as conversions. So without further ado, let’s check them out.

1. Daily App Launches

Downloading an app is one thing, and to keep using it everyday is another. After understanding and analyzing the number and source of your app downloads, you need to track how many times your application is opened in one day. Keeping track of this metric is needed to create better engagement with your users as well as assess the efficiency of your advertising offers, marketing channels, and user experience in real-time.

2. Daily Active Users (DAU)

Active users can be estimated based on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, or also averagely for a specified time interval to find Average Daily Active Users (ADAU). Even if you know the exact number of visitors who downloaded and installed your app, you still don’t have any idea how indispensable your app is to them. The best approach to begin analyzing and evaluating user engagement is by keeping a strict eye on your Daily Active Users (DAU) metric. This means you need to track and measure the total number of your app’s active users. And the DAU metric allows you to serve the same purpose!

By exploring this metric, you can determine if users are continually using your application on a regular basis, and not just installing it. It shows the real-time details about your active users who open and utilize your app at least one time during a single day. The evaluated numbers will also provide you with a solid baseline insight into your app’s growth & performance as well as how engaged your consumers are with your app over time.

3. Monthly Active Users (MAU)

Like DAU metric, MAU pinpoints the total number of users who are interacting with your app on a monthly basis and also the relevant seasonal trends. The method of measuring this value varies from company-to-company based on the type of their business app. For a quick understanding: Twitter determines the MAU metric by calculating the exact number of active users who sign in to their accounts within a period of 30-day.

MAUs at Facebook, on a side note, are those who sign in to their accounts and “use” Facebook within the month. And by the term ‘use’ means thay one must fully interact with the platform by performing one of the following practices:

Liking a post

Creating a group or page

Commenting on videos/images

Messaging with others on Facebook

Updating or sharing something

Clicking on a link

4. Session Length

Analytics tools usually revolve around the ‘session’ metric to identify the active users, average visit time, screen views per visit, and engagement rate. The session length metric measures the exact amount of the time, on average, that your users are spending on your app during each session.

An analytics tool allows you to generate audience reports to record the time when a session starts and completes so you can calculate the accurate length of that individual’s user session. Doing so will help you capture the flow of screen that your users view and navigate through during a session, track user engagement and retention rate, and also evaluate the frequency at which your users open and use your app.

5. Session Interval

The session interval metric gauges the time between two consecutive sessions so you can put a figure on how frequently your users return to your app. In layman’s terms, this metric is measured as the total interval of time elapsed between a user’s sessions (the user’s first session and their next one), showing how your users engage and interact with your app. It undeniably quantifies the stickiness, addictiveness & retention rate of your app and also signals the instantaneous value gained from installing and launching the app.

Remember, your sole aim should not be to have long session length, but rather to achieve higher frequency rate, since the primary goal is to convert users, such as alluring them to buy something from you or register for an event.

Once you identify the ideal session length and session interval, you can figure out where in and why your users typically abandon your application without converting. Short intervals confirm that your consumers aren’t remaining still for long periods of time between each session usage.

6. User Acquisition

This metric exposes how people are finding your app, how prominent your app is in various app stores, and which digital marketing channels are channeling potential users to your app. It also shows how many people downloaded and installed your app based on geographical location, organic or direct search, paid campaigns, and other features. Some important factors to collect and analyze for measuring the acquisition metric are:

✓ App store ranking

✓ App attribution

✓ App abandonment

✓ Funnel tracking

In order keep and attain users, you should thoroughly prepare and continue tracking and optimizing the right user engagement KPIs.

If you’d like to learn more about how to measure various user engagement metrics and other KPIs based on your app’s category, get in contact with us!