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When your app is live in the App Store, understanding how users engage with it and how to track key metrics is crucial for growth. This guide, based on insights from Flywheel Studio, walks through essential app metrics and how to interpret them.

1. Understanding the Metrics Funnel

When tracking app performance, it’s important to break down the journey of users through the following funnel stages:

1. Awareness: This is the first exposure people have to your app, whether through social media, SEO, ads, or word of mouth. The goal is to get potential users to see your app.
2. Conversion: For most apps, conversion means a download, but this can also vary. Some apps define conversion as a registration or a payment. Identifying what conversion means for your app is key.
3. Activation: This measures when users take specific actions after downloading. For some apps, it's completing a purchase, for others, it's interacting with features like Slack’s 2,000-message benchmark, which strongly predicts user retention.
4. Retention: This focuses on keeping users engaged. A retained user is one who continues to return to the app, which is vital for long-term success.

2. Measuring Awareness

Awareness metrics are at the top of the funnel. Common sources of data include:

• Social Media: Track post impressions, engagement, and followers.
• SEO/Website Visits: Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic coming from organic search, referral links, or ads.
• App Store Impressions: Platforms like the App Store and Google Play offer insights into how many people see your app icon or visit your product page.

While it's tempting to target a broad audience, the quality of exposure matters. For example, showing a gardening app to a football stadium crowd may yield fewer downloads than targeting 100 gardeners at a local conference. Quality impressions lead to better conversion rates.

3. Tracking Conversion and Activation

Conversion rates are often the result of how effectively your app page communicates value. Metrics to focus on include:

• App Store Downloads: How many visitors actually download your app? The App Store and Google Play give insight into conversion rates by showing how many people viewed your app page versus how many downloaded it.
• Activation Metrics: After a download, how many users actually engage with the app? This could be completing a purchase or using a certain feature. For Slack, sending 2,000 messages as a group has shown a strong correlation with long-term retention. You’ll need to define what activation looks like for your app.

To optimize, look at the user journey inside the app. Build funnels that map out user actions from opening the app to completing your desired actions. Identify where users drop off to address friction points, whether in onboarding, registration, or the first-time user experience.

4. Monitoring Retention

Retention measures how long users continue to engage with your app. Tools like Google Analytics or Firebase track user activity over time, often providing retention by cohorts, which group users based on when they joined.

Understanding cohort retention is critical. Instead of looking at total active users, cohort analysis helps you see if users who join in a specific period stick around. It uncovers whether new users drop off quickly, indicating deeper issues like poor onboarding or lack of value in the early stages.

5. Solving Common Drop-offs

Many apps experience high drop-off rates between awareness and conversion, or conversion and activation. If users are downloading but not activating, the issue may lie in the app’s user experience (UX) or lack of perceived value. Here are common areas to focus on:

• App Store Assets: Images, copy, and reviews on your App Store page should clearly convey the app's value.
• Onboarding Process: Simplify sign-up steps and remove unnecessary barriers to entry.
• In-App Value: Ensure users quickly understand and experience the core value of your app. Slack’s success with user engagement comes from getting groups to start using messaging features right away.

6. Aggregating Data from Different Sources

Unfortunately, app performance data is scattered across multiple platforms. Awareness metrics are tracked in social media platforms and Google Analytics, while conversion data comes from the App Store, Google Play, or payment processors like Stripe.

It’s important to aggregate these different data sources to get a holistic view of your app’s performance. For instance, app stores provide detailed download metrics, but in-app engagement can be tracked via Firebase or Google Analytics.

7. Choosing the Right KPIs

Every metric is not equally valuable. Metrics like awareness can sometimes encourage the wrong type of user, one who doesn’t convert or retain well. Focus on improving the conversion rate (downloads from store page visits), activation rate (actions within the app), and retention.

To effectively track and improve, select one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) to optimize. A good example could be increasing the conversion rate from app store visitors to downloaders or reducing the drop-off rate in your onboarding flow.

8. Avoid Feature Overload

While it’s tempting to add more features to improve retention, more features don’t necessarily fix the root cause of user drop-off. Instead, focus on solving core usability problems. Are users not signing up because of a confusing onboarding process? Is the value proposition unclear?

Fixing these core issues will likely yield better results than adding new, complex features that could overwhelm new users.

Final Thoughts

Tracking and improving app metrics requires a comprehensive approach. You need to follow the user's journey from awareness, through conversion, activation, and retention, identifying drop-off points and resolving them.

By focusing on the right KPIs, improving onboarding, and constantly iterating on the app's user experience, you can significantly increase your app’s performance over time.

If you need help diving deeper into these metrics and optimizing your app, reach out to Flywheel Studio. We're happy to help.

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