Mobile Marketing: 8 KPIs for Your Boss

I have selected 8 basic mobile marketing KPIs to help you determine the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, the interface and the level of achievement of goals.

In the mobile world, different applications must be evaluated according to different KPIs - depending on their tasks, functions, target audience and position in the market.

However, there is a "gentlemen's set" of indicators that will help evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and present results to management. So, let's go!

1. App Installs

The most simple, popular and widely used metric. The increase in the number of downloads from 25,000 to 100,000 is an understandable and easily measurable goal. The only

"but": in isolation from other indicators, it can give a false idea of success. Growth can be caused by low-quality downloads or motivated traffic and does not carry the

company's real revenue.

2. CPI (Cost Per Install)

The main advertising metric in mobile marketing determines the cost of one installation of a mobile application. This indicator can vary significantly by different channels and sources of mobile advertising.

As with the App Installs, you should not rely solely on the CPI. With low CPI, the quality of traffic can be just as low, and users who have installed installations from sources of such traffic cannot even bring a penny to your business at all.

3. RPU (Revenue Per User)

Perhaps one of the most important financial metrics for your leadership. The easiest way to calculate the RPU is to divide the total revenue from purchases through the mobile

application over the period by the total number of users (those who make purchases and those who do not). After that, you can segment users by the cost of perfect purchases -

this will create an effective TSS for each group.

The growth of total revenue per user directly depends on improvements in the product or marketing. Some companies that sell

products with a very long life cycle prefer to use RPU, rather than LTV (the total profit from one customer for the whole time of interacting with it).

4. LTV (Lifetime Value)

Marketers love this KPI and often use it, as it allows you to understand the relative health of your mobile business and determine the lifetime value of the customer. Calculating LTV

is easy. This indicator will help optimize sales channels in order to focus on finding customers that represent long-term value for your company.

5. Retention Rate

The Retention Rate metric (the level of user retention in the application) determines how satisfied your customers are and how your application develops. The more customers

you can keep, the more rapidly your business will grow.

A variation of this parameter - Retention Rate Day X - allows you to calculate the percentage of users who returned to

the application after X days after installation (for example, Retention Rate Day 1 - the next day, and Retention Rate Day 7 - in a week). Most analytics systems allow you to

analyse Retention Day 1-7, 14, 28, 30 and 90.

6. DAU / WAU / MAU

All these indicators determine the scale of your project and the activity of the audience in different time periods:

• DAU - the number of unique users who visited the application on a particular day.

• WAU - the number of unique users who visited the application in a specific week.

• MAU - the number of unique users who visited the application in a particular month.

All three indicators should increase over time - this requires increasing the flow of new users and improving the Retention Rate. It is superfluous to calculate and analyse the Sticky Factor, which determines the regularity of using the application by those who have already installed it.

7. Conversion Rate

The transformation of a visitor into a real customer is the ultimate goal for many mobile applications. As a rule, for this purpose the visitor needs to perform several simple actions: enter personal data, register an account and make a purchase. Calculating the Conversion Rate for each step will help speed up the "transformation" and adjust the marketing strategy.

8. Session Length

The optimal length of the session for different applications can be different. Most often, the long duration of a session means effective interaction with users. But in some cases, a high Session Length value in combination with a low conversion rate is a signal that you need to urgently improve the user interface.

Putting it all together

Calculating indicators is an important and necessary first step. But much more important is the following - their interpretation.

For example, what does it mean if the Conversion Rate increases and the RPU drops? Are you attracting too many low-quality, non-targeted users? Can you fix this by e-mail remarketing? Or is it all about seasonality, because of which the RPU fell only for a certain period?

Correct interpretation of metrics will help constant monitoring of the entire chain of indicators. Set up mobile analytics, collect reports across the entire chain, analyse

the impact of changes in advertising campaigns and the interface on all indicators. And if your mobile application will bring you real money - see the

whole picture.