In the App world acquisition was once considered the most important mobile metric. Mobile app marketers focused on attracting as many new users to the app as possible, touting number of users as the strongest pillar of success.
New users can be a bit fickle when it comes to sticking around
It’s apparent that retention analytics is the foundation of growth and we must move beyond just measuring app installs and focus on in-app behavior to promote engagement and retention.
The benefits of retention analysis include being able to:
• Understand how many users return to an app after installation
• Understand why some users churn and others do not
• Form growth hypotheses based on quantitative data
• Develop a data-informed strategy to improve app retention rate
Building a Retention Strategy
Product teams can compute a variety of retention rates as they pertain to their business. For a consumer music app, that might mean calculating retention for all users at seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. For a marketing automation software with long contracts, that might mean calculating year-over-year.
The easiest way to measure retention quickly is using acquisition cohorts. By breaking your users down into specific cohorts, you can find out exactly when they give up on your app and start to identify what is making them leave. With acquisition cohorts, you can look at the retention of a specific cohort based on when they started using your app. You can then find out exactly how many people churned per day (or per week or month). With behavioral cohorts, you are looking for the features that bring users back to your app time and time again.
You can evaluate retention based on acquisition sources. It’s not uncommon for certain sources to produce customers with either very high or very low retention rates. Ads, for example, might bring in new users who quickly lose interest. Social shares, on the other hand, might surface users who were dying for a solution and who are much more loyal.
Identifying behaviors that affect retention helps you understand the behaviors that drive engagement in your app. Once you start to run experiments to discover the actions that lead to growth, you’ll need to put concrete numbers on these behaviors.
By looking at the relationship between certain user actions and retention you can identify the main behaviors and actions that are correlated with long-term use. These can lead you to discover the actions within your product that makes users stay and continue to engage with the app.
That’s how you begin to build sustainable retention strategies.