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What is a good conversion rate for my app?

There are many measurement metrics in mobile app marketing, but when it comes to user acquisition (UA), one of the most important benchmarks to track is your conversion rate. In fact, understanding your conversion rates — and digging into the data around conversions in general — can tell you a lot about how to optimize your user journey.

Conversion rates vary based on what you are measuring. Everything from your app vertical to the conversion event you choose to measure can impact what is considered a good conversion rate. But learning how your app compares to others in your vertical is integral to allowing you to see how your app measures up against the competition, and whether or not you need to take aggressive action to improve your stats.

Let’s explore what a good conversion rate is and how you can approach improving your conversions.

How to measure your conversion rate

A conversion can measure any user action that a marketer wants to track, such as an install, purchase, or in-app event. The type of event that is considered a conversion can vary based on the goals of the marketer and the app vertical. For instance, if you have a mobile game,you may only be interested in driving installs, while if you have an e-commerce app, an install may not be considered a conversion. Instead, you may choose to track users’ first purchases. If you’re a social media app, you may not consider a user converted until they make their first post. Whatever in-app action you decide to measure, there is a simple formula for calculating your conversion rate.

A conversion rate is the percentage of users that complete the desired action, divided by the total number of people exposed to the campaign you are measuring. For example, if your campaign reaches 10,000 users, and 500 users install your app as a result of that campaign: 500/10000 = 0.05, or a 5% conversion rate.

Once you know what your conversion rate is, you’re ready to benchmark it against industry averages.

Benchmarking your app’s conversion rate

In 2020, AppTweak found that the average conversion rate across categories in the U.S. was 33.7% on the App Store and 26.4% on the Google Play Store. However, conversion rates are highly contextual. Not only do they vary by vertical, region, and the action you are tracking, they can vary by campaign. For example, a display ad campaign designed to reach new users will likely have a lower conversion rate than an email campaign designed to engage existing users.

Benchmarking tools can help you get specific answers about whether or not you have a good conversion rate for your app and the action you choose to measure. However, there are also some basic vertical averages you should take into consideration.

How to increase conversion rates

Conversions are a critical part of your user journey — but it’s important to think of them as a link in a chain. App marketers must fully comprehend the user journey in order to pinpoint where problems occur and discover how to fix them. Here are our tips for improving conversion rates and providing a better customer experience.

5 ways to increase app conversion rates

  1. Personalize your campaigns — For many app types, the most valuable conversion is an install. For these apps, improving conversions (installs) often requires you to personalize your campaigns. By tailoring your UA campaigns to each user’s individual needs, you acquire better users whose intent is more aligned with your product. Consider deploying dynamic product ads (DPAs) to engage users with hyper-relevant, personalized creative that allow you to connect with the right users from the beginning.
  2. Track everything — To understand where your users are falling off you have to track absolutely everything. By measuring engagements all along the marketing funnel — such as installs, purchases and registrations — you will not only gain valuable insight about your conversions, but you will discover your high-value channels, which can help you perfect your UA strategy. By tracking relevant events with your mobile measurement partner, you will begin to spot potential issues in your conversion funnel.
  3. Take your learnings and A/B test Once you have a better understanding of where your users are dropping off, it’s time to run tests to find out what works. Do users install the app but can’t get past your onboarding process? Are they abandoning their carts before purchasing? Whatever the problem is, it’s imperative that you don’t jump to conclusions and instead approach the problem systematically through A/B testing. You will need a hypothesis to test, but be prepared to abandon it if your testing does not return the results you expected. Learn from Yotta, a fintech app that hypothesized increasing the amount of bonus tickets users received for referring friends would also increase referrals. They turned out to be wrong, and had to go back to the drawing board to get the right answer.
  4. Master the onboarding process Onboarding is always important, but if your conversion event is a post-install in-app action, onboarding is doubly important. If your user can’t get through an onerous onboarding process, they will never make it to your conversion point. If you’re tracking and testing everything, problems with onboarding should be revealed. But if you aren’t optimizing the experience and taking the opportunity to teach people how to use your app properly, problems could manifest further down the funnel. So make sure your app onboarding is streamlined but informative.
  5. Re-engage users when necessary — For much of mobile marketing history, the focus has been on UA — but marketers are increasingly aware that engagement and retention is equally, if not more, important. Sometimes users just get distracted! Employing re-engagement messages at the right time can help bring users back to abandoned carts or to finish a registration process that they forgot about. Use push notifications, emails, or even retargeted ads to prompt users to finish what they started and come back to your app to complete that conversion event.

You will find that with these five tips for improving app conversions, your marketing team will do more than just maximize conversions — they will optimize the entire user experience. By staying focused on UX, you will build a better app and you will see knock-on effects along the entire journey.

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