The essential mobile app KPIs for every vertical

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to mobile marketing success and a central component of all marketing strategies. They enable marketers to quantifiably measure app performance with confidence and make data-driven decisions to optimize this performance. By clearly defining the objectives of your app in general (or the objectives of a specific marketing campaign), your strategy and measurement approach will be guided and driven in a clear direction.

In the world of mobile marketing, common KPIs include broad goals like improving return on investment (ROI) as well as more granular performance metrics like growing in-app purchases (IAPs) to reach a particular threshold.

When determining the KPIs for a particular app or campaign, consider the long-term goals of your app and the user behaviors that will help you to achieve them. Do you want to improve engagement overall? Specifically drive higher session rates? Make it less expensive to acquire new users?

In general, the most helpful and popular KPIs for mobile apps can be connected to the vertical (industry/category) of the app. Different verticals will experience different user behaviors and have different business needs, therefore seeking different optimizations.

Some KPIs are universal, but the weight that each app gives an individual KPI depends on its goals, competitive benchmarks, and other individual factors. Let’s explore which mobile app KPIs are most important to apps in each vertical.

Fintech app users are notoriously loyal and long-term retention rates are typically good, so shorter term retention measures may not be at the top of a finance app’s KPI list. People don’t check their banking or payment apps the same way they check social media apps—instead, app users log on when they have a task to complete. Consider monitoring these KPIs relating to this behavior to have a good handle on how your fintech app is performing.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Understanding how much it costs you to acquire each customer is a foundational building block of nearly everything else you do, from determining marketing budgets to understanding each user’s true value.

Part of the finance app vertical, crypto apps—used to buy and trade digital currency—have a lot in common with their parent category. Trust remains paramount for users. Because of the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, users tend to be engaged and active in-app.

• Average time to first transaction: You want your users to do more than just install your crypto app—you also want them to actually buy and sell currency. An engaged user is less likely to churn and speeding up the time to the first transaction can help keep the users that you have worked hard to acquire. Try offering a free first trade to get the ball rolling.
• Churn rate: While finance users tend to be loyal, the cryptocurrency market is hot and competitive. If your churn rate is higher than the average, you may need to tweak your user journey or start making personalized offers to keep users opening your app.

With e-commerce and shopping apps, the key to success is happy, repeat customers—who hopefully have deep pockets!  With new experiences like social commerce and live shopping becoming critical, particularly for Gen Z shoppers, keeping track of user habits and requirements is increasing in complexity. Luckily, there are still a few critical KPIs, or performance metrics, to focus your initial efforts on.

• Lifetime value (LTV): How much are your users worth over their lifetimes? Answering this question allows you to understand who your highest value users are, what they have in common, and how to find more of them.

Food delivery app users demonstrate high user intent, with eight out of ten searches resulting in a purchase—which is no surprise, as hungry people looking for takeout tend to be eager to pull the trigger. While re-engagement campaigns with well-timed discount offers can help improve retention, there are other performance metrics that can tell you more about your app and help you optimize the user journey.

• App not responding (ANR): The last thing you want is a “hangry” customer who gets so frustrated by an unresponsive app that they move on to a different app. If your app has a high ANR rate, you must address this quickly.

• Quit rate: Are your users dropping out before they complete onboarding? Or are they only quitting the app after they place their orders? Knowing when and where users are exiting your app tells you a lot about their journey and where you need to optimize.

• Retention rate: Just because retention and engagement rates are low with food delivery apps, that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to improve yours. Personalized offers that encourage users to come back for their favorite foods or at times when you know they tend to be hungry can help boost engagement. Getting the opt-in for push notifications and even location tracking can help you make the most of these strategies.

  Read more about retention rates in our guide: User retention, how to successfully keep users and grow your app.

Downloads of health and wellness apps have skyrocketed over recent years. This vertical covers a lot of different kinds of apps—from Peloton to Calm—and despite differences, they tend to have a few things in common. Successful health and wellness apps require users to form a habit, making it invaluable for marketers and developers to identify the behaviors (and KPIs) that are indicative of sign-ups, subscriptions, and premium features that boost your bottom line.

• Retention rate: Whether the goal is to get users to meditate or train for a marathon, retention matters. Pay keen attention to how often users are coming back to the app and what features and messaging they like best to keep them coming back for more.
• Churn rate: Churn is the other side of the retention coin. How many of your users do you lose in a given period? Understanding what’s normal for your app is important. Churn may differ at different times of year, and at differing points in the journey for each cohort. For instance, enthusiastic users may sign up after the New Year and then churn once they’ve given up on their resolutions. Knowing this will help you to keep things in perspective.
• Session length: Keeping users engaged for longer is also important for health and wellness apps. Whether your users are tracking longer runs or spending more time engaging with virtual coaches, the longer they stay in the app, the more satisfied users you are likely to have on your hands.

Gaming apps have a lot in common with health and wellness apps. Publishers count on users to engage regularly—sometimes more than once a day or for hours at a time. Depending on which subvertical or segment of the gaming vertical you operate in, the regularity with which your users engage may even be critical to your monetization strategy.

• Engagement and retention: These two performance metrics go hand-in-hand, and are integral to free, ad-supported gaming apps’ success. Not only do you want to make sure your users don’t uninstall your app, you want to give them a reason to play regularly and engage with ads. Daily rewards (potentially via rewarded video) or challenges are a great way to encourage users to open the app every day.
• Lifetime value (LTV): Even if your app is free, your users have an LTV. Whether they create value by engaging with ads, making in-app purchases, or by subscribing, calculating LTV will help you to refine your user acquisition (UA) strategy and maximize your ROAS.
• Cost per install (CPI): How much does each install cost you? This is important for all apps, but it’s especially critical for mobile games, where proving ROI can fall within less than a percentage point. Churn can be a real concern for gaming apps, and if you’re experiencing high rates of churn it’s important to get the cost to acquire users down as low as possible.