How to measure the success of your app user acquisition campaigns

Know where your app user acquisition channels drive sign ups

After spending your hard-earned marketing dollars on ad campaigns for your apps, you may be disappointed with the low acquisition figure and this prompts many questions. Have your ad campaigns targeted the right audience? Did you have the wrong advertising priorities when choosing campaign partners, ad networks and tracking partners for your ad campaigns? All these and many more aspects play a crucial role in making your app acquisition drive successful. Lack of adequate measures may mean you are unable to determine which channels are effective. So, measuring the success of your campaigns is crucial for the future of sustaining your app to support your business. In this post I will offer some clues as where to begin and how to approach this measurement.

First of all, sustainability is more important than growth because only when through enough acquisition you can secure a decent ROI to look forward to growth. Acquisition of uses is the bottom line of your app business on which every other growth objectives will stand. Now it is crucial to determine which channels will work best for acquisition. Secondly, it is not the acquisition numbers that you should focus on, but it is the value created by certain channels that should be given more importance. After all getting users, who give you far higher ROI than others, should be your focus. So, the bottom line is, you should give priority to acquisition channels that gives better ROI.

Here we are going to discuss the effective ways to measure the success of your user acquisition channels? Take a look at these.

The importance of investing money on marketing resources

To make your app reach your audience you need to invest in right marketing resources and then track their respective performance in bringing you the number and type of users. That remains to be the core principle of any user acquisition strategy for mobile apps. First of all, spending money on regular marketing channels and resources will allow your app to have a gamut of initial users with whom you can at least test the app features and usability standard. Secondly, when your app is getting random users from different ad acquisition campaign,  your app is  at the same time garnering more possibility of getting organic users who actually needed your app. Investing on acquisition channels and marketing resources is the first step forward to get your app visible to different kinds of users.

Pay attention to download figures and user engagement and retention metric

Now as you have already invested and presented your app through diverse resources and channels, it is time to monitor how these channels perform and how far they are successful in bringing you quality users. This can begin with the number of users brought by different channels. Remember, garnering a decent user number is crucial at this stage as only after assuring this you can afford to have qualitative focus. But then, if majority of your users behave just like casual strollers would it prove beneficial at all? Certainly not, and so, you must insist on keeping a balance between acquisition of numbers and quality.

User acquisition stats may show that a good slice of  app users (20% or more) just open the app only once. Naturally, any app focused on building a strong ROI based on regular user acquisition cannot just afford to stick to channels that bring them a large number of such casual one time users. Spending money on unqualified users will put your app at risk in respect of both sustainability and growth. So, focusing on taking the users to retention phase is extremely important and before that you cannot measure the success of acquisition channels. Evaluation of the new users in respect of their engagement, retention and value addition for the app is important at this stage.

A user retained is more likely to become the customer of your product or opt for an in-app purchase. User retention bridges the gap between a download and turning him into a potential customer or source of revenue. You should observe different levels of user engagement, frequency of use and potential retention metric achieved by different acquisition channels. It is the stage of acquisition where you need to observe user engagement and start to segment the channels Session specific statistic of app usage will give you exact data and insights as which channels did better job and which did not. Here are some session data to consider.

• The number of sessions begun by the user
• The duration of each session
• Frequency of using your app by a user
• User characteristics such as organic user or users brought by a paid channel

Prioritise acquisition channels responsible for bringing high-value users

Finally, after getting your figures right in regard to user behaviour, session frequency, engagement and retention, you can judge which users are most likely to retain the app and create longtime value for your app. In the app world this is understood as lifetime value (LTV) of a user. This lifetime value metric basically shows the likelihood of engagement, spending money on purchases and retention. Obviously the users with a high LTV must be regarded as your backbone and you should give priority to their user experience in every possible way. As for the acquisition channels consider which ones brought your high LTV users in most numbers and accordingly give focus to those channels in your acquisition strategy.

A qualitatively focused app marketer by choosing the acquisition channels and resources wisely can boost high value user downloads from the day one. But even when you struggle to maintain a decent ROI through a consistent acquisition, the above mentioned manoeuvres and insights can come to your aid.