In great news for the mobile app market, app retention rates are improving as app publishers shift from an early focus on “downloads” to more mature customer acquisition and retention models. The overall app industry improved retention rates 19% over the last year. App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.
Social networks like Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest get lavished with deserved attention, but apps from the leading mobile categories should not be overlooked by anyone wanting to engage or advertise to mobile users. The average news app performs especially well, earning as much monthly time-in-app as Twitter, and a (distant) second to only Facebook. In this study, Localytics looks beyond the types of apps downloaded or total time in various categories and focuses on the metric that matters most to app publishers — a time-spent benchmark for average apps in their category.
iPad users spend the longest periods of time reading news, listening to music, and accessing health and fitness apps, according to a new study from mobile app analytics company Localytics. Based on data from apps subscribing to the firm’s analytics … Continue reading
A key capability that sets mobile apps apart from mobile websites is that apps can still be used when your iPhone or Android phone has no coverage. App publishers know this is a major reason why the user experience with apps is much stronger than the mobile web. What many app publishers don’t know is that if they’re not accurately tracking offline use, they might be missing 15% of their customers!
In a previous mobile application analytics study, Localytics found that while smartphone and tablet owners are very willing to give applications a try, 26% of the time they never use the same application again. In this study, Localytics found that another 26% of people become very loyal, repeat customers, using a new application more than 10 times.
The market for phone and tablet apps is very competitive, with about 400,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 200,000 Android apps. The good news is that customers seem very willing to give new apps a try—it took only two weeks for 8th grader Robert Nay’s Bubble Ball to unseat Angry Birds. The bad news is that 26% of the time customers never give the app a second try. So make that first impression count and look beyond download statistics to understand real customer engagement.
Engagement with end users is a critical measure of an application’s success and can generally be defined as an end user’s focused interaction. In web analytics, proxies for measurement of engagement include average session length, average page views and return visits. In this post, we’ll show how to use mobile app analytics to record new and more useful measures of engagement.
