How to measure and track in-app events to increase user retention

Choosing the right analytics platform can make the difference between a successful or unsuccessful app. Whether you’re building a game, retail or social app you should track daily user behavior to drive engagement for your app. How do you measure and track in-app events to increase user retention?

Sunil Thomas, CEO for CleverTap posted the following success metrics on his Quora channel for tracking in-app events and customer segmentation for a social app.

1. New User Signups: Always want your app to attract a steady stream of new users. With a social app, add engagement hooks within the app itself to attract new users i.e. ways for existing users to bring new users into the app via. social sharing, or friend invites etc.
2. Users Consuming Content: No matter what the social app is about (videos, text, pictures etc.) it is critical that the users who are in the app are consuming content.
3. Users Interacting With Content: This is the social aspect of the app. A percentage of users who consume content need to interact with it. Depending on the app, these interactions could vary from commenting, sharing, up voting, forwarding, poking, high five’ing and more. Content interaction is the social fabric of the app and essential for the overall health and growth of the mobile app.

If you agree that the above are the core metrics of the app, then the in-app events you need to track have to be events that help you understand and trends these core metrics over time.

Depending on your app, in general terms the following might be useful:

• App Launched: Track how many times per day, week and month
• Login: Segment between anonymous users and logged-in users and maintain that ratio over time
• Content Viewed: Track properties that describe the content…maybe category by topic, maybe type i.e. video, image etc. and such
• Content Posted/Created: Track properties that describe the content, as above
• Content Interaction: Track properties that describe the content as above, AND also describe the interaction (share, up-vote and so on)
• User Interaction: Apart from content interactions, there might be certain user interactions that your app provides – like Follow-a-Friend, Subscribe-To-A-Users-Feed and so on. Its best to track User-to-User interactions differently as compared to User-to-Content interactions

The questions you want answered over time with your event design are:

1. Daily / Weekly and Monthly Active Users, how they trend over time
2. Ratio of Logged-In Users vs. Anonymous Users, how they trend over time
3. Basic Retention Cohort: how often (frequency and time period) do my users launch the app
4. Content Viewed: count/frequency by active users, how they trend over time
5. Content Interaction / Content Viewed: ratio of users who interact with content vs. users who only consume, with trend over time…you want to influence interaction from people who don’t interact
6. Content Interaction / Content Created: ratio of users who interact with content as compared to users who create content, how they trend over time…you want to influence more (and all) pieces of content that are created to be interacted with; and all users who create to also interact on other pieces of content
7. Drop-Off’s with the app – how many daily, weekly and monthly

Check out our recent case study on Streamago, a trendy new live streaming app that uses CleverTap to track in-app events, customer segmentation and increase user retention with our platform. For event design tips and tricks, check out our YouTube Channel.