With so many different KPIs out there, it’s hard to get started sometimes. Which take priority? Which mean more for the bottom line? Questions, questions, and no answers. Wait, scratch that! We’ve got you covered.

Welcome to our quick & easy checklist of KPIs that will help your app perform better in 2024 and beyond. We’ve sorted these in their order of importance. You will learn what KPIs will bring the most impact and how to improve them.

Oh, and before you start: there’s also a tremendously valuable industry report we’ve prepared that puts said KPIs under the microscope and shows how apps worldwide performed in 2023.

Mobile app KPI checklist

The KPIs provided below will answer a few tricky questions for you:

• What attracts users and what does the opposite of that
• Where to invest and what to fix
• Are users happy or do they hate you with a passion of a thousand burning suns
• If the cashflow is strong enough to support your marketing fun

Okay, 3, 2, 1—let’s go!

1. CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost

The total average cost of acquiring a new customer. It’s a broad metric that shows the effectiveness of your investment in attracting new users “globally”. Keep an eye on CAC to ensure you're not overspending and that you're attracting users who are more likely to stay.

CAC will depend on a lot of different things: platform, medium, and even how good your ad creatives are.

2. CPA: Cost Per Acquisition

The cost associated with acquiring a single action from a prospect or customer. This action can be a sale, but it can also be a sign-up, a form completion, or any other desired action.

Focus on how much you're spending to get each user, analyzing expenses channel by channel. It highlights the cost associated with each marketing move.

3. CR: Conversion Rate

Tracks the percentage of users who perform a desired action within your app and reflects the effectiveness of your app's design and marketing at converting users.

CR is influenced the most by visuals and marketing copy. Killer headlines are all super simple and direct—do that and your CR will grow.

4. ROI: Return on Investment

Calculates the profitability of your investments in app marketing. It helps you understand if you're gaining more than you're spending.

Boosting ROI comes with a nice, hard look at everything you’re doing: marketing activities by channel, price of your product, and efforts to keep the users in.

5. DAU/MAU: Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users

Measures user engagement by tracking how many unique users interact with your app daily and monthly. One of the best things to understanding user retention.

These metrics are heavily influenced by what makes your app relevant. If it’s a game, DAU/MAU will grow with how the game is. If it’s a travel app, expect the numbers to climb during holidays. Engage users with relevant content, reward them for using your app, and keep your communication strategy on point for top results.

6. Retention Rate

Indicates the percentage of users who continue using your app over a certain period, a key metric for assessing user loyalty.

This is the total version of the previous metric, in a way. Typically, good retention is achieved with a nice mix of relevance, frequent updates, and good price points. Some apps are unlucky by design, like dating apps: how are you supposed to keep users in if the whole idea is to leave the app?

7. Churn Rate

Shows the percentage of users who stop using your app or cancel their subscription within a specific timeframe. One of the more scary metrics.

Churn Rate is there to tell you that you’re doing something awfully wrong. If it’s stable and doesn’t really change, then you’re doing everything well and, obviously, there’s room for improvement. However, there is a ceiling to this metric.

If it spikes, then you did something really bad—jump to the review section to find out where you stumbled down the stairs without knowing it.

8. LTV: Lifetime Value

Keep track of the total revenue a user brings during their time with your app. High LTV compared to CAC indicates successful user retention and monetization.

You want this metric as high as possible. Improving LTV is something you can achieve by providing continuous value throughout the user lifecycle. In games, for instance, that’s often achieved with nice paid power-ups, skins, and other little things that you can’t help but keep buying.

9. ARPU: Average Revenue Per User

Calculates the average income each user generates. A pretty simple metric that is tied to LTV. ARPU can help you determine if there is a disparity in your pricing tiers and how good you are at upselling.

If your ARPU is abysmal but the MAU/DAU is high, then it’s time to push in some monetization. Be careful, though: slapping a price tag on your app without offering any extra value to it will end up in disaster, and your Churn Rate will make you cry.

10. MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue

Projects your app's revenue on a monthly basis. An amalgam of several metrics.

Boosting MRR is something you can achieve with subscription models, battle passes, seasonal events, and all sorts of promotions that occur periodically. Content, content, content!

11. App Install Rate

Monitors how many users download your app after seeing it, an indicator of the success of your user acquisition efforts.

Here, your best bet to boosting the install rate is to make sure your app rating is immaculate. Respond to reviews, ensure all users feel valued, and improve based on their feedback (but don’t forget to use your head—following them blindly will also wreak havoc).

12. User Growth Rate

Measures the increase in new users over time. Provides insights into how your app is expanding its user base and revealing the effectiveness of marketing strategies.

That’s the popularity metric! Can be affected by your marketing, offers, and app rating. The better all of these are, the faster it will grow. Referral programs, discounts, guerilla marketing, and strong ad campaigns will also help here.

13. App Store Ranking

Monitors your app's position in app store search results. This is how visible your app truly is to someone who never heard of it before.

Improving here means focusing on your ASO: work on making sure you’ve got the right keywords, your app is translated for the market it's in, and try your hardest to get featured.

14. Average Rating

Represents the overall user rating of your app, a direct influence on potential users' decision to download.

Simple recipe: respond to all reviews (80-90% at least), encourage users to leave reviews via in-app notifications, listen to user feedback, and improve. You’ll see it climb. Some apps managed to recover after truly awful disasters, you’ll do just fine.

15. Search Visibility Score

Assesses your app's visibility in app store searches. Guides optimization for better discoverability.

Keywords! Make sure that your app headline, description, and any other area with a text box in it has relevant keywords. If your app is about travel, you better have “tickets”, “trains”, “holiday planner” and other stuff like that somewhere in there.

16. CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score

Quantifies user satisfaction with your app. Guides customer service and product development. It's usually obtained through a survey question asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale, often from 1 to 5.

Are you happy with this new feature we’ve introduced? Yes, 5/5—that’s CSAT. Improve by listening to user feedback that you get through it.

17. Net Promoter Score

Identifies your app's promoters and detractors. Offers insights into user loyalty and satisfaction. Sort of similar to CSAT, but captures the overall impression of the user with the app or service.

Would you recommend the app to your friend, now that you’ve paid for it and spent 60 hours using it? No, 0/5—that’s NPS. Same tactic for improving as CSAT.

18. Reply Effect

Evaluates the impact of responding to user reviews on their ratings. An often overlooked metric that actually tells you a ton about how well your communication strategy is doing. If the review rating climbs from 2 to 4 stars after your communication with the users, a climb of 2 stars is your Reply Effect.

Improve with empathy, love, compassion, and being there on time. Some business apps take over a week to respond to a review—appalling! Respond as fast as you can, or better yet, automate.

19. Total Ranked Keywords

Tracks the number of keywords your app ranks for. Influences your app's discoverability in search results. Heard that one somewhere above, right? Well, the difference is this is a total for keywords that your app is ranking for. It could be a lot that don’t matter or a few that do.

Do your keyword research and make sure you rank for the right ones.

20. Sentiment Score

Analyzes the overall mood of user feedback. Provides a gauge of user satisfaction and areas for emotional engagement improvement. Sounds scary, but not really. This is basically a difference between positive and negative reviews based on the total.

This is an important score for enterprise apps, since lately, a lot of dissatisfaction is done via 5-star reviews (1-stars can be mass-removed via app store policies).

Improve by responding to reviews and addressing the user woes, whatever they may be.

Afterword

With this checklist in hand, you are unstoppable! Take your time to work on each one, but to sum it up, it’s a lot simpler than it looks. Trouble getting new users? Ratings, copy, audiences. Trouble keeping them in? Bad pricing, features, or bugs. Can’t figure out the cash flow? Look at how much is spent on getting users, and how much they spend with you. Improve accordingly.

Good luck!

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FAQ

How important are mobile app KPIs?

Mobile app Key Performance Indicators provide insights into user engagement, growth, and overall app success. If you don’t track important KPIs, you may end up with an efficient strategy that will ultimately end up with it losing traction and going in the red.

Are mobile app KPIs different from mobile app metrics?

Metrics = raw data points, like session length, downloads, and crash rates. On their own, they won’t tell you much. KPIs = generalized benchmarks that take several things into account to show you trends.

What are the best mobile app KPIs?

If you want to hit the big leagues, focus on KPIs that tell you how well you’re acquiring users and how well you keep them. Other KPIs will steer your strategy in the right direction, but acquisition and retention will directly affect your bottom line.