5 Steps to Mobile App

Success

Getting your app approved in the AppStore is a monumental step, but it should only be the start of a longer, albeit less intense process. If building your app is a sprint, ensuring it is a success is a marathon. In this book, we outline the main components of mobile app success.

1. Mission

2. Manage

3. Manage

4. Modify

5. Monetize

The 5M’s to Mobile App Success

Some of the most common aims businesses have for releasing a mobile app are:

• Increasing customer engagement and extending existing services

• Increasing customer satisfaction• Elevating brand awareness• Driving revenues through increased sales or

expanded ad inventory• Reducing operating costs

An app without a well-defined set of business objectives is likely to fail, and success metrics such as downloads and opens are meaningless in the absence of a clear business goal.

1. Mission

There are two key aspects of your app you need to stay on top of: app crashes and server issues.

Without the right tools, it can be difficult to track down specific causes of crashes. Compounding this problem is the fact that you may not know the percentage of your user base that is experiencing a specific crash, hence prioritizing can be tricky. Unfortunately, relying on Apple to report crashes is massively misleading, and you are infinitely better off going with a dedicated third-party solution.

Managing server issues is just as important if your app depends on server side components (whether that is your own server, or a third party).

2. Manage

Figure 1. Crittercism shows how you can easily prioritize issues by the number of users affected. Armed with this information, you can use Crittercism to get detailed stacktraces, diagnostics, and even re-trace the user’s steps leading up to the crash, saving you time trying to figure out what is occurring.

Once you have managed operational issues and are confident the app is performing optimally, it is now time to start measuring app store performance and user engagement.

Optimizing app store performance requires monitoring two metrics: 1. Discoverability and 2. Categories.

The second dimension to measure is user engagement. User engagement can be carved up into many facets, and the solution used to measure it is analytics.

3. Measure

Figure 2. This App Annie screenshot shows the ranking of an app over its lifetime. Note, you can choose the time horizon. As you can see, the app was previously ranked in the top 100 finance apps, then slipped into obscurity.

There two kinds of modifications you want to be making: 1. Adding new features, and 2. Optimizing the existing user experience.

Additional features are often driven by external motivators like customers requesting a feature, or an important partner requesting “just one more thing,” so adding them are often no-brainers. In addition, a frequently updated app usually gets a boost up the rankings.

By running A/B tests you can compare the new variation on a subset of your users and get actual data about whether your tweaks are making things better or worse.

4. Modify (A/B Testing)

Figure 3. Using Apptimize, you can view the results of A/B testing — in this case variant A outperforms the baseline (the existing variant), signifying you should push variant A to your entire user base.

Now that you have a finely-tuned, high-performing app, it is time to start adding fuel to your app monetization fire through paid user acquisitions.

Paid user acquisitions come in many forms and is a large and complex topic where success is app dependent. An acquisition strategy that works for a game, for example, might not work for a mortgage calculator.

For more details, please visit:

www.crittercism.com

5. Monetize