Mobile app engagement

In the context of mobile marketing, engagement refers to a set of metrics that measure how users are interacting with your app. By measuring user engagement, marketers are able to understand the overall performance of their app and get valuable insight on ROI, ROAS, and LTV so they can advertise more effectively. 

Engagement also helps app product and marketing teams understand where they need to improve their user experience. 

For example, if they find that customer retention drops significantly after a certain number of days, marketers can use that information to develop re-engagement campaigns. Ultimately, by measuring various engagement metrics, app developers and marketers are able to improve the user experience at various touchpoints in the customer journey.

There are a number of metrics that can be used to understand user engagement, although a few of the most popular that WebEngage highlights include:

• Daily active users (DAUs): The number of active users each day, which is also often measured monthly by monthly active users (MAUs).
• Average session duration: The amount of time users typically spend on the app.
• Retention rate: The number of users that visit an app at least once during a given timeframe.
• Stickiness rate: The number of users that return to an app each month (DAUs / MAUs).
• Exit rate: The number of users that exit an app from specific screens.
• Churn rate: The rate that users uninstall an app during a given time period.

You’ll also have a set of KPIs specific to your app around key conversions, purchases, or events that you know by analysis lead to better engagement, better retention, and better monetization.

Regardless of which metrics you use to measure engagement, tracking user behavior is essential for marketers to understand the overall performance and health of an app. In order to analyze these engagement metrics, marketers typically rely on a number of vendors, including their mobile measurement partner (MMP), which connects data from marketing campaigns like cost and installs with data from in-app activities in order to help you understand the value of and return on your marketing efforts.

As a leading mobile measurement partner, Singular tags and standardizes mobile app data, including various engagement metrics, in order to provide a single source of truth to analyze the ROI of marketing campaigns. As highlighted in our guide to MMPs:

MMP’s use a mix of technology to measure and attribute mobile events such as clicks, app installs, engagement, revenue, and so on. With this technological capability and after an extensive review and assessment period, MMPs are granted certification and special access to data that allows them to perform attribution for brand marketing campaigns on the largest networks and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Measurement Partners, Pinterest, Snap, Apple Search Ads, TikTok, and more.

The key, however, is connecting all of that top-of-funnel data with what actually happens when users install and use your app. Without this critical step, you can’t really measure the effectiveness of your growth campaigns.

In summary, MMPs provide marketers with the tools they need to collect, standardize, and analyze marketing data such as engagement metrics. MMPs provide marketers with the cross-platform engagement data they need to scale with accurate attribution, granular ROI metrics, and more.