Important Mobile App Metrics to Track

At Kontagent, we’ve helped hundreds of social customers win by helping them gain better insights into their users’ behaviors. We’re always improving our already-powerful, best-in-class analytics platform, and we’ve been leveraging our knowledge and experience to help many of our social customers make a successful transition into the mobile space, too.

Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a mobile application, or you’ve already launched it and have a substantial user base, looking to social app developers for a history lesson on how to do it right can give you a huge head-start, and greater chance at success.

Gaia Online has “done it right” with Monster Galaxy — a hit on both Facebook and iOS. In the first installment of our Kontagent Konnect Executive Interview Series, we spoke with CEO Mike Sego on how the company is applying many of the lessons it learned in moving social-to-mobile, including:

• The metrics that are most important to succeeding on mobile
• How to monetize on the F2P model
• How to successfully split-test on iOS (yes, it is possible!)
• Other tactics used to keep players engaged and coming back for more

Q: What are the overarching fundamentals for developers who want to make the social to mobile transition? Do these fundamentals also apply to mobile developers in general?
A: Applying the knowledge you gained on Facebook to developing for mobile is the most effective way we’ve found to succeed in the mobile space.

When it comes to content, the mechanics are almost identical for what motivates user engagement, retention, and monetization between mobile and social. Appointment mechanics, energy mechanics, leaving players wanting more, designing specific goals that are just out of reach until multiple play sessions, etc.—the user experience is consistent.

When it comes to social and mobile game apps, we have found that free-to-play models are the most successful at attracting users. Beyond that, you should focus on a very tight conversion funnel; once a new user has installed your application, analyze every action she takes through the levels or stages of your app. When you start looking at cohorts of users, if there is a spike in drop-offs, you should start asking yourself, ‘What is it about this particular stage that could be turning off users? Did I make the level too difficult? Was it not difficult enough? What are some other incentives I can bake into this particular point of the app to get them to keep going?’

But, as you continue to develop your application, keep in mind that you should develop and release quickly, and test often. The trick is to test, fine-tune and iterate with user data. These insights will help you to improve conversion. Spending a disproportionate amount of time instrumenting and scrutinizing the new user experience will pay dividends down the line. This is true for both social and mobile games.

Q: What are the metrics you pay most attention to?
Just as it was in social, the two biggest levers in mobile are still minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC), and maximizing lifetime value (LTV). The question boils down to this: How can we acquire as many users as possible, for as little money as possible? And, how can we generate as much revenue as possible from those users? Everything else is an input into those two major metrics because those two metrics are what will ultimately determine if you have a scalable hit or a game that just won’t pay for itself.

The full interview goes on a bit longer, and it has profound responses topics we alluded to earlier in the post. We don’t want to over-stay our generous welcome here on the SoftLayer blog, so if social and mobile application development are of interest to you, register here (for free) to learn more from the complete interview.

-Catherine Mylinh, Kontagent

Measure Everything!

If you’re a SaaS or PaaS provider, making sure that you deliver the Quality of Service that your users expect is probably your highest priority. This means that you rely on continuously monitoring all aspects of your operation that can alert you to unusual events and help you find and fix the root cause of any service degradations. User complaints cannot be the first sign of trouble, and there is no time to hunt for data that has not already been collected.

This need for information is the main reason why “Measure Everything” is the new principle by which SaaS and PaaS clouds are managed and why many DevOps and Operations teams are using a variety of open source and commercial tools to monitor their infrastructure. In addition they often need to monitor data that is collected with custom tools because it is specific to their application environment. Since each tool comes with its own user interface, alerting mechanism and set-up requirements, the monitoring work-flow is disjointed, wastes time, and – most importantly – introduces problems when trying to correlate data from different tools for rapid root cause analysis.

Wouldn’t it be nice if – just as there are standard Database Management platforms – there were Time Series Data Management platforms that provide uniform visualization, correlation and alerting, and a scalable, redundant repository for your metrics? Ideally, that platform would be delivered as a service and could even be embedded by SaaS and PaaS vendors to allow users to monitor their services directly.

Librato Metrics is the platform we built to meet that critical need. Designed from the ground up with an “API first” approach, Metrics allows customers and partners to easily send it any time series data and understand how that data fits with other data they are collecting.

If you want to provide your users with monitoring capabilities, you can integrate and embed Metrics at whatever level best fits your needs: data repository, instruments for your own dashboards, or complete “white label” dashboards. By programmatically creating user accounts and transparently signing your users onto the Metrics platform, you can deliver a seamless experience.

We used “flexible,” “affordable” and “simple” as our key mottos in developing a business model for Metrics. Our goal was to make the platform easy to adopt and completely transparent, empowering every organization to take advantage of the “measure everything” philosophy. We charge a modest amount (in “micro-dollars” actually) per measurement, provide a 30-day free trial, and charge you monthly for what you have used … there are no minimum fees or lock-ins.

To make it easy to adopt Metrics, we provide connectors for a variety of popular collection agents such as StatsD, CollectD, and JMX. To help build a broad collection of useful collectors and connectors to existing tools, we’re building a community and ecosystem where Metrics users and tool developers can contribute. We hope you’ll try out the platform and help us grow our community!

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato