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I don't think it is a problem that is harder on mobile than web, it is just that up till now for mobile we have only focused on downloads: downloads is the main
by dirkdk 14y ago
I don't think it is a problem that is harder on mobile than web, it is just that up till now for mobile we have only focused on downloads: downloads is the main metric for iTunes Store and Google Play to rank apps and to get into a top 25.
I totally agree that this is a stupid metric and we should move to monthly active users, both for general measurement of success as well as ranking in app stores. Getting a lot of one time visitors on your web site is not hard, monthly recurring visitors is. No different on mobile, let's start dealing with the challenge of engagement on mobile as well.
- jacquesm 14y agoBut even 'monthly active users' is a very stretchable metric. For one app it is defined as 'user opened the app', for another app it is defined as 'user interacted with the app' and for a third it is defined as 'user communicated using the app'. Depending on which of the three you use you're going to end up getting wildly different figures from different kinds of apps. Mobile metrics are like web metrics back in the day when 'hits' were the normal way of expressing how popular a website was. Churn figures have similar problems, as do customer lifetime value (which you can only properly establish at the end of a cycle) and various other metrics. Some standardization and common sense would go a long way to making the mobile world more transparent but as long as there are fortunes made based on opaqueness this is not likely to change.