As the growth of mobile continues, it’s important to track the users that are accessing your website or content from their device in the same way you track those that use a PC.
But what exactly do you track? Here, we suggest five mobile metrics that have an impact on your business bottom line you should be watching.
Monthly active users
The number of average monthly active users gives you a number of insights into your webpage. It allows you to establish a baseline from which you can determine whether your users are growing or decreasing over time and how engaged they are with your mobile website.
Stickiness
Stickiness refers to the concept of people returning to your website – or sticking to it – over time. If you have a high stickiness, it means that users are finding your content highly engaging or relevant – which is fantastic for any business, and is also a great way to create repeat customers and brand ambassadors.
To increase stickiness, some of the things you can do include ensuring you have a new content offering as frequently as practical, creating shareable content (which incentivises users to come back for content they can share with their friends, while exposing your website to new audiences) and complement your mobile strategy with something like an EDM or social media campaign to remind people of your mobile content and push them back to your site or app.
Retention
Retention is essentially the product of your monthly active users and your stickiness. If stickiness is what keeps people coming back to your site, retention is the measure of that over time. An ideal is to have a continually growing number of monthly active users, with a steady percentage of those being “sticky” customers. This means you’ll have to make a continued effort to capture and engage new customers and add them to customers considered to be retained as the months go on.
Session length
Knowing how long your users are staying engaged gives you an idea of how powerful your content is and how people are using it. Is it a quick five minute read on the bus? Or is someone perusing your mobile page or app for an hour? It’s not always a bad thing to have a short session length, so long as your number of users is high and it’s equating to sales rather than empty visits.
Revenue
On the note of sales, we want all of this mobile activity to be actually achieving something tangible. Tracking the number of sales that have closed as a result of mobile activity is essential in linking your marketing activities to your bottom line. Through Analytics, it’s possible to view the traffic referral source of a sale and determine your percentage of mobile-initiated customers.
