Apps and software
An install is the cheapest thing to buy and the least useful thing to count. We know because we buy them for our own apps.
You run an app or a software product. People sign up or install, some of them stay, and the difference between those two groups is your whole business.
Installs are up, the cost per install is down, and the number of people using the product on a given Tuesday has not moved in six months.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true in almost every product.
Acquisition is measured, activation is not
Everybody knows the cost per install or per signup. Far fewer can say what a user who is still there in a week cost, which is the only one of the two worth optimising toward.
The first session is a mystery
People leave on a specific screen, on specific devices, and the reason is usually mundane and fixable. Without tracking each step on each screen, it stays a vague discussion about onboarding in general.
Crashes are counted, consequences are not
A crash rate is a number for engineers. The number for the business is how many of those people never opened it again.
Ad revenue and experience are argued about with opinions
One more placement earns more per session and costs some proportion of tomorrow's sessions. That trade can be measured, and almost nobody measures it.
We buy installs for our own apps with our own money, so the advice you get has been tested on our budget first.
Measured the way we measure ours
What we measure here
The numbers a product lives on.
Every business gets the fundamentals. These are the ones that matter in a software product and would be a waste of money in a shop.
- Activation, the moment a new user first gets real value, defined for your product and then measured
- Retention by sign-up week and by acquisition source, not as one blended average
- Cost per retained user, alongside cost per install
- First-session drop-off by screen and by device model
- Crash impact measured in users lost rather than in crash rate
- Ad or paywall placement tested against next-day return, not against session revenue alone
Questions people ask
The questions we hear most.
Do you work on iOS products too?
For measurement and advertising, yes, whatever the platform. For building the app itself, tell us what you need when you get started and we will be straight about whether we are the right team for it.
We already use a product analytics tool.
Good. The usual problem is not the tool, it is that nobody agreed what activation means, so every chart is measuring something slightly different. That is a week of work and it makes the tool you already pay for worth having.
Can you help with app store listings?
Yes. We publish our own, so store listings, privacy declarations and staged releases are ordinary work here rather than something we would be learning on your account.
Proof
Zip VPN
Our own app, measured the same way we'd measure yours.
Our own app, with around 20,000 users a day, measured the way we would measure yours.
Read the case study- people using it each day
20,000
people using it each day
- events recorded a day
300,000
events recorded a day
- of users come back
20%
of users come back
Where to start
The two services we usually begin with.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Find out which of your adverts bring paying customers.
Tell us about the business and the report you have stopped believing. Within a working day we will tell you what it is really saying and what it would take to fix.