Crittercism App Success Playbook

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App Success Playbook: The 5 Ms to Mobile App Success

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Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................... 3

1. Mission ..................................................................................................... 4

2. Manage..................................................................................................... 4

3. Measure.................................................................................................... 6

4. Modify (A/B testing) .................................................................................. 10

5. Monetize ................................................................................................... 12

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 15

About the Author:

Dr. Einar Vollset is the owner of AppAftercare, an app maintenance and

optimization service. Vollset co-founded the YC funded startup ReMail, which

was subsequently acquired by Google. Previously, he was a visiting professor

of Computer Science at Cornell University. If you have any questions or would

like help in any way, dont hesitate to contact him at [email protected]

or visit http://appaftercare.com.

App Success Playbook

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Introduction

Getting your app approved in the AppStore is a monumental step, but it

should only be the start of a longer, albeit less intense process. If building yourapp is a sprint, ensuring it is a success is a marathon. In this book, we outline

the main components of mobile app success.

Weve broken down each of the steps of app success into 5 sections,

otherwise known as the 5 Ms. Your rst order of call is to clearly understand

the mission of the app in terms of business objectives. The next step is tomanage the app to ensure it is stable and performing well. These steps are

then followed by measuring and optimizing the apps performance regarding

user engagement and conversion rates. If there are any changes that need

to be made, the next step is to then modify the mobile app. If your app is a

consumer-facing app, the last step is to look at ways of monetizing your app.

App Success Playbook

Mission

Manage

Modify

Measure

Monetize

App Dev/Test/Release

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App Success Playbook

1. Mission

Hopefully you have a good grasp on the reason you had a mobile app built

in the rst place, but its worth going back to those business objectives nowthat your app has been released. Some questions to ask are: What does

success look like for the app? and What business objectives are you looking

to achieve?

Some of the most common aims businesses have for releasing a mobile app are:

Increasing customer engagement and extending existing services

Increasing customer satisfaction

Brand awareness and new customer acquisition

Driving revenues through increased sales or expanded ad inventory

Reduction of operating costs

You should not only fully measure these metrics as they relate to your

business objectives, but also be able to nimbly respond and pivot to optimize

those metrics. An app without a well-dened set of business objectives is likely

to fail, and success metrics such as downloads and opens are meaningless in

the absence of a clear business goal.

2. Manage

The rubber hits the road once your app enters the AppStore. But because noapp launch is entirely without issues, it is important to actively manage these

issues. To do so, there are two key aspects of your app you need to stay on

top of: app crashes and server issues.

App crashes are the number one reason why people abandon your app or

leave a 1-star review. It is also almost inevitable that any reasonably sized

app with more than a handful of users will experience crashes. However,

without the right tools, it can be difcult to track down specic causes of these

crashes. Compounding this problem is the fact that you may not know the

percentage of your user base that is experiencing a specic crash, hence

prioritizing can be tricky. Unfortunately, relying on Apple to report crashes ismassively misleading, and you are innitely better off going with a dedicated

third-party solution.

Managing server issues is just as important if your app depends on server

side components (whether that is your own server, or a third party). Your app

wont necessarily crash just because your server is returning an error, or a

third party service is slow; it just leads to an unbearable user experience for

your customers. This can ultimately lead to users quickly abandoning your app.

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App Success Playbook

Recommended Vendor:

Crittercism is a one-stop shop for handling crash detection and monitoring

server endpoints, both in-house and third party.

Once youve installed the Crittercism SDK and pushed the update to the

AppStore, youll be presented with a dashboard that gives all the information

you need to effectively manage your app. As a rst step, try to get a sense the

biggest offenders, or the worst crashes.

Figure 1. This screenshot shows how you can easily prioritize issues by thenumber of users affected. Armed with this information, you can use Crittercism

to get detailed stacktraces, diagnostics, and even re-trace the users steps

leading up to the crash, saving you time trying to gure out what is occurring.

Best Practice:

After wrestling your worst crashes to the ground, you need a detailed view into

whether service calls are slowing down your app.

Figure 2. The screenshot below shows all web services your app interacts

with (both your own or third party) broken down by latency, error rates, data

transferred and more. It makes it easy to monitor and troubleshoot network orservice issues that affect app performance.

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App Success Playbook

3. Measure

Once you have managed operational issues and are condent the app is

performing optimally, it is now time to start measuring app store performance

and user engagement.

Optimizing app store performance requires monitoring two metrics:

1. Discoverability and 2. Categories. Discoverability refers to how people nd

your app in the app store, and is usually done through keywords. Categories

is a bit more complicated where users will pick two categories that are chosen

through competitive analysis and other methods, and measure how they are

ranking in each of those categories. If needed, users can buy an ad to purchase

a bump in category rankings.

The second dimension to measure is user engagement. User engagement

can be carved up into many facets, and the solution used to measure it is

analytics. As an example, you may have the number of downloads, but how

will you know if you are getting people to take the nal pay-off measure?

More importantly, how will you get insight into all of the events that are

occurring and nd where people in the funnel are falling off?

The tools used for measuring analytics are different from mobile app

performance management (mAPM) tools. mAPM solutions look at correctness

to answer questions like, Are the app and associated services performing

as we would expect? Analytics tools are used to answer questions such as:

Okay, the mobile app is working correctly, but can we make it perform better

in terms of our business objectives?

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App Success Playbook

It is important to understand that the two are complimentary, but the

management aspect is foundational. For example, it would be suboptimal to

start measuring and optimizing user engagement if the app is crashing for

50% of your users.

Recommended Vendors:

Some of the tools that will help in this space are Applause Analytics, App

Annie and appFigures. There is a lot you can do with App Annie, including

diving deep into competitor intelligence, but the most popular features are App

Ranking and App Reviews. These provide a check on whether rankings are

trending up or down, and App Reviews give important clues to bigger issues

that may need to be resolved.

Figure 3. This App Annie screenshot shows the ranking of an app over its

lifetime. Note, you can choose the time horizon. As you can see, the app was

previously ranked in the top 100 nance apps, then slipped into obscurity.

The reason for the decline was due to new, well funded entrants into the

marketplace, and radical changes to AppStore search algorithms (after Apple

bought Chomp, the app didnt rank as well). This highlights the kind of issues to

keep abreast of.

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Figure 4. The screenshot below shows the most favorable reviews.

The next important question you will want to answer is: Given that we want

users to perform some conversion action, such as buying an upgrade or

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