Our industry uses many measures to track the success of apps. Total users, monthly active users (MAU), daily active users (DAU), Day 1, Day 7 retention, average revenue per user (ARPU). Swrve tracks them all. But here's the thing: these metrics, whilst interesting, are not even close to the full story.

Lets look at a fast growing app with 2 million monthly active users (MAU). Sounds great. However MAU can deceive. In this case, marketing has paid to acquire a ton of new users. At the same time, existing users are slowly abandoning the app. Our ‘successful’ app is in fact in real trouble. Paid acquisition, low conversion, spiralling churn.

Swrve recognized that the model used to track and understand success was broken. We explored many solutions, but in the end the answer was simple. Don't focus on the numbers. Focus instead on the people behind the numbers, the people using the app, most especially in the context of what they've done, or not done, in the app. Actual usage and behaviors by the people using the app give real insight into how well an app is doing, and where can we optimise growth, engagement, retention.

Swrve does this behavioural observation today. We ‘listen’ to every users actions. In fact, every second Swrve receives 60,000 actions from the 1 billion plus app installs we power. It builds an understanding of each user. Who just logged in for the first time? Who signed up last week and hasn’t opened the app this week? Who has just arrived in Heathrow airport? What active subscribers have we not seen in the last month? 

Now knowing every user is great in concept, but impossible in the context of mobile’s massive scale. That’s why we’ve wrapped up all this data in an incredibly insightful dashboard. It takes a lifecycle approach that segments users by their behaviors over time. This dashboard is entirely configurable by app - and it has to be. The user lifecycle of a banking app, for example, is entirely different to that of a retail app:

Back to our app with 2 million MAU. At a glance, we can see see that it has 41K new users, and a further 115k users who've bounced (opened the app just once). 38K new users are actively evaluating the app, and we can see above that there's a healthy 1.5 million engaged users. However - over half a million formerly engaged users are disappearing.

When you visualize users in this way, you can see exactly which ‘jobs’ you need to perform to drive engagement, retention and conversion. It could be revamping the app. Running a/b user experience tests. Or lifecycle marketing which speaks individual with users depending on what stage in the lifecycle they’re at - the screen below shows us about to target a campaign at new users specifically - although of course we will be able to further refine that targeting later in the process.

Since we rolled out user lifecycle insights, it has given Swrve clients a profound insight into how their apps are growing – and exactly how they can unlock more growth. The first reaction was to tailor proactive campaigns (a/b tests and communications) to each segment. And now you can do that right inside the dashboard. It couldn’t be easier to create an on-boarding campaign. In the example below, it is a banking app that is delivering a welcome tour bespoke to new student accounts.

Check out Swrve user lifecycle. It is the best way to see and interact personally with every users as they use your app.