What are key performance indicators (KPIs)?

In a mobile marketing context, key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that are used to assess the performance of a mobile application and the broader business that surrounds it.

Essential marketing KPIs include a number of in-app factors (such as retention, monetization and number of active users), external factors (such as review scores and chart rankings) and campaign indicators (such as click-through rate and campaign cost.)

App KPI metrics can also include impressions, clicks, installs, reattribution, sessions and events triggered which are also used for further calculation.

App KPI metrics are important to mobile advertisers and marketers for a number of different reasons to determine the success of a mobile app business.

Essential marketing KPIs help professionals across app businesses set goals and measure how well the business does in achieving them. By establishing a clear set of KPIs, app businesses can help developers, marketers, product managers and other professionals understand what to work on or what to improve.

More specific to mobile marketing, KPIs are an essential part of driving iterative improvement of app performance and mobile marketing campaigns. Examining and contextualising KPIs like retention and user lifetime alongside the campaigns that acquired them will help a business to identify where improvement could be found, such as in an app’s user experience or within campaign performance.

Adjust’s KPI service has been created specifically to help assist businesses track, analyze and respond to specific KPIs.

The service uses a pull API to drag Adjust datasets out of the dashboard for internal purposes. This helps marketers to access detailed information about the performance of an app or its related advertising campaigns, before allowing them to use it for myriad purposes (such as internal segmentation, supporting additional research or helping to accurately report on performance).

The service allows marketers to make three types of calls, each of which provide slightly different KPIs to monitor.

The first is the overview query, which draws out metrics such as clicks, sessions and installs as well as other metrics related to reattribution and fraud. The second is the events call, which pulls out figures related to completion rates on in-app events like purchases or sign-ups. The third query is the cohorts call, which allows marketers to draw out data attached to specific cohorts and segments.

By using a service such as this alongside a carefully considered mobile marketing plan - particularly one that has selected which KPIs to monitor closely - marketers should be able to properly monitor, assess and react to the performance of their app and its marketing campaigns.