What is mobile user retention?
Keeping users engaged with an app over time. Mobile user retention is critical to an app’s success, and it’s vital for marketers and app developers to make an ongoing effort to draw users in. This may include adding new features, providing opportunities to connect, and keeping the app up to date and bug-free.
Retention is the continued possession, use, or control of something (often, in this context, referring to the retention of acquired mobile users). Mobile retention relates to the percentage of your users who return to the app over a specific period of time with the goal of better understanding engagement levels with the current product and community. There are several retention rates that teams use today: among them, daily retention rate, rolling retention rate, and return retention rate.
Mobile app usage has skyrocketed in the past few years—in fact, an estimated 89% of mobile media time is spent in-app. A study by eMarketer suggests daily time users spend in mobile apps has more than doubled since 2012. The average adult reportedly spent 3.1 hours per day on mobile devices in 2017, while adult users on average spent less than an hour per day on mobile in 2012.
In addition, mobile apps are currently producing better ROI for businesses than they ever have before. Mobile experts estimate that app users have spent a whopping 20x more time in-app than mobile web users have spent in the mobile web, and that mobile apps converted at rates 3x those of mobile websites.