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In today’s constantly changing world a strong app presence is instrumental to your app business’ survival. It’s probably time for an app growth audit if you are looking for the best method to get your app to stand out from the crowd, create an effective app marketing strategy, and not waste the budget on unsuccessful actions, or inept testing of solutions invented on the fly.
In today’s constantly changing world a strong app presence is instrumental to your app business’ survival.
Apps that don’t have a strategic, intentional, distinctive & ROI-focused app marketing strategy will not build a position and stand out in such a competitive market as the app market.
Research shows that there are 80+ apps installed on the average smartphone. But with that said, people aren’t using all of those apps. The average person uses 9 mobile apps per day and 30 apps per month. If the average smartphone user has 80 apps on their phone, this means that more than 62% of those apps don’t get used every month. What does this mean? It’s simple. People are downloading apps and not using them. In fact, 25% of apps are used only once after being downloaded, and then never used again.
It’s probably time for an app growth audit if you are looking for the best method to get your app to stand out from the crowd, create an effective app marketing strategy, and not waste the budget on unsuccessful actions, or inept testing of solutions invented on the fly.
An app growth audit, when done correctly, can give you a lot of valuable insights and a ready-to-implement roadmap into what could be done to boost your current app growth strategy.
Let’s dig deeper into the app growth audit paradigms to solve the puzzle and give your app a quick solution to your growth problems.
An app growth audit is a business document (typically a presentation) that summarizes all of an app’s marketing operations and initiatives in key app growth areas.
Rather than describing strategy or plans, it focuses on the implementation and results. App Growth audit is a collection of data that can be used to design or evaluate an app's growth & marketing strategy. It can reveal information about competitors' activity and performance, as well as identify opportunities.
App Growth Audit will support the overall growth efforts of your app. However, there are key elements you should pay particular attention to. Here are a few of the major players in your app marketing effort that should be scrutinized:
Before you focus on researching and optimizing the methods and channels for getting users to your app, we need to start with a few important points. One of these is User Onboarding & First Time User Experience (FTUX).
A user onboarding audit will give you a clear understanding of the problems your app is having right after you install it. Is the registration process simple and easy to understand, does the user know about the most important features, and are the benefits of paid subscriptions and functionalities communicated correctly and in a simple way?
Included in this audit is the correct structure of user onboarding and screens, a checklist of all elements, good practices in data acquisition and permissions, presentation of paywalls, gamification of the onboarding proses, and much more.
Don’t start with user acquisition if this element is not designed and implemented correctly because you will lose a lot. Poorly designed user onboarding affects conversions from downloads to registrations, from registrations to trials, and trial conversions to paid subscriptions. If you don't think through and eliminate mistakes at this stage, your user acquisition costs will be several or more times higher than they could be with well-designed user onboarding.
Another part of the audit is to check the application for a product and interface design i.e. UX/UI. Here it is necessary to put emphasis on the issues of crashing of the application, proper display of data, the size of buttons and their location, as well as whether the application allows easy navigation between functions, whether the graphics and images are of sufficient quality and whether the forms and other elements of user interaction do not cause problems.
We want to avoid negative opinions and other problems with the product itself before directing users to the application.
Once the user onboarding and product and design issues have been audited, we can move on to user acquisition. This topic is complex and in order to approach it properly, we will start with the organic method, i.e. App Store Optimization.
Here we have 6 elements on which we must place special emphasis:
1. Keyword optimization: Analyze the title, subtitle, and description of your app. Do your research and find what keywords will get you higher ranks and what your competitors use.
2. Graphics optimization: Search for whether there is anything you can change in your visual assets such as an app icon, screenshots, or promo banners, and what can be improved in order to attract more users.
3. Click-to-install conversion rate: Compare your current ASO indicators, user acquisition channels, and conversion rates with the average in the market and in your app category.
4. Ratings and reviews monitoring: Examine your ratings and reviews, featured reviews, and your competitors’ apps reviews, and discover how to improve them.
5. Uninstall rates (also known as user churn): It’s important to know how and why your users deleted the app, and what actions can be taken in these cases. Come up with ideas on how to encourage them to reinstall it.
6. Final report: Summarize everything that has been conducted, what KPIs need to be increased after each step of ASO, and where to get extra traffic. This step helps you to see the whole picture and start working on your ASO strategy.
Starting a user acquisition audit with App Store Optimization is a great way to lay the foundation for future lower spending on paid user acquisition. A well-thought-out ASO strategy is the foundation for successful user acquisition and low UA spending.
A comprehensive User Acquisition Audit should identify your biggest opportunities for growth and help you achieve your business objectives. Using the systematic approach and drawing on extensive experience, with carefully tailored recommendations will help you scale and optimize your user acquisition campaigns.
In UA Audit, you should take care of the following topics:
Designing of good paid user acquisition strategy should take into account all the above aspects to be comprehensive and effective.
Analytics is very important in the growth process of mobile app marketing. It is important to know what you are measuring, and whether everything is well-measured so that in later stages you have controls and a good reading of the results of your actions. An analytics audit includes checking all current analytics tools, recommending new ones if needed, and setting them up so that together they consistently show all the most important KPIs for each element of app marketing.
The aspect of keeping and activating the user in the app is another important part of the app's growth strategy. What's the point of a freshly acquired user if they open your app and then leave it and never come back? This is why the Engagement & Retention element is so important so that your money spent on user acquisition converts and creates revenue, and the user enjoys and has the satisfaction of using your app. At this stage of the audit, we will examine your Customer Management tools and recommend improvements on issues such as in-app messages, notifications, user activation, up-selling, feedback loop, customer support, and much more. As a result, user retention will be higher and the money spent on acquisition will pay off in the form of high lifetime value (LTV).
The last important aspect is monetization. We will check the current user conversion types and ways to monetize your app and recommend new ones or improve the current ones to make them even more effective. Here, important issues include, for example, the business model, a/b paywall testing, ways to present pricing and bundling, activating user cohorts, and monetization analytics.
So now the most important question you will probably ask yourself. Does my app need an app growth audit? If you see that your KPIs are decreasing or you are not sure about any of the app growth areas listed above you should probably think about the audit. Are you feeling stuck on what to do next to increase downloads and revenue? App Growth audit will allow you to check all the most important elements of app marketing. If you want to check what element to emphasize for optimization to bring the best results, see what your competitors are up to, how to improve ASO, User Acquisition, Retention, and Analytics, and develop an effective ready-to-implement roadmap with KPI estimation for the coming months, then this audit is for you.
Creating an app marketing strategy based on the facts and insights from the app growth audits to plan out and implement the suggestions. It should be divided into phases and modularized so that work can be moved ahead or backward as needed.
Each task on the roadmap must result in an outcome that includes a suggestion based on a key finding from the audit.
This method ensures that each item of work is supported and rationalized by a business rationale. There is a six-step methodology for app marketing projects. As you can see, everything begins with an audit!
Evaluate: do a digital audit and present the client with options and recommendations.
Define: short, medium, and long-term objectives in your strategy.
Design: work on all aspects of the app marketing campaign
Develop: implement technical improvements.
Launch: The project goes live, and a preliminary audit is performed to assess its short-term viability.
Measure: keep track of key metrics and performance versus KPIs.
If at this stage of reading this article you are considering an app growth audit then I will write a few words about what such an audit looks like at AppDNA. As we are a kpi-based agency we work fully performance-based which means our services and fees are based on the results we deliver to our partners. Usually, app growth audit is a great way for us to dig deeper into your app, check-up and propose solutions and then estimate KPIs for future services. From your side, it’s a great way to test the partnership between us and get the list of recommendations with an action plan and KPIs estimated for the next 6 months. What is the main benefit of our audit? Well, it’s free when you decide you want to work with us on implementing these changes. The audit will be ready within 7 days and after 3 months from the audit we will catch up with you to make another consultation call so you can ask us again with your upcoming questions after the audit results implementation.
If you haven’t already guessed, doing a full app growth audit is a time-consuming and difficult task. While you might technically do it yourself, you’re unlikely to get the results you want without the tools and the commitment required to undertake a complete examination of your present app marketing plan. Also, there are numerous advantages to outsourcing your app marketing to a seasoned firm. Now you know what a good app growth audit should look like and consist of. You should be able to tell if your app requires such an audit and what it looks like at our agency. If you still have any questions or want to ask something we invite you to a free consultation before.
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