Smartphones have undeniably become indispensable in our everyday lives, allowing us to do so much in so little time. More and more businesses have accelerated their mobile initiatives, and to satisfy their on-the-go customers, they need to focus on optimizing user experience. Data from Apteligent, a mobile app intelligence firm, shows that one in four users will abandon your app after just one poor experience. Companies can see the direct impact of poor app performance on user reactions and ultimately business results. Here’s what that looks like.

Impact of poor performance on app usage metrics

A performance issue, such as a crash, can negatively affect a user’s experience and their tendency to return to your app. You’ll be able to see the business impact reflected in your app’s usage data, which includes essential metrics such as retention rate, engagement, daily/monthly active users, and stickiness. It’s important to monitor your retention, and therefore your churn rates, as well as your unique daily and monthly active users, to stay alert on the percentage of customers you’re losing.

According to Apteligent data, the best apps have an overall crash rate of less than 0.25%, but 75% of apps across iOS and Android do not meet this standard. To maintain the optimal crash rate, you need an overview of all the crashes in your app, which then allows you to prioritize and focus on the crashes that affect the largest number of users in the latest release of the app.

Impact of poor performance on business metrics

But visibility into crashes alone is not enough; you need to be able to leverage data science tools to uncover mobile insights that explain end results. Poor app performance not only hurts your user experience, but it most likely translates to a downward trend in sales. As you track your business metrics, some that could be affected by a crash or a network failure are cost per acquisition, lifetime value, average revenue per user/paying user, and return on investment. In addition to app performance and behavioral metrics, you must analyze industry data to see how your app performs relative to others in key app performance measures. One example is to use reliable benchmarks of crash rate, app launch time, or network latency to help you compare how your app ranks against your industry peers. That way you can get the statistical analysis and insight that allows you to focus your resources and improve your mobile business.

An example of industry benchmarks: iOS crash rate by version among App Store’s shopping apps

How to effectively improve app performance

We’re happy to announce that you can now integrate the Appboy marketing automation platform with data from Apteligent (formerly Crittercism) on crashes, slow performance, and poor user experience. This integration allows you to learn how app performance is directly impacting your user engagement and business results.

First, make sure you have integrated both the Appboy SDK and the Apteligent SDK into your mobile app. Next, subscribe to the Apteligent crash observer and add one line of code to send the event to Appboy. It takes less than 15 minutes to copy and paste the code available in this document. For more information, you can contact Appboy here.