We don't have to tell you that app retention matters—after all, a brand that can’t hold onto its users is a brand that will find itself endlessly trying to refill a leaky bucket, burning energy, acquisition dollars, and goodwill without much to show for it. But while figuring out how to hold onto more mobile users can be a challenge, the first step in making it happen and improving your customer engagement outcomes is ensuring you have a good picture of how many users are churning. And getting that right starts with app Uninstall Tracking.

What Is Uninstall Tracking, Anyway?

While consumers spend more than 4X as much time on mobile devices as on desktop, much of that time is spent on a select few apps. And the only way for your app to be in contention for users’ attention is if it stays on their home screen. But it’s very normal for users to get tired of apps—or fed up with issues associated with those apps—and then just delete them (though most people who do so are open to installing them again if the issues in question were addressed).

And that's where Uninstall Tracking comes in. As the name suggests, Uninstall Tracking makes it possible for brands to monitor the amount of uninstalls they’re seeing in connection with their mobile apps and the campaigns that are associated with higher or lower app uninstalls.

What App Uninstall Data Tells Us (and How to Act Upon it)

While it's human nature to want to see the positive, and it's a marketer's nature to want to see positive trends, negative KPIs like uninstalls can be just as telling as positive metrics—and sometimes even more so. And your brand's overall app uninstall rate is one measurement you can't afford to ignore.

When we asked folks on our own internal teams why they chose to uninstall a mobile app, we found a number of common reasons:

• Too many messages

• Irrelevant messages

• A better competitor app

• Privacy concerns

• No/poor mobile onboarding

Tracking your own app uninstall metrics may help you uncover issues with your app's functionality and features, your acquisition efforts, or your engagement activities—for instance, the push notifications and in-app messages you're sending your users.

If your app uninstall numbers aren't where you'd like them to be, there are a few things you can try to turn things around:

• Improve your onboarding for new app users to bolster engagement and loyalty

• Test out winback campaigns for those who've uninstalled your app but who are still members of your email or SMS subscriber list (or who've opted into web push notifications)

• Leverage a cross-channel strategy that ties in email marketing and web messaging in addition to your current mobile marketing communications (like push notifications and in-app messaging) to better engage mobile users who may be wavering

• Uplevel your overall customer messaging with personalization and send-time optimization to provide a more valuable, engaging experience

Uninstall Tracking Capabilities in Braze

To help brands better understand their mobile app uninstalls and take action to support stronger, more sustainable relationships with their mobile users, the Braze customer engagement platform provides support for app uninstall tracking. This feature provides reporting on:

• Daily aggregate app-level uninstall statistics, so you can pinpoint trends and discrepancies

• Campaign-level uninstall statistics, including the number of campaign recipients that uninstall per day, so you can detect whether a specific campaign is preventing or contributing to app uninstalls

If you're ready to understand how your app's performance and your mobile messaging campaigns are impacting app engagement—and how this is in turn affecting your overall customer engagement—it's time to get started with the Braze platform’s app uninstall tracking feature.

Next Steps

It costs 5-7X as much to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones and companies that improve their retention by just 5% are able to see their overall profits increase by 25-125%. Uninstall Tracking can be a powerful way to lean into this dynamic, supporting stronger customer relationships and higher retention, something that can have positive long-term impacts on your bottom line.

Interested in digging deeper into retention? Check out our exclusive look at customer retention and what it takes to make the most of it.