Many of the metrics we measure in social apply to mobile users, too.

If you’re developing or have launched a mobile app, are you tracking it properly to ensure that it’s profitable? Do you know what metrics are important, and how to track them?

The remarkable thing about mobile apps is we’re not starting from square one, like we did several years ago in social. Because we now have years of experience developing successful social games, we can hit the ground running in mobile–because many of the same metrics from social games apply to mobile apps.

This is especially true when it comes to the what we call the ARM funnel of Acquisition, Retention and Monetization. It’s the analytics framework by which our social customers have used to develop and iterate their games–and has helped to make them successful. When it comes to mobile devs, here are some metrics in social they can use to improve their apps in mobile:

Acquisition
Social gaming led the way in acquisition tracking. Previously, marketing metrics were focused on raw conversion and lift. Now with a user-centric models, it has become possible to track almost any metric for any arbitrary cohort of users.

Retention
Measures of retention and engagement, such as monthly active users (MAU) and average session lengths, are both key to measuring the success of your app with your target customer.

Monetization
If you have in-app purchases in your mobile app, average revenue per user (ARPU) and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) are metrics that are key to measuring monetization.

You can gain clear actionable insights from these metrics. And, this may be combined with cohorting by install date. This is a view of your users that requires no cooperation from your advertising partners, yet provides deep insights on return on investment of ad campaigns with your target users.

These metrics all originated in social gaming, where they continue to be refined today; and they can be strongly applied to mobile because of the the user-centric nature of mobile apps (which is a permanently logged-in state). If you want to learn more, our president and CSO Josh Williams penned an article for Social Times that explores this in depth: How Lessons Learned in Social Will Give You a Head Start in Mobile.

In summary, data-driven decisions have been key to social game developers over the past three years. Zynga tracks 70 billion messages a day just to keep up with their players. Can lessons learned on the social Web improve the bottom line of mobile app developers? We know they can.

P.S. If you want to learn more, we’re hosting a webinar, From Social to Mobile: A Playbook for Building Successful Games, on Wednesday, Jan. 25 | 10 a.m. PST.

During this 45-minute live presentation, our expert panel will dig deep into the challenges and opportunities mobile developers and marketers face, including:

• Successfully transitioning from social to mobile platforms
• Challenges in discovery, acquisition and marketing attribution
• Comparisons between social vs mobile user behaviors
• Unique engineering challenges that didn’t exist in social
• Tips and tricks for monetizing in mobile

Register today.

Click on the image to register.

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About the author: Conor Nash is a data scientist and account manager for Kontagent. He specialized in statistics and cryptography at Trinity College before going on to perform statistical consultation and deep social network analyses on subjects such as the U.S. Congress. He has also worked extensively in the tourism sector, guiding 5,000+ people through Dublin, Ireland. You can contact Conor at @conornash.