Engaging App Users Through Session Metrics - Whiteboard Wednesday

This week's Whiteboard Wednesday will help to define app engagement through valuable session metrics in order to craft mobile marketing strategies.



Hello and welcome to another Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Miles Branman, Digital Marketing Specialist here at Localytics. Today I'm going to be talking to you about two key metrics, the first being session length and the other, session interval. Both of these metrics are focused around user engagement. Using these metrics as a mobile marketer or app developer can really help you understand user engagement within your app.


Defining Key Session Metrics

So let’s go over a definition first. A session is when a user enters an app, performs a certain action, and then either exists the app, or times out. That said, session length is pretty straightforward; it’s basically how long the user is in that app, per session. Session interval, on the other hand, is just the time between a user's first session, and their next one. This can be a very short period of time or a long one- short being much better for you, the mobile marketer.


Activating Session Length Analysis

Let’s apply these two metrics to a certain example. If you are, say, a news media app, and you are concerned about your sports related content, you could look at something like session length and discover that session length is much greater on Fridays and Saturdays for sports related content than during the rest of the week. If you wanted to activate that information, you could create a campaign for registering users for a certain event. If you initiated that on the weekend, knowing session length is greater during that time, you could penetrate a larger user base and push more customers to that action, in this case registering for an event.


Applying Insights From Session Interval Data

Let’s apply that same example for session interval. You may also discover that smartphone users are having longer session intervals or longer time between their sessions than tablet users. That means you want to improve the app experience for those smartphone users. Some things that you might be able to do are: improve your screen flow or make a design improvement that would create a better user app experience. That could lead to a positive change in terms of shortening the interval between sessions for those smartphone users.



There are many ways you could analyze the data and glean insights from it. Localytics helps mobile marketers take a look at that data and tailor the app experience, for particular users, based on key metrics like these. Again, thank you for joining us for this week’s Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Miles Branman, Digital Marketing Specialist here at Localytics, and I hope to see you again next week.

For more from Miles, follow him on Twitter!

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