Amanda Maricle is the Product Owner at Nami ML. She has an extensive background in app development and most recently product managed the Connect mobile app platform at HomeSpotter.
There are dozens of metrics and data points available in the subscription app world. But that can be very overwhelming! Which ones should you keep an eye on and why are they important? In this article we cover more than 15 subscription app analytics you should start tracking.
Here is Nami’s guide to the most important subscription app metrics that you should know about.
Purchase Types
An important factor to consider when looking at app metrics is what type of purchases you support.
The main types of purchases are:
subscriptions
non-consumable one-time purchase (such as a lifetime ad-free purchase)
consumable one-time purchase (such as a purchase of coins for a game)
Subscriptions are recurring while non-consumables and consumables are not.
Different purchase types will impact your revenue metrics differently, as we will discuss below. If you have a mix of in-app purchase types, you may need to look at multiple metrics to get a clear picture of your revenue.
User Types
Just like purchase types, there are a few types of users you may want to track.
If your app has subscriptions, you will have subscriber users. These are typically your most engaged users and you will want to track their activity, retention, and more closely to monitor the health of your subscription business.
If your app supports non-consumable or consumable purchases, you will have paying users as well. A one-time purchase is a key indicator of engagement and you will want to focus on keeping these users engaged and purchasing again.
Finally, all users who install your app and use it are active users. These are leads who could potentially purchase. You will want to track the LTV and retention of these users to understand how to convert them into paying users.
Revenue
Revenue is an extremely important core metric that represents how much money you are making from your app. It sums up all purchases from the given time frame.
Revenue takes into consideration all types of purchases, including subscriptions, and consumable and non-consumable one-time purchases.
Sample Revenue Metric chart
MRR
MRR represents the normalized value of all your subscription customers. It is the most important metric for a subscription app analytics. Unlike revenue, it does not include one-time purchases, since these are not recurring. And unlike revenue, it doesn’t report the total amount of the purchase but rather the normalized monthly amount of the subscription.
For example, an annual subscription of $90 would have an MRR of 90/12 = $7.50. For every month that this customer is active, their MRR would be $7.50. On the revenue chart, this would be shown as a $90 transaction once.
MRR will often be lower than Revenue, but overall it gives you a better picture as to how your business is doing over time without the spikes of one-time purchases and large subscription transactions.
Sample MRR Metric chart
ARPU
ARPU (Average Revenue per User) can mean several different things depending on what Revenue you are looking at and which User Types you are including. Let’s look at 3 different calculations below.
Average MRR per Subscriber
Average MRR per Subscriber looks at only your active subscriber user group and your MRR. This metric is useful to understand the monthly recurring value of any individual subscriber.
By understanding this number, you can calculate how many more subscribers you need to get to a goal MRR number. Or you can try to increase this number by moving subscribers to higher priced subscription plans through upsell campaigns.
Average Revenue per Paying User (ARPPU)
Average Revenue per Paying User looks at all revenue for a time period and divides by all paying users. This takes into account one-time purchases as well as subscriptions and is a good combination metric for any app that sells multiple types of purchases.
By understanding this metric, you can measure how much users are willing to pay for your app and track reactions to pricing decisions.
Sample Average Revenue per Paying User chart
Average Revenue per User
Average Revenue per User looks at all revenue for a time period and divides by all active app users. This number will typically be much lower than ARPPU.
ARPU can be used to measure the overall effectiveness of a pricing strategy. If your ARPU is going up but your number of users is staying static, that means users are engaging more with the app and paying for your product.
Sample Average Revenue per App User chart
Active Users
Active Subscribers
This metric tracks all users who have an active subscription. Subscribers are your most engaged, valuable customers and tracking this number is important to keeping your subscription business healthy.
Metrics like New Subscribers, Trials, and Subscriber Churn are also useful to dive into how your subscriber base is changing over time.
Sample Active Subscribers chart
Active App Users
Active App Users are all users who have had an active session with your app during the time period. These will include subscribers, purchasers of consumables or non-consumables, or users who installed and used once and then churned.
Anyone who installs your app can be considered a lead at the top of the funnel. Your goal should be to drive them down the funnel towards a subscription.
If your Active App Users are increasing but your Active Subscribers are stagnant or decreasing, this can be a sign that you need to optimize your funnel.
Sample App Users chart
Subscriber Movement
Subscriber Movement is a visual of your subscriber base that helps show if your Active Subscribers are increasing or decreasing overall. It is calculated by taking New Subscribers and plotting against Churned subscribers who have expired their last subscription.
The Net of New subscribers - Churned subscribers is a visual of how much your Active Subscriber base is growing. If it is trending upwards, your business is in good shape. If it is negative, you are losing more subscribers than you are gaining.
Sample Subscriber Movement chart
User Churn
User Churn is an important metric that represents that rate at which you are losing users during a given period. While it is important to see the static number of subscribers and app users, as shown in the previous sections, it is also important to know how many you are losing, since this is another measure of health.
Subscriber Churn
Subscriber Churn indicates the rate at which your subscribers are expiring. It is calculated by taking (Expired Subscribers - Resubscribers) / Active Subscribers.
The higher your subscriber churn, the more work you need to do to gain new subscribers.
App User Churn
App User Churn is the percentage of users who uninstall or stop engage with your app over time. It is calculated by taking 1 - (Non new users this period / Total users last period).
App User Churn is the same as abandonment rate and can show you when users begin dropping off. Using this data, you can optimize your funnel at key drop off points or times to engage users and decrease churn.
MRR Movement
MRR Movement shows a visual of your net MRR and helps tell you if your MRR is increasing or decreasing overall. It is calculated by taking New MRR (from new subscribers being added) and charting against Churned MRR (from subscribers who expired all their subscriptions).
Some systems will also track Expanded MRR (from product SKU upgrades or price increases), Contracted MRR (from product SKU downgrades) and Reactivated MRR (from a former customer who resubscribed) as well.
The Net of New MRR - Churned MRR is a visual of how much your MRR is growing and should be tracked carefully to understand how healthy your subscription business is. If it is negative, your business is shrinking.
Sample MRR Movement chart
Revenue Churn
Revenue Churn tells you the rate at which you lost Revenue during the previous time period. It is calculated by 1 - (Non-new Revenue from current period / Revenue from previous period).
Sample Revenue Churn metric
MRR Churn
MRR Churn tells you the rate at which you lost recurring revenue. It is calculated by taking the MRR lost to downgrades & cancellations / MRR at start of period.
High MRR churn means that high value subscribers are leaving at a high rate. An ideal MRR Churn rate is negative, meaning you are gaining more subscribers than you are losing.
MRR Churn should be tracked with MRR Movement to give you a view into the future.
LTV
Lifetime Value (or LTV) is a measure of how much revenue you can expect to make from an average user throughout their lifecycle. LTV is critical to understanding how much you can invest in customer acquisition. If your LTV outweighs CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), your business might be in trouble.
Subscriber LTV
Subscriber LTV focuses on the total recurring revenue from a subscriber throughout their subscription lifecycle. It is calculated by taking Average MRR per Subscriber and dividing by Subscriber Churn.
This metric is a key to track for your subscription app analytics. It only looks at subscription users and recurring revenue. If a subscription user purchased a one-time product, this wouldn’t be included in their LTV.
App User LTV
App User LTV takes the total bucket of App Users and measures their Lifetime Value. This metric includes all purchases, recurring and one-time, and all users. As a result, it will be much lower than Subscriber LTV.
It is calculated by taking (Total Revenue / Active Users) and multiplying by App User Churn.
User Retention
Retention is the opposite of Churn. Retention helps to show you the average tenure of your customers and can expose where drop-off is happening in the funnel or which segments of customers are most likely to drop-off.
Subscriber Retention
For Subscriber Retention, calculate cohorts of new subscribers for each month in a period in the past. Then for each of these new subscriber cohorts, look 1+ months ahead and sum up all the subscribers that renewed during that next month.
Average Subscriber Retention is the average number of subscribers in a cohort divided by the average number that renewed.
Sample Average Subscriber Retention Rate chartSample Subscriber Retention Cohort chart
Final Thoughts on Subscription App Analytics
For app developers and publishers, subscription app analytics are extremely important to measure the health and growth of your app business. The 19 metrics described are key to keeping a pulse on your app audience and mobile revenue.
At Nami, we are constantly growing our product with reporting for these key analytics. Check back for more content on subscription app analytics and join our newsletter to hear about the latest product updates.
Promotional In-App Purchases are a great way to showcase your in-app purchases on the App Store and invite users to purchase before even downloading the app. Here are 5 best practices for setting them up in App Store Connect.
Provide Friendly Name and Description in Metadata
Each promotional in-app purchase has a name and description.
The name should be different from your app’s name and describe the purchase in some human-readable way. In other words, don’t give it a name of promo_1_month. For the description, provide up to 45 characters of details about what the purchase unlocks. Try to avoid generic terms like ‘Unlock all access.’ That doesn’t help your customer understand the benefits of what they are buying!
Design a new Image for your Promotional In-App Purchase
Your promotional IAP should use a different image than your app logo. This is because in search results, Today, Games, and Apps tabs, your promo IAP will display with your app logo next to it. So make sure your logo isn’t repeated! Design a promo image with similar elements to your logo without completely copying it.
Promotional IAP from The Weather Channel app
Choose the Right Size and Layout for your Image
Apple has a particular size and layout for the promotional in-app purchase images. Their guidelines recommend a 1024 x 1024px image, either in .png or .jpeg format.
Apple also places the image in a frame. Make sure your image has plenty of padding on all sides, especially the bottom left where the app icon is inset.
To test your image, you can upload into App Store Connect for a live preview.
Testing an in-app promotional image live in App Store Connect
Use Consistent Branding for Your Promotional In-app Purchase Images
Your app has a brand and a style. Use these guidelines when designing your IAP images.
Gentler Streak uses their mascot in their promotional images. In the monthly image, the mascot is standing. In the yearly image, the mascot is moving. This cute detail helps represent the benefits of purchasing the yearly plan.
Promotional images for Gentler Streak app
The CARROT weather app utilizes the lightning bolt from their icon to represent premium.
CARROT Weather app store page
Create an Image for Each Product
You might sell multiple products in app: monthly or yearly plans, purchase packs, or lifetime access. Creating unique images for each of these products will help sell the benefits.
Four promotional in-app purchases from SongShift
Final Thoughts
Setting up a Promotional In-App Purchase is an easy way to extend your app’s brand and show App Store browsers all the benefits your app has to offer, without requiring them to download the app. Following the few steps above can help you create the best promo IAP experience possible.
Team Nami has been hard at work with updates! Here are the latest additions to the platform which are now live:
Made improvements to subscription reporting on the Overview screen.
Launched the Android 2.0 SDK which is full of major improvements
Introduced a new Integrations section for managing Nami’s interface with third-party
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
📊 Subscriptions Report Card
We all want to know how many active subscriptions we have but that only tells a part of the story. Your subscriber base can be segmented across a number of dimensions to tell a more complete story.
That’s why we’ve rolled out a new Subscriptions Report Card that gives you a real-time report of the number of subscriptions with the following context:
Total Subscriptions
Active Paid Subscriptions
Subscriptions in Free Trial
Subscriptions in Intro Pricing
Paused Subscriptions
Subscriptions in Grace Period
Subscriptions in Account Hold
Subscriptions not renewing
With Subscriptions Report Card, get insight into your app's subscription journey states available on the Overview screen. To learn more, visit the docs.
🤖 Android 2.0
The latest Android release is full of features!
Nami's entitlement engine is now improved to handle subscription upgrades and downgrades
Options to sell new in-app purchases with lifetime one-time purchases and consumables
Localize your paywalls to sell your app in multiple languages
Improved TalkBack support for accessibility text to speech on our no-code paywalls
Learn more about the Nami Android 2.0 SDK, head over to the ChangeLog.
🔗 Integrations Screen
Connect Nami to your App Store or Google Play account plus other tools using our new Integrations screen.
Sync Nami subscriber data with 3rd party platforms such as mParticle, Wicket Labs, and Zendesk (coming soon). Importantly, you can also now setup and consume Nami context on your own backup by consuming our webhooks.
We’ve studied hundreds of top apps and discovered similarities in the way their paywalls are designed. Here are 20 paywall examples with design patterns that you can test to help improve your conversion rate.
Featured Product Badge
Guide your users towards purchasing a particular SKU with this simple design pattern. Include a small tag or badge on top of or next to the product with text calling out why the user should buy this option.
Videoleap
The Videoleap app includes a small badge showing the savings if you purchase an Annual Subscription.
Videoleap Editor by Lightricks
Wattpad
The Wattpad reading app uses a small ‘Best Value’ badge. Strategic use of their brand color helps to draw the eye towards the Annual Subscription.
Mobile app users love to swipe through images. Capitalize on this by including a simple carousel with images of your subscription experience. You can even mix images and text or app reviews in a carousel.
Zombies, Run!
This running app includes a fun carousel of illustrations.
Zombies, Run!
Citizen
The Citizen app smoothly embeds a carousel of text and images with real examples of features you will unlock.
When thinking of paywall design elements, you don’t need to limit yourself to just static text and images! Video can be incredibly effective at representing the value proposition of your app, especially if your app is in the Photo & Video category.
Teleprompter
This video teleprompter app includes a tiny embedded video thumbnail. This helps demonstrate the Premium experience without being too distracting.
Teleprompter by Bigvu
VSCO
This popular video editing app not only embeds video in their paywall, but embeds it in a carousel to really show off all the features of their app.
Using a Tiered Plan can be very effective when building a dedicated user base. Introduce users to the app with the ‘basic’ tier plan, and then promote the ‘premium’ plan to engaged users.
Paramount+
The Paramount+ streaming app shows side-by-side plan options. Clicking each plan shows pricing and the list of benefits.
Paramount+
The Washington Post
Washington Post’s paywall includes 2 tiers of plan. A simple checklist shows you the difference in the 2 plans.
Product Buttons are often displayed in a vertical list, stacked on top of each other. But a horizontal product list is one of the most popular paywall design patterns because it encourages users to compare offers.
Wondery
This popular Amazon-owned podcast app features 2 product options with extra badges on the annual product to encourage purchasing.
Wondery - Premium Podcast App
Kahoot!
The Kahoot! education app has a simple paywall with 2 horizontal buttons.
Nami is ending the year strong! We've released some great new security features including:
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Enterprise organizational policies
🔑 2FA
Nami takes security very seriously, and we are proud to now be able to offer another layer of protection to your account through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
If you setup 2FA, logging into your Nami account will require a code from your authenticator app as well as your username and password.
Enterprises now have even more control over the safety of their Nami organization and the security of their team members with our configurable organization security policies.
Enterprise admins can configure these policies:
Expire Passwords
Lock Account After Failed Login Attempts
Disable Inactive Team Members
Control Center Session Lengths
These features are only available to users on our Enterprise plan. Contact us to setup a demo or upgrade your plan.
Have you ever wondered which mobile app platform you should develop for first? iOS or Android? That question is integral to your mobile application strategy. But it has a lot of variables that should be considered. Let’s have a look at what those variables are and what they mean.
iOS or Android Market Share
One of the most basic variables in the iOS or Android equation is general market share - how many mobile devices exist worldwide and how are they broken down by platform?
As of September 2021, Android holds the global market share, with 72.44% of devices. But there is a lot of variance by region of the world.
In the United States, iOS holds the market at 57.08% of devices, but in the United Kingdom, their hold is less secure, at only 51.62%.
When considering the platform for your new app, knowing the geographic region of your user base is extremely important. Otherwise you risk losing out on large groups of customers. For example, launching a new app on iOS only in India in 2021 probably wouldn’t be a good idea, as Android holds 95.79% of market share in that country.
No matter what markets you serve, don’t forget to tailor your app store’s page and paywall to users in that region.
Doing user research can be extremely valuable to determine if your app audience leans towards 1 platform or another. One simple way to do this is to set up a pre-launch website where users can sign up for launch updates. Include separate forms for iOS and Android and see how many users sign up for updates on each platform.
Unsurprisingly, even the way that your app generates revenue differs by platform. iOS users are typically more engaged with their apps, and are more willing to pay for a subscription. (The top 100 subscription apps on the App Store in 2020 made 3.8x as much revenue as the top 100 subscription apps on the Google Play Store.) An Android app will typically reach a wider audience, but a less engaged one that isn’t as tolerant of a subscription model. Instead they prefer free apps with ads.
Your platform choice then, also should be determined by your planned revenue model. If you plan on building a loyal subscriber base then iOS would be a good choice. But a monetization strategy based on ads only should start on Android. Our opinion on good practice: if a user has paid for a subscription, they expect not to see ads anymore. Try to keep these revenue models separate.
What about one-time in-app purchases? These have proven effective across both platforms, especially in the gaming industry. Try introducing one-time purchases of things like coins and skins on top of your ads on Android to capture more revenue at strategic times.
No matter how you decide to implement your revenue model, Nami can help. Setup subscriptions in minutes or implement one-time purchases with ease, or do both!
If you have to choose one mobile app platform to develop for, answering basic questions about your market, user types, and revenue model will help you determine whether to choose Android or iOS as your first app platform.
When it’s time to setup your app subscriptions or purchases, Nami is supported on native iOS and Android and can be implemented in minutes. Developing on a cross-platform framework? Nami also supports React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin.
Still not sure what platform to choose? Struggling to find a good app developer or dev shop? Confused about potential app revenue models? Book some time on our calendar.
