Advancements in technology have opened new avenues through which businesses are able to interact with their customers and initiate transactions. Gone are the days when businesses spent long periods of time and significant amounts of money developing applications.
Today, all businesses need to do is to come up with the functionalities that they need then leave the rest to software developers. The developers are able to use technologies such as APIs that allow them to customize code instead of writing it from scratch.
However, even though you might get an application matching your requirements within a short period of time, it does not mean that all is well and you are ready to go. You need to test and monitor the application to make sure that it meets its requirements.
When monitoring the application and measuring its performance, there are certain key metrics that you need to pay attention to. What are these metrics? Before going into the metrics, you need to differentiate between monitoring and observability.
Observability Vs Monitoring
Most businesses find it difficult to understand the difference between observability and monitoring. This is one of the reasons why their applications fail to meet their requirements.
While observability is a solution designed to allow software developers to debug their applications actively while at the same time exploring new patterns and properties, monitoring is a solution designed for developers to understand and watch the state and performance of their applications.
Metrics to Watch
Load Speed
This is one of the things that can help you retain customers or push them away. You need to understand that application users will not be patient with you every day.
Most application users will use a slow application the first day, maybe thinking that it is because it is their first time. But this will change when they come back and realize the application is still slow.
Crash Reports
Different devices come with different operating systems which can, sometimes, lead to application crashes. This doesn’t happen solely because of the operating system, it can also be caused by things such as user actions, and product complexities.
No matter the cause of the crashes, you need to keep an eye on the reports generated from a crash. This is because you need to understand when the application crashed, its cause, and how to resolve it. You do not want to lose potential customers due to application crashes.
User Sessions
A session can be defined as the time taken by a user to perform an action when using your application. Today, users are demanding a total application experience, and short session times would mean that your application has problems.
You need to pay attention to both the session depth and length. Session depth is used to measure the time taken before a user gets to their target action. Session length can be used to measure the level of engagement of the application.
Number of Screens Opened Per Visit
You need to measure the average number of screens your users open when visiting your application. The higher the number, the better the performance of the application.
This metric is important when measuring the ability of the application to engage your visitors as well as its user experience. A higher number of screens means that the application has an intuitive and user-friendly design.
Churn Rate
Churn rate is used to measure the number of users who install and use your application then stop using it after a short period of time.
You will have a low churn rate if your application’s performance meets the demands of its users. If it is high, then it means that you have problems such as application lags and crashes, lack of new content or updates, and problems with user experience.
Number of Active Users
Finally, you need to keep tabs on the active users that you have. These are users who are often launching and performing actions on the application.
You can get weekly and monthly active users and evaluate how these numbers change. If you have a growing number of active users every week or month, then your application is meeting its performance requirements.
The performance of your application is important when it comes to the success of your business. You need to make sure that it meets all the requirements of your users and encourages them to do business with you.