Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, proposed using management to promote corporate growth. He once said a very classic quote: “If you can’t measure, you can’t grow effectively.”

Similarly, in order to measure the promotion effect and user stickiness of an app, scientific data statistics and analysis are particularly important, and openinstall, as a professional omnichannel data statistics tool, can provide strong support for app operation.

What are app statistics?

App statistics refer to the collection and analysis of various data related to user behavior during app usage to understand user behavior, evaluate operational effectiveness, and optimize product experience. This data can help us answer questions such as:

• How many new users have downloaded and used the app?
• Which features are most popular with users?
• Which aspects are most likely to cause user churn?
• Which promotional channels bring in higher quality users?
• For metrics used to assess marketing effectiveness: Daily new users
• For user engagement and value metrics: Activity rate
• For user health analytics, the following metric is used: retention rate.
• 

1. Daily new users: the lifeblood of the fishpond

This is the number of users who use the app for the first time each day, representing growth momentum. Without a continuous influx of new users, the user pool will gradually dry up, and it directly reflects the effectiveness of marketing promotion.

The key lies in channel analysis. The number of new users brought by different promotion channels (such as social media advertising, KOL collaborations, on-the-ground promotions, and user sharing) varies greatly.

Enabled by openinstall:

Precise channel attribution: Completely solving the problem of “where do users come from?”. Whether it’s online ad clicks, offline poster QR code scans, social media sharing links, or on-the-ground promotion QR codes,

Openinstall can accurately track and attribute the installation source, generating detailed channel statistics reports.
Evaluate channel ROI: Clearly demonstrate the number and quality of customers acquired through each channel (which can be combined with subsequent retention analysis) to ensure that every penny of the marketing budget is spent effectively, eliminate inefficient channels, and optimize resource allocation.

Cross-platform attribution: Seamlessly connects data from different promotional platforms, avoiding data conflicts or “black holes” between channels, and providing a unified and accurate view of user origins.

2. Activity rate: an indicator of the vitality of a fishpond.

It reflects the user stickiness and daily value of the product. A high activity rate means that users have formed habits and the product has vitality. The number of active users needs to be deduplicated (the same user is counted as one person if they are active multiple times).

Enabled by openinstall:

Enhance the first-time user experience for new users: Through deep linking and scene restoration technology, after users click on the promotional link to install and open the App, they are directly redirected to a preset personalized page (such as an event page, product page, or specific content page), which greatly shortens the conversion path and increases the willingness and activity of new users to use the App for the first time.

The foundation of refined user activation strategies: openinstall provides relevant indicators such as activity trends, growth trends, and existing user trends. Combined with user behavior analysis, it can reflect the effectiveness of differentiated user activation strategies designed for different channels (such as pushing specific offers and content recommendations). All indicators and reports provide “duplicate removal” functions and flexible filtering capabilities, which can efficiently assist in refined operations.

3. Retention rate: A key metric for user engagement and user health.

The percentage of new users on day 1 who continue using the product on day N (e.g., day 2, day 7, day 30) reflects the product’s ability to retain users and its long-term value. Low retention means users are churning quickly, and the reasons need to be investigated. Facebook’s 40-20-10 rule (40% on day 2, 20% on day 7, and 10% on day 30) can be used as a reference.

Enabled by openinstall:

Precise Channel Quality Assessment: Combining retention rate data, openinstall’s channel reports clearly demonstrate the medium- to long-term retention performance of users from different sources. It identifies which channels bring in “active fish” (high-retention users) and which are “passersby” (low-retention users), thereby optimizing channel strategies and focusing on acquiring high-quality users.

Optimize the user onboarding process: By achieving precise and direct access through scenario recreation, new users are provided with highly relevant content or functions, meeting their expectations for their first visit and effectively improving day 2 retention and day 7 retention.  

Rethinking the Fishpond Model: Daily new users are like bringing water into the canal (open source), activity rate is like observing the vitality of the fish population (promoting activity), and retention rate is like ensuring the water source doesn’t dry up (preventing loss). These three are interconnected and together form the core closed loop of user growth.

 The core value of openinstall: In the lifecycle of app growth, openinstall acts like a precise “water quality monitor.” It solves the key pain points of accurate user source tracking and contextualized integration, providing a solid data foundation and powerful technical means for the analysis and optimization of the three core indicators of new users, active users, and retention, making growth decisions more targeted.

Measurement is the starting point for growth, and accuracy is the key to efficiency. By mastering the three major life indicators of an app—daily new users, active users, and retention rate—and by leveraging openinstall to achieve zero-error channel attribution and seamless user scenario replication, developers can truly understand the growth trajectory and transform user data into sustainable product vitality and market competitiveness.