Early mobile app has highest user retention

SINGAPORE — Liftoff, the leader in performance-driven mobile user acquisition, on Thursday released its annual Mobile App Trends Report, which found that Asia is home to some of the highest-performing countries in terms of Day 1 mobile app user retention, although loyalty to the apps generally tends to drop off after 30 days.

Based on Liftoff’s internal data, the report analyzed over 349 billion impressions across 992 mobile apps, 5.35 billion clicks and 76.6 million total post-install events. Spanning a variety of app categories, including those in finance, entertainment, lifestyle, music and audio, education, gaming, shopping, social media and more. The report covered 30 countries in four regions; including 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam). The report found the following:

The mobile app user retention rate measures the percentage of consumers that continue to use an app over a given period of time. In Asia — where the average Day 1 retention rate was recorded at 25.2 percent, Taiwan (at 29.5 percent) outperformed the region’s average retention rate, followed by Malaysia (29.1 percent), Japan (28.4 percent) and Thailand (27 percent).

Despite the high figures recorded for first day retention, the figure was shown to drop off considerably after a month. This is as the Day 3 retention rate stood only at 12.6 percent in Asia — the lowest across all regions – while Day 7 retention rates dropped to 8.1 percent (lower than the 8.9 percent and 8.5 percent in the North America and EMEA regions respectively, but still higher than the 7.9 percent in Latin America). By Day 30, Asia’s retention rate stood at 3.1 percent; lower than the 3.5 percent seen both in the EMEA and North America regions, however still higher than the 2.8 percent in Latin America.

A key factor explaining the high early retention rates in Asia is the relatively low cost to engagement ratio for users to install an app which, at $1.11 cost for 100 percent engagement, signifies one of the lowest ratios amongst all the regions.