Recommended Metrics for E-Commerce Apps

Customer Acquisition Cost can be defined as the amount that it costs to acquire a user to your paid service.

This is calculated by dividing the total marketing campaign costs related to acquisition by the total customers acquired.

For example, if you paid $1000 in marketing and you gathered 100 customers, your CAC is $10.

This is important as it lets you gauge your performance and return on investment in previous, on-going and upcoming marketing campaigns.

Average Revenue per User can be defined as the average amount of revenue that a customer brings to your platform via paid downloads, In-App Purchases and/or Subscriptions.

It is useful as it lets you know how much you can expect to bring in for when acquiring new customers.

Share of Paying Users can be defined as the percentage of users that pay for an In-App Purchase or Subscriptions.

This is a valuable metric as it lets you measure your monetization model.

Purchase Frequency can be defined as the average number of purchases a consumer makes during a period of time.

This metric is useful to measure customer loyalty, and can allow you to target similar customers through marketing and remarking campaigns. You could also use this metric to give these customers special offers to reward them for their loyalty and on-going investment in your app.

Return on Ad Spend can be defined as how much money you get from customers compared to how much you spent on marketing.

It can be calculated by dividing the total amount spent on marketing by the revenue generated from customers during the marketing period.

This metric is important as it measures profitability and marketing performance.

Read our business guide to get our latest market and customer research, perspective and recommendations on building Apple e-commerce apps that use In-App Purchases and Subscriptions.