Why Is Your App or Website's User Retention So Low?
With consumer app spending swelling from $40B to $86B since 2015, it’s no wonder that thousands of businesses release their own each year. But with millions of apps available on Google Play and the App Store, yours faces serious competition.
“Anyone can dream up great ideas, but an idea is nothing until it’s realized, be it as a website, a physical product, an app, or a user interface.”
— Jens Martin Skibsted
And if it fails to gain the traction you hoped for, you may feel like you’ve let yourself and your team down — without really knowing why. Rest assured, though: You’re not alone. Research shows that the average app loses 77% of users within three days of installation.
When your user retention suffers, you need to take a step back and review your product to determine its biggest problems.
Let’s think about what they could be.
1. Too Many Ads
Ads are a necessary evil in the digital age. Websites and apps of all scales rely on them to generate revenue, especially when offering free content on a daily basis.
But let’s be honest: There’s a fine line between a healthy amount of ads and bombarding your users to the point where they simply won’t stand for any more. 91% of people feel that ads are more intrusive today than they were two or three years ago, yet 83% agree that they only want to filter the “really obnoxious” ads out.
Too many ads cause users to install tools that block all ads equally (good and bad), and driving them to such tactics costs yourself ad revenue in the long run. And that’s a big problem.
Ads that bring the user’s experience to a halt are especially offensive. Good apps or websites should cultivate a steady, smooth flow from one page to the next on the way to a conversion. Breaking this journey for the sake of imposing ads is taking a major gamble with your user’s tolerance.
2. Pages Load Too Slowly
How many times have you clicked away from a site or abandoned a purchase altogether because a page simply refused to load?
Chances are, we’ve all known the frustration of slow load times. The problem is more common on smartphones, with websites that haven’t been optimized for mobile devices and are trying to cram too much onto small screens.
So, how much time do you have to present a page? Sadly, not long at all: 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
That doesn’t leave you much time to display your content and create a satisfying user experience, but that’s the reality of modern tech. Users’ patience is only going to decline more and more as smartphones evolve.
Pages must load quickly enough to fit within this timeframe and give users the content they expect to see. Half-formed images or videos that pause to buffer every other second are just two hallmarks of an app or website in need of tighter optimization.