Hey there, if you’ve ever scrolled through a app that crashes every time you open it mid-task or a website that takes forever to load on your phone, you know a digital product’s success isn’t just about looking pretty. As someone who’s spent the last 7 years building custom digital products for small businesses and mid-sized brands (I’m one of the partners at this shop, so I’m deep in the weeds on this stuff daily), I’ve seen way too many teams get hyped on shiny features and forget the metrics that actually make a digital product worth using—for both the people interacting with it and the folks footing the bill. Let’s cut the fluff: here are the actual key metrics we live by when we build, tweak, and launch products, plus how they tie to your bottom line. Digital Product
First up, let’s talk about the user experience core: engagement and retention. I get it, every product team brags about “daily active users” (DAU) or “monthly active users” (MAU) like it’s a gold star—but those numbers mean nothing if people check in once and dip. A year back, we built a loyalty app for a local coffee chain, and their first report had a super high MAU: like 42% of their regulars were on it. But when we dug deeper into session duration? The average user spent 12 seconds in the app. Turned out the team added a bunch of random games that no one cared about, so people were just opening the app, grabbing their reward points, and closing it immediately. We cut the fluff, focused on one-tap point redemptions, and pushed personalized “reminder for your usual order” alerts—bam, session duration jumped to 2 minutes, and their 7-day retention (people who came back a week later) went from 18% to 35%. That’s way more valuable than a vanity MAU number. We also track something called “active days per user” for our product clients, because that tells you if your product is becoming a habit. If your average active days are 2 out of 30, you’ve got a problem, not a product. And don’t sleep on in-app actions—like, how many people actually use the checkout button or save a favorite item? We once had a fitness app where 60% of users added a workout to their calendar but only 5% actually logged it, so we moved the “log workout” button to the home screen and saw that number jump to 30%. Small, intentional actions beat big, empty metrics every time.
Next, let’s get to the stuff that matters to your wallet: conversion and monetization. This is where a lot of our clients overcomplicate things. They fixate on “conversion rate” (how many visitors turn into paying customers) but forget to look at where those conversions are dropping off. Take our recent e-commerce product for a sustainable apparel brand—their initial conversion rate was 2.1%, which they thought was good, but when we pulled the funnel data, 45% of people left at the shipping page. Turns out they had three shipping options with super vague timelines, so we simplified it to two: standard (5-7 days) and express (2 days) with clear pricing, and added a free shipping threshold that was $10 lower. Their conversion rate jumped to 3.8% in a month, and their cart abandonment rate dropped from 68% to 52%. Cart abandonment is a huge one—we always build tools to track why people leave: is it hidden fees, complicated checkout, or just not ready to buy? For subscription products, we track churn rate way more than new sign-ups. Churn is the percentage of users who cancel in a given period, and it’s the silent killer. If your churn is 5% a month, that means you lose 60% of your users a year—no amount of new sign-ups will fix that. We recently helped a meal kit service cut their churn from 8% to 4.5% by adding a “skip week” button (no hoops to jump through) and sending a quick survey when someone cancels. That small change kept $200k in recurring revenue for them last year alone. Also, lifetime value (LTV) is non-negotiable. LTV is how much money a user spends with you over their entire relationship, and when you pair that with customer acquisition cost (CAC—what you spend to get a new user), you want that ratio to be at least 3:1. If it’s lower than that, you’re losing money on every customer, no matter how many you get. We work with clients to optimize their onboarding to boost LTV—like, for a skincare brand, we added a 7-day personalized routine to their app, so users who complete the routine spend 2x more than those who don’t. That’s not a random feature—that’s a metric-driven play.
Then there’s technical performance, which is the thing that makes or breaks a product behind the scenes. I can’t tell you how many times a client will show me a new app they launched that has 10k downloads, but when I test it, it takes 8 seconds to load on a mid-tier phone. Page load time or app load time is a big one—Google’s own data says that 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. We had a client with a wedding planning app that was losing 60% of users because images were compressed so poorly they took forever to show up. We optimized the images (without losing quality) and cut the load time from 7 seconds to 2.5, and their user retention in the first week jumped by 22%. We also track error rates—crash-free users rate. If your app has a 5% crash rate, that means 1 in 20 people are using it and having it die on them, which is a terrible experience. We fix bugs in real-time, but we also track things like API latency (how long it takes the app to talk to the server) and uptime. Uptime should be 99.9% minimum—any downtime is lost money. For a ticketing app we built for a local concert venue, a 2-hour downtime during a pre-sale cost them $15k in lost ticket sales. That’s the kind of thing you can’t afford to ignore, so technical metrics aren’t just “tech stuff”—they’re business metrics. Oh, and accessibility! Wait, I know that’s not a “traditional” metric, but it’s non-negotiable. We follow WCAG guidelines, and track things like screen reader compatibility and color contrast. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it opens your product up to 1 in 6 people with disabilities—our café client saw a 10% jump in users with visual impairments after fixing contrast issues, and that’s a whole new customer base they were missing.
Another key one: user feedback and satisfaction, because numbers don’t tell the whole story. We use NPS (Net Promoter Score) — that’s the “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?” question, scored from 0-10. A good NPS is usually above 30, but some of our best clients are at 60+ because their product feels like it’s made for them. But we don’t stop at NPS—we do in-app surveys, Slack polls (if it’s a SaaS product), and even one-on-one user interviews. A few months back, we built a project management tool for a small design agency, and their NPS was 28, which is okay, but when we interviewed users, everyone said they hated the calendar view. We changed it to a drag-and-drop calendar that syncs with Google, and their NPS jumped to 58 in 2 months. We also track support tickets—how many are there, what kind, how fast we resolve them. If 30% of support tickets are about the same feature, that feature is broken or confusing. We had a SaaS client where 40% of tickets were about invoicing, so we simplified the invoicing workflow and added templates, and support tickets about that dropped by 75%. That’s not just less work for your team—it’s a better experience for your users.
Wait, let’s talk about how these metrics work together, because none of them exist in a vacuum. You can’t have high engagement if your technical performance is garbage. You can’t have high conversion if your LTV is low. A lot of teams get obsessed with one metric and ignore the rest. For example, a social media client we worked with had a super high DAU, but their churn was also through the roof, and their conversion for their premium feature was terrible—turns out DAU was driven by a viral challenge that no one cared about long-term, so they had to rebuild their feature set to match actual user needs instead of chasing vanity numbers.
So why does this matter for you, as someone looking to build or improve a digital product? Because we build products that are built on these metrics, not just pretty interfaces. Every feature we add, every tweak we make, every bug we fix ties back to one of these metrics, so you’re not wasting money on things that don’t move the needle. Whether you’re a small business looking for a custom app, a mid-sized brand wanting to optimize your website, or a SaaS company trying to cut churn, these metrics are the roadmap.
Digital Product If you’re ready to stop guessing about your digital product’s success and start using real data to make it work for your business, let’s chat. We can walk through your current metrics, figure out where the gaps are, and build a plan that fits your needs and budget. No jargon, no pressure, just straight talk about making your digital product actually deliver results.
References
- Nielsen Norman Group. UX Metrics: A Guide to Measuring and Improving User Experience. 2023.
- McKinsey & Company. Digital Product Success: Key Metrics That Drive Growth. 2022.
- Google. Core Web Vitals: Essential Metrics for a Healthy Website. 2024.
- Bain & Company. Net Promoter Score®: A Practical Guide. 2023.
- SaaSBOOMi. Churn Rate and LTV:CAC Ratio: Critical SaaS Metrics. 2023.
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