What you measure, improves

Whether it’s weight loss or a campaign at work, you need to measure to improve. I’ll share two examples, one from work and another about my personal life where measuring helped me improve.

Fitness

I joined a gym 6 months ago. My trainer did the assessment and told I had about 18% body fat. I’m lean, and even though it’s a decent number, I thought I can do better. I worked hard, was very strict with my diet and kept measuring the same metric every month.

In two months, it came down to 16, and now it’s at 13.6%. My goal is to get it below 10. I never cared much about the body fat percentage before. But, things changed for better after I started measuring it.

App Store Optimization

App Units to App Store Views ratio tells you how many people installed your app, after viewing your app listing. If 3 out of 10 people who view your app listing install your app, the ratio will be 0.3.

This metric was unknown to developers till Apple launched App Analytics in 2015. Almost instantly, I became obsessed with it. You can improve the downloads without having to be in front of more people. An optimization that can make any marketer’s job easy.

What will be the user experience if they

• Find us on the App Store through search
• Land on the listing through a referral link

We came up with several use cases and optimized our title, screenshots, app previews and description. We thought about the metric even while designing the ad campaigns outside the store. We measured it after every experiment and successfully managed to improve the App Units to App Store Views ratio from 0.29 to 0.52, and hence the downloads.

Our approach changed after we started measuring. The numbers went up.

What you measure, improves. With a lot of metrics that float around, we should be careful in picking the right ones to measure. Growth will follow.