Been tracking NPS for our app for over a year now but starting to wonder if it’s actually moving the needle.
Seeing more teams shift to retention cohorts and LTV metrics instead. What’s everyone else prioritizing these days?
NPS is mostly vanity metrics. Track what people actually pay for.
NPS has one solid use case - catching issues before they tank your metrics.
Ran campaigns for an e-commerce app where NPS dropped 15 points over two months. Ignored it because revenue was still growing. Three months later our retention cratered and CAC went up 40%.
Turns out a product update broke the checkout flow for Android users. NPS survey comments caught it early but we were too focused on revenue numbers.
Now I check NPS monthly as an early warning system. But for actual optimization decisions, retention cohorts and LTV segments tell you where to spend your time and budget.
We still check NPS but focus way more on user actions now. Revenue per user matters more than scores.
NPS tells you how people feel, not what they actually do. I’ve seen apps with great NPS scores but terrible retention rates. Retention cohorts show you real behavior patterns. Day 1, 7, 30 retention numbers predict revenue way better than satisfaction surveys. Keep NPS if it takes five minutes to check monthly, but spend your time on cohort analysis and identifying what keeps users coming back.
NPS can still work if you tie it to actual business outcomes instead of just collecting scores.
I track which NPS segments convert to paid features and their churn rates. The promoters who actually spend money are different from the ones who just give high ratings.
Use NPS to find your real advocates, then figure out why they stick around and pay.