Behavioural analytics player Amplitude Analytics launched Compass, which helps app developers pinpoint specific user behaviour that drives long-term retention.

Compass enables developers to scan through data to assess trends most highly correlated with weekly or monthly retention, to make product improvements based on this.

The company believes user engagement and retention will be indispensable in “the economic landscape of 2016” and added that a 5 per cent increase in customer retention has shown to increase profit by anywhere between 25 and 95 per cent.

“There has been a significant shift from user acquisition to retaining and monetising users in both public IPOs and private marketings. Companies such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Dropbox, have seen a decline in tech valuations,” Amplitude said in a statement, adding that valuations are expected to decline even further.

According to CEO Spenser Skates, investors “want to see companies that can grow at a profit. And with user acquisition costs only getting higher, startups are starting to realise they need to place a premium on retaining their users”.

“We developed Compass to address this shift in focus and to help businesses, company-wide, identify specific behaviors that will help them drive long-term retention and profits,” he added.

The makers of trivia app QuizUp used Compass to discover that users of its social features within the first seven days of downloading were 60 per cent more likely to be long-term users. Using this information, Amplitude said QuizUp is improving its on-boarding process to drive retention even higher.

In its Q4 2015 results, Amplitude said it achieved 355 per cent year-over-year revenue growth and 300 per cent year-over-year increase in customer acquisition.

It also revealed it is tracking more than 1 billion user events per day on a billion mobile devices worldwide.