How do you find your most active users and keep them engaged?
Lowdown is a weekly series that brings you tips and tricks on how to best use AdMob to grow your app business, directly from members of the Google AdMob team.
Paul Buchheit, the Googler behind Gmail and now partner at Y Combinator, is famous for emphasizing that, “It’s better to make something a small number of people love, than something a large number of people don’t care about.” This is absolutely true for your app business. Scaling something mediocre isn’t going to fare well for your business in the long run. Its crucial not to settle for exclusively measuring fluffy metrics like overall downloads or general traffic. You’ve got to dig deeper to find out who’s using your app the most, what they love about it, and eventually double down on what’s working well. We’d like to introduce you to two key reports from Google Mobile App Analytics that will help you to do just that.
Loyalty Report within Google Analytics
The Loyalty Report within Google Analytics shows you the number of sessions for the nth occurrence in your app. You’ll see the number of “1st interactions” with your app, then the number of “2nd interactions”, then the number of “3rd interactions”, and so on.
This report can help you determine at what point in your app users drop off. For example, your Loyalty Report may show you that users with fewer than three sessions have lower conversion rates.
With this information, there are many tests that you can run. You could go through the app yourself to see if there’s anything within the user experience that hinders engagement past 3 sessions. You could segment the users that drop off before 3 sessions and investigate whether they share any common attributes–maybe they came from a marketing campaign that’s bringing in the wrong audience or there could be a language difference. You could even try to use advertising to motivate users early with incentives.
By clearly recognizing the engagement drop off point in your app, you can begin to take methodical action towards increasing engagement. Check out the help desk for more detailed information.
Recency Report within Google Analytics
The Recency Report within Google Analytics shows how much time passed between app sessions. This provides a great way to segment users based on frequency of engagement, and enables you to know who uses your app once a month, or once a week, or even once a day. With this information you can begin to target new customers that are similar to your most engaged segment. You could also try using notifications or advertising to bring less engaged users back more frequently.
It's critical for your app's growth to have a disciplined and metrics driven approach to understand who uses your app. AdMob has Google Mobile App Analytics built right in, making it easier to discover trends and take action that will directly tie to revenue. Visit our website to learn more about how AdMob can help you understand your users. Until next time, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter page.
