When thinking about growth for your app one of the most important
things is the key flows that you know your users are going to go through.
Most people who download your app are not going to come back later.
So you really need to get them to the wow moment at the beginning
as soon as possible with your product.
So make them see what the value is so that they will come back again.
One of the most important things in A/B testing is also the creative side.
So whilst the process itself is scientific,
and you want to use math and data to get to the right decision,
knowing what you can do to move the metrics that you want to do
is very much the creative part that goes at the beginning.
And without that, then you can't do all of the testing that comes afterwards.
If your user is waiting just few hundred milliseconds more,
they will use your app less.
It's really important to be creative.
For instance, if your app aBARKment, you wanted more people to be able to post
an ad, there are an infinite number of ways that you can go about it.
For instance, you might want a permanent entry point on at the same point in
every single screen in the app to make sure that people always knew that they
could post an ad and they always knew where they wanted to go to do it.
One of the most important things that any marketer needs to think about with
their Apple product is retention.
So, it's hard to get people to try out your app for the first time.
And if you're losing users from your app,
that can make all of your work that much harder.
It's like having a bucket with holes in it.
If you're pouring water into the top,
your bucket's not going to get full if you have that many holes.
So you concentrate on filling those holes, increasing user retention, and
then you can get more users in.
When you're trying to measure retention,
if you're storing your own data, you need to make sure that you store when
was the first time that you saw this user.
So what was the date when they first turned up?
Then you can do what's called cohort analysis.
And this is just a way of saying for everyone who installed on a single day,
after that, what was the likelihood that they came back on any other given day?
Another thing that app marketers should really care about
is the number of people who are actively using your product.
Too many marketers focus on just the top of the funnel and
getting the number of downloads up and the number of new users in, but if
they're not actively using the product, then they're not doing you any good.
So one that Facebook uses is monthly active users and that's just the number
of people who have opened and used your app in the last 30 days.
When you're looking at new user acquisition, one of the most important
things is the different sources that are providing you with new users.
So, for instance,
there's organic downloads where people are coming direct from the App Store.
Maybe they're searching for a specific term.
Maybe they're just browsing.
Other ones include pay channels.
Facebook, for instance, does mobile app install ads.
If you go with paid media,
you'll usually get a lot of stats from the actual tool itself.
So inside of Facebook, if you pay for ads,
we'll give you really important key of metrics, like the reach and
number of impressions that your ads are delivering, as well as the number of
installs that you're getting that's attributed to that campaign, and
really key metrics like the cost that you're paying for each install.
For user engagement, there's lots of different ways that you can look at it.
The specifics will depend on what your app is and
which market segment you're in.
The number of times that a user comes back inside of a month.
The daily active to monthly active ratio is a good measure of engagement.
And also the number of things that they do inside of the app.
If you're looking at a shopping app, for
instance, the number of items that they view might be a good metric for
engagement, the specifics all the way down to the app itself.
One of the most important things that you can do for growth
is get people through the new user experience as quickly as possible and
into the real wow moment of your product.
So what is it that really is going to capture the user's attention?
What is it about your product that makes it successful?
If you have a long sign up flow, you're going to reduce the number of people
getting through, and that's not what you want.
Facebook puts a lot of effort into its new user registration flow.
So when you go to sign up for Facebook, we ask you for
as few pieces of information as we can so that we can get you to the real point
of the product and that's seeing all of the status updates and photos and
things that your friends are posting in your news feed.
>> The most high level metrics for
paid social are going to be CPC, which is cost per click.
That's the usual term that ad industry uses for engagement on your ads.
And what that means is every click is going to cost
you a specific amount of money.
It's also important to take into consideration when you're thinking
about cost per click and how much you're going to spend for
a click potentially to your product or website, but
think about the lifetime value or LTV of that particular customer.
So how much will they potentially spend long term
if you're able to acquire them with one simple ad?
Certain platforms like Twitter use CPE which is cost per engagement.
That could be anything that a user engages with in one of your paid ads.
That could be a favorite,
a retweet, or a direct click through to your product or website.
Also, just for good measure, it's good to do some basic research on
industry standards and industry baselines for how well ads perform.
So, for example, if you are developing a fitness app,
do some research on how fitness industry ads perform on Twitter.
And if you're getting a return or an engagement of, let's say, 1% on your
ads, you know that you can compare that to whatever the industry average is.
There's no perfect way to find industry averages or
how well relative industries perform on specific social platforms.
I'll just say do some Googling, do some searching, do some research.
You're going to find really helpful free resources out there and you can at
least find some baselines to go up and measure your performance against.
Thinking about a small brand or a small startup,
it's really important to embrace grassroots tactics.
Think constant engagement, think things like giveaways and
contests, anything that can move the needle in the right direction and
help build your social media follower base.
It's also important to consider things like user generated content.
Getting great content from your users, quotes, anything tactical like that can
really pay off and help engage with your customer base.