Author: Mark Boyd

Mark Boyd is a writer and API industry analyst, who writes regularly for ProgrammableWeb, and The New Stack. He has chaired several API conferences, and published a number of ebooks on the API lifecycle, best practices for API adoption, and API uptake in industry verticals.
As founder of the API-focused startup, Platformable, he regularly conducts industry research, supports API providers grow into platform businesses, and manages data-driven projects that draw on open data and proprietary sources.
With a public health and urban planning background, Mark is especially interested in how APIs can help local governments transform into a city-as-a-platform model.

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[Infographic] How to design a growth strategy for your app.

app growth strategy

Developers are makers. They solve pains, entertain, enlighten, and enhance productivity. Building an app can be an exhilarating experience and the joys of shipping can linger for… about ten seconds. Then comes the question: “I’ve built an app, now what?” Where do you start with your app growth strategy?

Building strategies for user acquisition and retention are the two major tasks for dev teams after they have built an app. Analytics helps understand exactly what is happening and how to keep building traction. From there, new possibilities can emerge that will help you grow your user community even stronger and help you identify novel ideas that may offer you a winning edge.

Check out our infographic based on our series of articles on User Acquisition , User Retention and Growth Analytics.

Built_an_app_Infographic (3)

Want more insights on app growth strategy?

Check out our State of the Developer Nation Reports, and make sure you understand Analytics for Growth.

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Business

You’ve Built an App: Now What? Part 3: Analytics for Growth

 

analytics_growth

Like many developer teams that have released an app, Ægir Thor Steinarsson and Anne-Marthe Lorck (creators of the BudUp app), are now working on the next two goals of app creation: user acquisition and retention.

Steinarsson said that right now, he is “laying the groundwork”: setting up databases and spreadsheets to track what is happening. “I am taking a scientific approach to it: everything will be calculated. You need to Excel the shit out of this! I am using Google Analytics with collection points like counting every time users download the app, where the users are coming from. We have this set up but haven’t really started using it, but will in the near future. This is a learning process for us, so what is most important is measuring the traction channel. We’re very focused on collecting information.”

The Core Apps Analytics Process

Caroline Ragot, co-founder of Women in Mobile and a mobile strategist at Schibsted Spain, described the complete process for new dev teams when setting up their analytics:

“The basic tool is Firebase. It’s easy to integrate but isn’t as powerful (as paid options), but it is free and the others are not cheap but very powerful.” Ragot said Firebase is one of the most powerful free analytics tools available, especially if it is combined with Google Analytics. Firebase has been designed especially for mobile analytics and Ragot believes Google will keep investing in making it better. She also pointed to Flurry Analytics, which has a free component. Like many developers, Ragot focuses on Android apps first. According to VisionMobile’s Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation bi-annual report, 47% of professional developers consider Android their primary platform.

“If you start doing acquisition, you have to start tracking everything.” She suggested using AppsFlyer or Adjust. “Track everything that you promote, for each campaign for Facebook, you can have a separate link so you can see each specific campaign and how many downloads it gets you.”

Ragot said it is essential to go beyond downloads and track events to see how users from each traction channel are actually using your app. For example, for a job search app, you would want to set up event tracking for signing in, editing a CV, or applying for a job. “That way, you can see the quality of the campaign and whether the download users are doing something in the app. For example, 50 out of 100 downloaders might sign in coming from one campaign, and in another channel, 200 downloads are done but only 20 of those actually sign in to the app, so the quality is actually not so good so you can decide how to invest your money. So track everything with AppsFlyer and Adjust.”

Ragot said once analytics is in place, it is possible to start looking at the data and making sure your funnel is right. Each app has its own engage and customer funnel. For example, for Steinarsson’s BudUp app, the funnel involves creating an event, and attending it with other users who are looking for social company. For e-commerce, the funnel is selecting a product and going through the shopping cart to buy it. For an image manipulation app, the funnel is to add a filter to a photo and share it on social media or publish it.

Ragot said that over time, each step in those processes needs to be included in Google Analytics, so that dev teams can analyze when a user exits without completing the process. “Look at every step. Where do they drop? Was it a UX problem, that is super important. Analytics is for making sure your product is working well. How many downloads and users you have is really vanity metrics,” Ragot warned.

Brenden Mulligan, who is currently working on the app platform Firebase, is the former LaunchKit founder, which was recently acquired by Google. He listed a range of tools that he believes should be the bedrock of an app team’s analytics process. “Listen, learn, listen, learn,” he encouraged. “Analyze user behavior with analytics tools like Firebase Analytics, Mixpanel, or Fabric Answers. Make sure your app quality is strong with monitoring tools like Firebase Crash Reporting or Crashlytics. See what users are saying on the App Store with LaunchKit Review Monitor or App Figures. Set up communication channels through Intercom or Zendesk. Track any press mentions with Google Alerts and keep track of what people are saying on social media. Do A/B testing of different on-boarding flows and critical user journeys using Optimizely and Firebase Remote Config.”

Selecting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Steinarsson said he is interested in two metrics at the moment:

  • Active users vs downloads (“That will be bad now, but we need to set a base”), and
  • Measuring each acquisition channel (“for example, measuring referrals from blogs or from Facebook ads”).

Ragot said new dev teams can even just focus on one metric: “If there is one KPI, according to my experience, that tells you everything, it is “Retention at Day X”. D1 retention is how many people come back to your app in the same day after they install it. I am always looking at D1, D3, D7, D14 and D30. If you put all of your effort into measuring this, you have good analytics that is a mix of retention and acquisition.”

Thinking Outside the Box

For Steinarsson and his cofounder Lorck, one of the biggest journeys since releasing their app has been the need to shift mindset from developing an app to running a business. “The greatest challenge has been moving away from being an amateur building something and being someone who runs a company and all the skills that go with that,” said Steinarsson. “Now it is out there, there is no hiding anymore and you have to acquire the skills at lightening speed, so that transition is the greatest challenge for me at the moment. Luckily, I have people who are working with me: for almost a year, my cofounder and I have been working together. She understands the pain point we are addressing, so she corrects me when I go off course. I can’t stress enough the importance of working together in a team.” He mentioned having a separate web designer and someone doing content generations for videos, and other outlets as an example of building his team.

“Mobile marketing is a discipline which is creating itself, and is still in process of creation,” explained Ragot. In the same way that once upon a time we would say “webmaster” and think of one person, now we all agree that it would be crazy to have one person managing content, social media, backend infrastructure, API developers, community engagement, and all of the other roles that are required for a scalable, growth-focused web business. It is the same for mobile, she said. As an app grows in its usage, the rest of that team needs to fill out, and everyone has a role in keeping on top of new developments, or testing new ideas.

“It is crazy to think you can have one developer do everything for your mobile app,” cautioned Ragot. “To me, a good developer has to know the 360 overview and what are those other expertise and how they work together but doesn’t need to know everything.”

The beauty of growing that team means that new ideas can spring up and new techniques to encourage user acquisition and retention. Ragot says that as an emerging industry, there are still new methods that have great opportunities for app developers. While Facebook Ad campaigns are now a mainstay in mobile marketing — with cost per acquisition now reflecting a high level of competition — other techniques are still available to savvy dev teams.

“App indexing is the new trend that not many people are using,” Ragot suggested. This requires both a website and mobile app for now although there are plans to make it available for app-only sites. Ragot says the technical integration is not easy, but the idea is that if you have the same search interface on both web and app, then users can open your website on their smartphone browser and when carrying out a search on your site, they are automatically directed to download your app, or directed to automatically open your app and carry out the search there if it is already downloaded. “It is still not fully used, whereas Facebook campaigns are now overcrowded and everyone knows that is the easiest way to get paid acquisition. App indexing is a great way to get organic acquisition — which means free downloads.”

Building strategies for user acquisition and retention are the two major tasks for dev teams after they have built an app, and analytics helps understand exactly what is happening and how to keep building traction. From there, new possibilities can emerge that will help you grow your user community even stronger and help you identify novel ideas that may offer you a winning edge.

The strategies listed here work equally well for Android, iOS and Windows mobile apps, but for many developers the need for analytics tools to integrate with the Android platform is of paramount importance. According to VisionMobile’s  Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation  bi-annual report, Android has 79% of mindshare amongst mobile developers and is dominating as the mobile application platform used by professional developers. Based on surveys with over 16,500 developers across 145 countries, this latest study from VisionMobile shows how developers are building apps and thinking through solutions for mobile, desktop, IoT and emerging technologies including VR and Machine Learning. 

We are currently running our new survey and it is sci-fi themed! Would you like to contribute ? Take the survey 

 

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You’ve Built an App: Now What? Part 2: User Retention

user_retention

When devs create apps, it feels like that is the project. But once an app is built and released on an app store, it becomes obvious: creating the app was just the start of the journey. Now comes the really exciting (and scary) stuff: getting that app in front of users who will find it useful, and making sure they keep coming back to your app on a regular basis.

According to the  Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation bi-annual report, mobile is the key platform for application development, with developers also building solutions for desktop browsers, IoT, and now emerging technologies, which includes VR and Machine Learning. But for professional developers, the main game is still mobile, and Android is increasingly dominating as the mobile app platform of choice.

So after you’ve built an app, the first task is to position it so that your potential users start downloading it. User acquisition is all about getting app downloads. After downloads start climbing — even a slow increase is okay as long as it is steady — then it is important to start focusing on retention: getting users to start integrating your app into their habits so they reach for your app regularly.

Caroline Ragot, co-founder of Women in Mobile and a mobile strategist at Schibsted Spain, who has helped shepherd apps at several businesses into top ten rankings, says that without an early focus on retention, any resources invested in user acquisition can be wasted. “When you have a good base, then you can decide to go stronger on acquisition and invest more in downloads, but there is no use doing that too early,” Ragot said. “If you acquire and you cannot retain, then that is money you are throwing out the window.”

Brenden Mulligan, who is currently working on the app platform Firebase, is the former LaunchKit founder, which was recently acquired by Google. He said that the easy answer to retention is to “create an engaging and valuable experience and users will keep coming back over and over.” But, of course, it’s rarely that easy. “Users are constantly distracted with other apps, and everything else going on in their life. Therefore it helps for devs to build in re-engagement triggers into their app. Keep users interested in what’s going on within the app, and remind them to come back if they’ve lapsed too long. Study user behavior to know what the signs of a churning user look like and set up notifications and incentives to come back in before they lose interest.”

App user retention strategies fall into three categories:

  • User experience
  • Re-engagement
  • Performance.

Retention Strategy 1: User Experience

Ægir Thor Steinarsson and Anne-Marthe Lorck recently built the BudUp app aimed at supporting users to make new friends by letting them create and post activities or to join posted activites. Steinarsson said that now that the app has been released, he wants to focus on activities that don’t necessarily scale, but that give him a depth of insight into how downloaders are using the app. “You need to go and talk to people and stop hiding. It is very intimidating. For people who have spent a year and a half building something in the bedroom, it can be really scary.”

Ragot agreed. “You need to speak to people who are using the app, even if you are a dev and social skills are not your forte, you need to go out of the building because that will help you improve your app.” Ragot said that after launching an app, devs should be speaking to every single user. “Do they understand how to use the app? Do they get value out of it? Ask them to use the app in front of you.”

Ragot said the basic funnel for app user retention is the signup process. This is crucial because it is an early step in having the user make a commitment to using the app, and by signing in, it makes it easier to use retention strategies like social media plugins that let the user share in their networks that they are using your app (see part one on acquisition).

Ragot said watching users go through this basic funnel can be revealing. “Even in the beginning, you will see that some don’t know how to hide the keyboard, and maybe that is hiding the button for ‘next’ so if the user is blocked, they don’t complete the signup and they don’t come back. If you paid $1.50 to get that user, that is $1.50 you just lost.”

Retention Strategy 2: Re-Engagement

Echoing Mulligan’s comments about re-engagement triggers, Ragot also suggested using a number of app marketing and user retention products to help automate engagement with users. “The basic strategy is to use a tool for push notifications or in-app messages so you can segment your users,” said Ragot. She suggested using some mobile marketing automation tools to be able to create at least two types of segmentation. The first would be a re-engagement trigger automation so that when users have not used the app within a certain time frame — say, more than one week — they are prompted with a reminder that encourages them to use the app again. For apps like Steinarsson’s BudUp that have a geographical focus for the user, Ragot suggests also using a geographical segmentation to send relevant messages to users within a particular area. She pointed to Appboy, Swrve and Firebase as three tools that can help with this automation and re-engagement.

Ragot also suggested that devs regularly scan reviews of their app and respond to each comment. “Look at every single one and reply to each of them,” Ragot recommended. For now, devs can respond to reviews in Google Play, but apparently Apple has plans to introduce a similar feedback feature soon, too. “You can even say, send an email to support at whatever and we will help you. Try to talk to them, make a list of complaints about what are the major problems. Then you first fix what’s not working, and then you build the cool new features.”

Retention Strategy 3: Performance

Knowing when users are frustrated by their app experience leads to the third important strategy for retaining users: keeping your app highly performant.

48% of users who download an app and see it crash are less likely to use the app again and often quickly delete it for good from their device, with a third (31%) of downloaders then telling others of their negative experience.

“It is very important to have a tool to see the crashes in your app,” said Ragot. She recommended Fabric, which is made by Twitter. “You can integrate their SDK and see live how many people are using your app. It even prioritizes the crashes: it details the number of crashes and identifies at what line of your code it is happening.”

Ragot says that app developers should be aiming for 98% crash free performance.

Acquiring users is a challenging process, so devs need to be sure they can retain those users once they start using your app. Otherwise, there is a risk that the money, time and effort spent on acquisition is wasted as users have a quick look, and never return again.

These retention strategies work equally as well with Android, iOS and Windows mobile apps, but many of the tools available are embedded in the Google Play platform or able to be integrated with Google Play. This is incredibly important, as according to VisionMobile’s Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation bi-annual report, 80% of developers building apps professionally are targeting the Android platform.

In our final part of our series, we look at how developers can set up an analytics process to track acquisition and retention, and we unlock some of the next wave strategies that are not yet flooding the industry and may offer new apps a competitive advantage.

We are currently running our new survey and it is sci-fi themed! Would you like to contribute ? Take the survey 

 

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You’ve Built an App: Now What? Part 1: User Acquisition

user acquisition

user acquisition

Developers are makers. They solve pains, entertain, enlighten, and enhance productivity. Building an app can be an exhilarating experience and the joys of shipping can linger for… about ten seconds. Then comes the question, “I’ve built an app, now what?”

“Building an app is incredibly hard,” said Brenden Mulligan, former LaunchKit founder, which was recently acquired by Google. “But getting people to use it is an even bigger challenge. Once an app is released you start getting so many signals of how it’s doing, and it’s important to have the right infrastructure set up to receive and learn from those signals. Things like user activity, app store reviews, churn… In addition, devs have to be thinking of the next feature, or bugs they need to fix.”

Earlier this year, Ægir Thor Steinarsson and Anne-Marthe Lorck built an app to resolve what they were seeing as a common pain point.

“I am a fairly introverted person, and I am a bit disconnected from social groups: I’m studying with people much younger than me, I live in a foreign country. I mostly felt content in my day to day life, but also that I was missing out: I would end up repeatedly cancelling stuff I did want to do, like go to a concert or even a museum, because I didn’t know who to invite,” said Steinarsson.

“We did interviews with about 40 people and found others were experiencing social isolation as well,  we asked people to give it a pain grade on a scale of 1 to 5 and we started seeing everyone giving it a high pain point (3 and above). That turned out to be the main theme rather than the exception.”

Steinarsson and Lorck created BudUp as an app to solve that: users can register an event (a concert, movie, dinner party or other activity), and specify the number of people they hope to attend with.

The app was released on the Google Play Store. Android is the main mobile platform for professional developers, according to VisionMobile’s State of the Developer Nation quarterly report, which found that Android accounted for 79% of mobile developer mindshare.

For the BudUp team, while they have plans for an iOS app, for now their focus is all about traction: to get user downloads. As they ramp up their user acquisition, Steinarsson wants to make sure he has data systems in place to know what is happening and to monitor the user experience.

Knowing what to measure and using the free tools that can help developers do that quickly is crucial, said Caroline Ragot, Co-founder of Women in Mobile and Mobile Strategist at InfoJobs, a company of Schibsted Spain.

Ragot says there are two tasks to focus on after building an app: the first is acquisition, which is really about marketing an app.

The second task for a new app is to focus on retention. Ragot says retention is about marketing and the product working together. Analytics underpins an understanding of both these tasks.

Focusing on Acquisition: App Store Optimization (ASO)

Increasing user acquisition for your app starts with app store optimization. 30% of downloads occur after someone has searched by keywords in Google Play. So getting noticed within the app marketplace can already drive up user downloads before looking at any other type of promotion.

Ragot says there are three components in app store optimization:

  • text
  • icons
  • Screenshots
  • Review and rating.

Building off the experience of websites in getting noticed, app store optimization makes an impact. Ragot suggests thinking what people will search for when looking for your app, and making sure that those keywords are included in the application title text. “Put the keyword close to your brand,” said Ragot. “When I have done that for app projects, within about two hours I have seen apps move from a ranking of 30-something to a ranking of 8.”

After ASO, the next task is to make sure your icon looks appealing. Don’t believe this is important? Ragot suggests doing a simple app search for something like ‘clock’: “You will see that there will be some you don’t want to download just by looking at them.” In the Google Play console, there is a function to allow developers to A/B test their icons. Ragot suggests testing several and seeing which icon design drives more downloads for your app.

Screenshots are also important. “It’s like the landing page for your app. When visitors arrive, they need to understand what your app is about and it should inspire them to download. It is your first touchpoint with a user,” Ragot explained.

Finally, reviews and ratings make an impact. App stores like Google Play use metrics of downloads and active users as part of their search ranking algorithm, and reviews of apps makes a significant impact on helping encourage searchers to download.

Organic and Paid Acquisition

“The two big acquisition buckets are organic and paid,” said Mulligan, who recently talked about how to optimize app launches with First Round. “Ideally, an app can attract users organically. To do this, there are a lot of ways to optimize a launch to be more successful in initially attracting users. You need to make sure your product name is short and your tagline is clear and concise. You need to figure out what good acquisition looks like for your product and track it from the beginning. You need to bake in marketing hooks that let users share with others how they’re using your app and invite their friends to join them. When the time is right, you need to target the relevant reporters to cover your product and post it to sites with good lead generation like Product Hunt. And the whole time, make sure your line of communication with your early community is very open so you know what’s working, what’s not, and how to change your product to boost your acquisition.”

Other acquisition ideas include Facebook ad campaigns, which Ragot cautions can be expensive, but suggests it is still a good idea to dedicate a small budget of a few thousands dollars to encourage initial traction. Ragot also suggests focusing on social media by encouraging downloaders to share that they have downloaded your app and encourage their networks to do the same.

Steinarsson and Lorck will next focus on content marketing: getting featured in blogs, in particular. They believe when starting to acquire users it is important to do things that don’t necessarily scale in order to maintain an initial personal contact with potential users. They will target several content domains and see in which ones they get traction and focus on those segments to start.

When starting with acquiring users, it can feel like everything is an opportunity cost: choosing one strategy means not investing in another. Setting up analytics to quickly identify what is working is crucial to being able to do more of what works and quickly identify where effort is wasted. Ragot, Mulligan, Steinarsson and Lorck all agree: setting up analytics for acquisition and retention is essential.

And while their strategies are universal across mobile platforms, all three have focused on how to build acquisition with an Android app, reflecting the dominant position of Android in the mobile app developer’s mindshare. According to VisionMobile’s State of the Developer Nation report, 80% of those building apps professionally target Android.

In our next part, we will look at how to retain users once they have started using your app and in part three, we examine what analytics techniques for acquisition and retention to have in place and what free tools to use.

We are currently running our new survey and it is sci-fi themed! Would you like to contribute ? Take the survey