Understanding Retention, Conversion, Engagement
Retention
Retention is all about tracking how long users stick with your product. For subscription-based apps, it's crucial to understand why users churn. And for other businesses, it's essential to know what keeps users coming back and, more importantly, why some don't. Make sure your 4-week retention rate hits at least 10% before optimizing anything else. Find common benchmarks and how to implement it in the 'Retention' section.
With retention, we just need to answer a few important questions:
- What percentage of new users are we retaining after 1 day, 1 week, 1 month?
- On average, how long does a user stay active before churning?
- What factors affect retention? (This is where engagement metrics come in handy)
Conversion
Track the journey people take from learning about your product to becoming active or paying users. The action you want prospects to take is your conversion goal. Find examples in the ‘Conversion’ section. While you can have multiple goals for different products, markets, or campaigns, it's important to focus on high-intent goals - those that show a strong interest in your product. Keep in mind that "bad" conversion rates can also mean that you are targeting the wrong audience.
Common questions you will be able to answer when analyzing conversion rates:
- What elements of your website or app store listing encourage visitors to install your app?
- Which in-app experiences motivate users to make a purchase or subscribe?
- How can you optimize your pricing strategy to increase user conversions?
Engagement
Keep track of how users engage with your product's features. By adding events for different features, you'll discover which ones matter most to users. Tracking feature usage can help you prioritize features and identify which ones should be prioritized and which ones should be killed. Find examples in the ‘Conversion’ section.
- Which features are most popular among retained users, and which should be prioritized for improvement or expansion?
- Which features are underutilized, indicating potential discovery gaps or a need for redesign?
- How can you incentivize users to explore and engage with different features within your app?