When we talk to people about advice that is unhelpful or frustrating to them, something that frequently comes up is ‘fix the product’ – or ‘build an amazing product’ or ‘have a strong product before you spend on UA’.

This is all good – except – if you pardon my French, WTF does that even mean? 

Today, we’re going to break down what we look for when we evaluate ‘a strong product’. We’re going to share our 6 point checklist of key metrics that you can review and benchmark to assess if your product is strong enough for you to consider doing paid UA. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

This is a slightly bigger than a mini episode. But this is titled WTF does fix the product mean? Our six point checklist to assess your apps readiness for paid user acquisition. Now, when we talk to people about advice that they find unhelpful or frustrating, something that often comes up is that they read the advice about, “Oh, you should fix the product”, or “you should build an amazing product before you do user acquisition” or “have a strong product before you do user acquisition”.

Makes sense – except if you’re pardon my French, WTF does that even mean? So today, we’re going to break down what we mean by have a strong product. And this is from our own experience from talking to many relatively early stage apps that are trying to decide whether to spend on mobile user acquisition or not. We typically have a six point checklist of key metrics that you can review and benchmark against your category or genre to assess if your product is strong enough for you to consider doing paid UA. 

So the next time you see advice that says have a strong product. This is a checklist you could come back to to evaluate what products trend is and what it can look like. And whether that means you’re ready for paid user acquisition or not. 

Without further ado, let’s get right into it.

1. How strong is our activation rate?
   
   This is typically the earliest post install metric. You want to know and understand if people are continuing to use the product after the install. After the download our users actually seeing enough value to go in and explore it check out or did they just download and just get away from it? So you want to understand your activation rate. 
   
   And the key metrics you want to be tracking or looking for:
   
   
   • Registration completion
     Are users registering while entering their information and investing some amount of time and effort. That’s a key metric you can track.
     
     
   • FTUE completion
     That is first time user experience completion. Are users taking the time to complete the first time user experience, which could be a tutorial for games or a guided walkthrough for a lot of other apps. So are users completing that, what percentage of users are completing it.
     
     
   • And if you have a subscription app, you could be tracking free trial percentage, which are users coming in and subscribing. Are users coming in and starting a first session, or are users subscribing for a free trial and getting started. So that’s number one, activation rate.
     
     
2. Are we seeing strong engagement for organic traffic?
   
   This is particularly important if you aren’t monetizing, or if you aren’t yet feature complete, so you cannot evaluate monetization or LTV. In this case, early engagement for organic traffic can often act as a proxy for subsequent monetization. If users are sufficiently engaged, you know they’re going to be monetization monetizable down the line. Now, what does engagement mean? It’s again one of those terms that tends to be not very well defined.
   
   So the three metrics we recommend looking at under engagement are:
   
   
   • Session length
     Which is how long does each session last? Important because you don’t want users to just come and go away. You want them to be deeply engaged.
     
     
   • Session frequency
     How often in the day do users access this app? This is a slightly different dimension of user retention, except that it measures intraday retention, if you want to look at it that way.
     
     
   • Session time
     How much time do users spend in the app per day. 
     
     And typically, you want to benchmark these and look at these verses to genre, or the category you are in. 
     
     For a casual app that we evaluated recently. We looked at the session length of six minutes, session frequency of six per day, session time of 30 minutes a day. This was a very strong app and it’s category. Again, you want to look at these metrics for your app. 
     
     
3. Are we hitting retention benchmarks for organic traffic?
   
   Again, this is a different dimension of the engagement metric. Specifically, you know, we talked about that session frequency. This retention metric is crucial, because it lets you understand if users resonate with the product over a period of time, be it weeks, days or months, you want to look at the natural usage frequency and understand what sort of retention metric makes the most sense for you.
   
   For casual games, benchmarks for strong retention could be d1, d7, d30. For subscription apps, you might look for monthly retention numbers. Whatever you look at, whatever your relevant metric is you want to make sure you track your retention numbers, both short term and medium term understanding that you may not have super long term retention metrics. And short term could be d1, d7, medium term could be d30 if possible, same thing that a weekly with w1 or w4 retention.
   
   
4. Are we hitting monetization benchmarks for organic traffic?
   
   Of course, this is applicable if you are monetizing. And if you are, it’s helpful to ask how value are monetized. How likely is it that you’ll make your money back if you chose to spend on paid UA? Typically, you look at ARPU or up down numbers for your genre. And ideally, you see if you can calculate a D7 or D30 ARPU to understand what your eventual longer term LTV could be. At once you understand your D7 or D30 ARPU, you could also look at your genre CPI. And understand if this is something that could potentially make for strong unit economics for yourself.
   
   
5. Are we seeing strong ratings and reviews?
   
   Self explanatory. Our users are taking the trouble to actually read you and rate you well, right. Typically, you want to be at least 4+ on your ratings and reviews for your organic traffic. Because you want to know if users like enough of your rate, enough of your product, and at the very least, you want them to say it’s not terrible.
   
   
6. Are we generally free from bugs and tech issues?
   
   This again, is something that can be objectively quantified. Some crashes sent in or in us are unavoidable But if you had to look at one benchmark, it would just be crash rate. Ideally, you would want crash rates to be at most at 1%. That said there certainly are many metrics that Google particularly surfaces. And Google’s particularly diligent about showing value aren’t meeting these benchmarks, you will actually cause us bad behaviors. You could check out one of our other YouTube live videos, I believe it’s called, “That revenues drop 75%” We talk much more about Google’s bad behavior thresholds and how that they can impact organics. But in this case, you want to understand if you are relatively free from bugs and tech issues, so that you know and assess if your product is ready for paid user acquisition. 

So these are the other six questions we like to ask. These typically are the lowest hanging fruit to help you assess If your product is strong enough, for at the very least testing out paid up. If any of these aren’t where you like to be, it’s very much worth it to go back to the drawing board to improve upon these metrics before you are ready to test paid user acquisition. 

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!