Category: Analytics

How User Analytics and Onboarding Can Help Emerging Developers Get Their Fair Share of the $100 Billion Boom in Mobile Spending
Introduction

In a world grappling with economic uncertainties and slowdowns, mobile consumer spending has emerged as a surprising beacon of hope. Despite the ominous signs of a global economic slowdown, the mobile industry has been thriving, hitting a remarkable milestone of $100 billion in early Q3 2023. This phenomenon is a testament to the resilience and adaptability of the mobile ecosystem. For emerging mobile software developers, this presents a golden opportunity to thrive and make their mark in a competitive landscape. However, in order to capitalize on this potential, developers must prioritize effective user analytics, user onboarding, and user engagement tools. In this blog post, we will delve into the impressive figures and explore the reasons behind this remarkable performance in contrast to the broader economic trends. We will also l delve into the significance of these elements and how they can empower emerging developers to not only compete but excel in the mobile spending boom.

The Milestone Achievement

The mobile industry reached a significant milestone early in Q3 2023 when it surpassed $100 billion in consumer spending. This monumental achievement was reported in an article by Business of Apps on September 29th, 2023 (“Mobile Spending Hits $100 Billion Milestone Early in Q3”). While this news might come as a surprise given the global economic slowdown, it paints a fascinating picture of consumer behavior and trends.

Global Economic Slowdown

Before we dive deeper into the mobile spending phenomenon, let’s briefly touch upon the backdrop of the global economic slowdown. An article by Reuters on September 5th, 2023, reported signs of a global economic slowdown, citing data from the August PMIs (“Global Economy: Global Business Activity Showed Signs of Slowdown in August PMIs”). This slowdown, attributed to various factors including supply chain disruptions and the ongoing pandemic, had raised concerns about consumer spending in various sectors.

The Resilience of Mobile Consumer Spending

Mobile consumer spending has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of these economic challenges. There are several key reasons why the mobile industry has not only weathered the storm but also thrived during this period:

Digital Transformation: The pandemic accelerated the process of digital transformation across industries. With remote work, online education, and e-commerce becoming the norm, consumers increasingly relied on their mobile devices for various activities. This surge in digital dependence naturally led to higher mobile spending on apps, subscriptions, and in-app purchases.

Entertainment and Gaming: Mobile gaming and entertainment apps witnessed a surge in popularity during the pandemic. With more people seeking entertainment options from the safety of their homes, mobile games, streaming platforms, and digital content providers saw a significant increase in user engagement and revenue.

App Monetization: App developers have become more adept at monetizing their offerings through various strategies, including in-app advertising, freemium models, and premium subscriptions. These monetization tactics have contributed to the sustained growth in mobile consumer spending.

Mobile Commerce: E-commerce has experienced a massive shift towards mobile platforms. Consumers now shop for everything from groceries to electronics using mobile apps, contributing to a surge in mobile commerce spending.

Consumer Behavior: The pandemic reshaped consumer behavior, with people increasingly turning to mobile devices for convenience, entertainment, and social interaction. This shift in behavior has become a permanent feature of the post-pandemic world, sustaining mobile spending levels.

Innovation and New Features: Mobile app developers continuously introduce innovative features and improvements, enticing users to spend more on their platforms. The constant evolution of mobile apps keeps consumers engaged and willing to spend.

The Role of In-App Purchases

One significant contributor to the robust mobile spending figures is the prevalence of in-app purchases. Many apps, especially in the gaming and entertainment categories, offer in-game purchases, virtual items, or premium content. These microtransactions add up quickly, encouraging users to spend more within the app ecosystem. The ease of making in-app purchases through mobile devices further drives this trend.

The Role of Analytics and User Onboarding and Product Adoption.

The mobile consumer spending’s remarkable performance in Q3 2023, despite the global economic slowdown, is a testament to the adaptability and resilience of the mobile industry. However for aspiring app developers success hinges on more than just creating a great app; it requires a deep understanding of user behavior, effective onboarding, and ongoing user engagement.
1. Effective User Analytics:
User analytics is the foundation upon which successful mobile apps are built. For emerging developers, understanding their users’ behavior and preferences is crucial for creating apps that resonate and drive mobile spending. Here’s why effective user analytics is paramount:
1. Data-Driven Decision Making: User analytics provides developers with invaluable insights into user behavior, allowing them to make data-driven decisions. It helps in identifying what features users engage with the most, where they drop off, and what drives them to make purchases.
1. Continuous Improvement: With analytics, developers can continually refine their apps based on user feedback and usage patterns. This iterative process leads to a better user experience, increased engagement, and ultimately higher spending.
1. Targeted Marketing: By analyzing user data, developers can segment their audience and create highly targeted marketing campaigns. This ensures that promotional efforts are directed at users who are most likely to make in-app purchases.
1. User Onboarding:
Contextual User onboarding is the first impression users have of an app. It sets the tone for the entire user experience and can greatly influence whether users decide to stick around and spend money within the app. Here’s why user onboarding is vital:
1. First Impressions Matter: A well-designed onboarding process introduces users to the app’s core features and benefits. It helps users understand the app’s value proposition and encourages them to explore further.
1. Reduced Churn: Effective onboarding reduces the likelihood of users abandoning the app shortly after installation. A smooth onboarding experience can significantly decrease user churn rates.
1. Education and Engagement: Onboarding is an opportunity to educate users on how to use the app effectively. It can guide users through key features, prompting them to take actions that lead to spending, such as signing up for an account or making an initial purchase.
1. User Engagement:
User engagement is the lifeblood of mobile apps. Engaged users are more likely to spend money and become loyal customers. Here’s why user engagement tools are indispensable:
1. Retain and Grow: Engaging users with regular updates, personalized recommendations, and interactive features keeps them coming back. Loyal users are more likely to make in-app purchases and spread positive word-of-mouth.
1. In-App Notifications: Well-timed and relevant in-app notifications can encourage users to explore new features, participate in promotions, or complete in-app purchases. User engagement tools help developers deliver these notifications effectively.
1. Personalization: Personalizing the user experience based on user preferences and behavior can lead to higher spending. Engagement tools enable developers to tailor content, recommendations, and offers to individual users.
Conclusion:

The $100Billion mobile spending boom is a remarkable opportunity for emerging mobile software developers to thrive in a competitive market. However, success hinges on more than just creating a great app; it requires a deep understanding of user behavior, effective onboarding, and ongoing user engagement. By harnessing the power of user analytics, onboarding processes, and engagement tools like Contextual, developers can create apps that not only complete but excel in the mobile spending boom. These elements not only drive user satisfaction but also increase the likelihood of users becoming loyal, high-spending customers, ensuring a bright future for emerging developers in the ever-evolving mobile landscape.

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October 19, 2023
Unlock the Secrets of Black Friday Success with Contextual User Onboarding!

In case you thought it was too early to be talking about Black Friday sales, think again.

This period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is make or break for retailers, accounting for up to 40% of annual sales. With the holiday season just six weeks away, data.ai reports a staggering 22% increase in visits to mobile shopping apps as consumers eagerly research, compare prices, and hunt for discounts.

But here’s the catch: while downloads are important, user engagement on mobile shopping apps has grown nearly twice as fast. The time users spend in these apps directly correlates to higher retail sales. As the world faces an acute shortage of software developers, retailers struggle to quickly adopt a mobile-first strategy to capitalize on this massive trend. Additionally, inflation continues to impact consumer wallets, making the upcoming holiday season even more challenging.

To win over mobile users and maximize sales, retailers and service providers must do more than simply release a mobile app. They need a solid strategy for mobile app user onboarding and ongoing user engagement. Mobile shopping apps, in particular, are prone to high user churn, making it crucial to guide users to the “Aha moment” swiftly. This moment occurs when users experience the initial value of the app, such as finding a desired product and making a purchase—also known as “Activation.” Activation aligns with the methodology of Product Teams, ensuring the app fulfills a potential customer’s needs to be done (JTBD). Since users invest only a few minutes or even seconds before moving on, a well-designed mobile app walkthrough is essential for them to activate and return to the app repeatedly.

When it comes to mobile app user onboarding, best practice involves designing contextual mobile app walkthroughs. Contextual mobile tooltips deliver the right information to the right user at the right time, enhancing the onboarding flow and ensuring a seamless user experience.

Experienced retailers understand the art of maximizing customer spending by optimizing impulse buying decisions. Mobile app shopping is unique because time is of the essence, and users will quickly move on if their needs aren’t met within seconds. This is where contextual mobile in-app tooltips come into play, helping users achieve their goals and nudging them toward the next desired action, such as checkout and continued shopping.

As mentioned earlier, software development resources are expensive and in high demand. They are also slow. To catch the wave of mobile e-commerce consumers, app developers, designers, and product managers must move faster than traditional software development sprint cycles allow. The market is evolving too rapidly for current methodologies to keep up. That’s where Contextual, a no-code SDK plug-in, becomes invaluable. It empowers product teams to create mobile app user onboarding guides, in-app tooltips, onboarding carousels, mobile app videos, and user feedback surveys through an Engagement layer, without the need for extensive coding. This preserves precious development resources, allowing them to focus on the app’s feature layer.

Don’t miss out on the incredible opportunities presented by Black Friday and beyond. Embrace Contextual User Onboarding to supercharge your mobile app success and leave your competition in the dust!

October 18, 2022
Atlassian commits on guides

It won’t surprise you that Atlassian is data-driven and the data from their guides is tracked along with other app usage analytics.

A few years back we started to see Atlassian introduce a few tips; the craft and sophistication has increased over time – here is a fresh example.

Recently Confluence got a make-over and they do a nice job of introducing the change.

What’s cool about the use of graphics here is:

1. that they abstract away everything you don’t need to see (other sidebar menu options, body text) so that you don’t get distracted.

2. Super-clear call-to-action. Its clear that the Confluence team want to get most users across onto the new navigation.

3. “Learn more” is present but not the highest priority – they allow your to take the guide if you are unsure as there is an element of unknown for the user.

Whats more controversial is that they don’t show the guide before the prompt – this is also likely a decision that comes from analytics showing than many people WILL jump to the new navigation if you show it upfront.

The “Learn more” is a fairly normal guide in a carousel form. Again the intelligent use of graphics use the main characteristics of the screen as signpost the user can recognise.

Good elements of a carousel:

1. Clear title/description.

2. Back/Next arrow buttons

3. “Next” button is highlighted and strongest as the intention for the product team to get the user through the process.

3. “Dismiss” is important as an escape route. Could also be a “X” button at top right.

4. Progress indicator “…” lets the user understand how much time they’ve invested and how much time left. This type of contextual orientation is essential to avoid abandonment.

5. The cutout on “Recent” is a little inconsistent with the previous “Home” step. However, you can really get the focus with the cutout. At Contextual we love cutouts as it really allows the point to standout and user remains undistracted. The cutout is even more important when you are doing contextual guides pointing at things ACTUALLY on the screen.

In summary, Atlassian have opted for a takeover carousel dominating the whole user experience rather than point at specific screen elements. It would be great to understand why – maybe it just controls the experience more.

So it’s not really a “Guide” but its a great intro to the new navigation in confluence.

The intelligent use of abstracted graphics is beautiful and informative – but it does require you having an artist on staff – not a luxury many teams have. Sure you have a designer but they may not have the skill, tools or time to do with the same quality. So using guides maybe a better approach.

August 4, 2020
New Feature: Individual User Sessions and clicks

For some time, Contextual has had the ability to track pages visited and (on some plans) clicks.

We’ve also allowed Product Teams to see a user’s targeting with Tips, Tours, Tooltips and Popups. We’ve taken this one step further and allow you to see a users sessions and what they click on within a specific session – you can also see WHEN they interact with the guide content you’ve targeted for them.

Above you can see the user “William Gibson” in Session 1, visited particular screens and was presented with a Carousel – their engagement was to interact “accepted” rather than dismiss it.

Dashboard user can click into any user and like a CRM can see each individual’s:

a) their device (phone, tablet, iPad, web browser)

b) how many sessions, when they installed, last user.

c) experiments and how the user engaged

d) select from a drop-down of sessions (as seen above)

e) Custom Tags (attributes) to target, personalize, segment or add to an audience. For example, a tag called JobRole could be synced with your App to be able to target “Project Managers” or “Sales Team” for specific guides.

These two examples illustrate how you can drill down to any user and see which guides they’ve seen and how they responded. The first user “Rejected” and “Touch Out”, the second user “Accepted” the guides.

This is a per user version of the Guide Analytics that visible when tracking the performance of any content you have created.

June 17, 2020
Part 2: Segments are nice but each user journey is unique
In the Part 1, we covered the importance of establishing goals around your engagement experiments and flows.

We could call this Part 2: “Segments are nice, Segments are dumb”.

Segmentation will eventually be “individualization” – we cover the steps needed to get there. Thinking in “Goals” are an important step.

Since Contextual’s inception, we provide default segments useful for tracking and grouping users. Names like Newbies, Light Users, Power Users, Churning, Zombies have filters for capturing generic “buckets” of users.

In addition, you can choose a combination of filters based on your own Custom Segments. This example below is creating a segment of “Recently active Project Managers”.Contextual

Once having defined and saved the “Active Project Managers” segment, your Product Team can then:
- target tips, tours, flows, popups at this group (in conjunction with other triggers)
- track the size and membership of that segment.
This is a very good granular way at looking at your user base and targeting flows and content that is customized for their job role.

But…

User’s don’t care about your segments.

Ask a user what segment they are in. You’ll get a blank look.

Segments ignore the needs hopes and wishes of each individual user. A segment aggregates and abstracts them into a “label”.

But each user is on their own unique journey and within a segment you should be seeking to personalise and respond to individual needs at scale. How do you scale for each unique snowflake?

Credit: Monty Python, Life of Bryan.

Scaling Individualization

If you have 25K Monthly Active Users, then having 6 segments is easy for you to manage but mediocre for users.

One solution would be to create more segments – the ultimate solution would be to create as many segments as there are Users (25,000 segments!). That would be:
1. ridiculous!
2. a huge amount of work for the product team
3. always out of date.
4. Still not what a user wants from your product.
Artificial Intelligence will eventually make this possible: what Netflix does for movie recommendations or Facebook does in your feed. More on this later.

Goals – a user’s needs
- Better than structuring your users into segments – goals align the Product Team’s interests with the user’s interests.
Its not very different but an important way of thinking about your user’s needs.

Example:

Already you can see a business GOAL or event looks like a customer progression in their own journey, there are some mandatory steps in the business process that each user must be aware of and complete:
1. DETAILS_FILED = YES, NO
2. TERMS_AGREED = YES, NO
3. QUOTE_CREATED = YES, NO
4. SALE = YES, NO
Then joining these journey goals with Contextual’s seamless tracking of the user’s behaviour, e.g:
1. Install date and time
2. Usage dates and times
3. Screen Visits, Session count, length etc
4. Touch events
Delivers a rich pool of rule-based or training data that can tell you more about the user that enriches data-driven segment toward goals and “individualisation”.

Today, by manually working backwards from the population who have achieved goals you can determine the “Next Best” segments you should be targeting. Contextual allows you to “what-if” audience size my testing goal-completers with other data. You could export or dump this data to a datalake (redshift, bigquery/bigtable, snowflake, Azure DW) or data-mining system for better tools for PCA and to seperate causality from correlation. Then you can compare goal-completer’s rows vs not.

You should end up with some observations like:
- “80% of users who completed the introduction tour” resulted in DETAILS_FILED=YES”
- “90% of users who completed the introduction tour” within 24 hours of registration resulted in DETAILS_FILED=YES”
The goal at scale

The interesting thing about goals is that unlike the 25,000 potential segments, there is a small number of goals that matter in the sequence of a user journey – so scaling with the above method is naturally a more manageable.

But…let’s face it, you don’t want to click through all your users to uncover nuances submerged in the data that lead to greater personalisation and individual needs.

DETAILS_FILED = YES is an important business goal in this app – the business relationship is established. The Product Team can learn a lot from what attributes distinguish these users from the DETAILS_FILED = NO users. There are also other filters that are pre-cursors, for example, users who have churned will automatically DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = NO.

From the Contextual data we can learn that these 2 goal based segments can be broken into (we chose) approximately 10 interesting segments.

For example, we know that users who viewed the “Completing the Document” tip tour have a higher success rate of DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = YES.

So one logical conclusion would be to keep re-showing this tour to users until they complete it. Another action could be to trigger a feedback question to these users.

Some other attributes are surprising – for example Android uploads from newer devices is a predictor of success. How the hell could the Product Team manually discovered that? The action is the Product Manager can schedule an investigation by developers to find a root cause.

Individualization with Machine Learning

Each of the 25,000 user’s journeys is describable by the data (behavioural, segmentation, goal, external enrichment).

Instead of the manual iterations above, you will see AI in platforms like Contextual by training on the “goal data” (supervised) to learn the models, then automate interaction with new users as they move through the journey.

The challenge is that both platforms and Product Teams outside silicon valley are not quite up to the task at the moment. So, purchasing decisions for on-boarding/engagement products are made without this as even a consideration, so we need to user the rule method and engines like Contextual to get results today.

Keep an eye out for companies like https://www.clearbrain.com/ who are early but pitching causal based analytics to convert customers.
September 2, 2019