Crittercism App Success Playbook

8/9/2019 Crittercism App Success Playbook

1/16

App Success Playbook: The 5 Ms to Mobile App Success


2/16 2

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................... 3

1. Mission ..................................................................................................... 4

2. Manage..................................................................................................... 4

3. Measure.................................................................................................... 6

4. Modify (A/B testing) .................................................................................. 10

5. Monetize ................................................................................................... 12

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 15

About the Author:

Dr. Einar Vollset is the owner of AppAftercare, an app maintenance and

optimization service. Vollset co-founded the YC funded startup ReMail, which

was subsequently acquired by Google. Previously, he was a visiting professor

of Computer Science at Cornell University. If you have any questions or would

like help in any way, dont hesitate to contact him at [email protected]

or visit http://appaftercare.com.

App Success Playbook

2


3/16 3

Introduction

Getting your app approved in the AppStore is a monumental step, but it

should only be the start of a longer, albeit less intense process. If building yourapp is a sprint, ensuring it is a success is a marathon. In this book, we outline

the main components of mobile app success.

Weve broken down each of the steps of app success into 5 sections,

otherwise known as the 5 Ms. Your rst order of call is to clearly understand

the mission of the app in terms of business objectives. The next step is tomanage the app to ensure it is stable and performing well. These steps are

then followed by measuring and optimizing the apps performance regarding

user engagement and conversion rates. If there are any changes that need

to be made, the next step is to then modify the mobile app. If your app is a

consumer-facing app, the last step is to look at ways of monetizing your app.


Mission

Manage

Modify

Measure

Monetize

App Dev/Test/Release


4/16 4


1. Mission

Hopefully you have a good grasp on the reason you had a mobile app built

in the rst place, but its worth going back to those business objectives nowthat your app has been released. Some questions to ask are: What does

success look like for the app? and What business objectives are you looking

to achieve?

Some of the most common aims businesses have for releasing a mobile app are:

Increasing customer engagement and extending existing services

Increasing customer satisfaction

Brand awareness and new customer acquisition

Driving revenues through increased sales or expanded ad inventory

Reduction of operating costs

You should not only fully measure these metrics as they relate to your

business objectives, but also be able to nimbly respond and pivot to optimize

those metrics. An app without a well-dened set of business objectives is likely

to fail, and success metrics such as downloads and opens are meaningless in

the absence of a clear business goal.

2. Manage

The rubber hits the road once your app enters the AppStore. But because noapp launch is entirely without issues, it is important to actively manage these

issues. To do so, there are two key aspects of your app you need to stay on

top of: app crashes and server issues.

App crashes are the number one reason why people abandon your app or

leave a 1-star review. It is also almost inevitable that any reasonably sized

app with more than a handful of users will experience crashes. However,

without the right tools, it can be difcult to track down specic causes of these

crashes. Compounding this problem is the fact that you may not know the

percentage of your user base that is experiencing a specic crash, hence

prioritizing can be tricky. Unfortunately, relying on Apple to report crashes ismassively misleading, and you are innitely better off going with a dedicated

third-party solution.

Managing server issues is just as important if your app depends on server

side components (whether that is your own server, or a third party). Your app

wont necessarily crash just because your server is returning an error, or a

third party service is slow; it just leads to an unbearable user experience for

your customers. This can ultimately lead to users quickly abandoning your app.


5/16 5


Recommended Vendor:

Crittercism is a one-stop shop for handling crash detection and monitoring

server endpoints, both in-house and third party.

Once youve installed the Crittercism SDK and pushed the update to the

AppStore, youll be presented with a dashboard that gives all the information

you need to effectively manage your app. As a rst step, try to get a sense the

biggest offenders, or the worst crashes.

Figure 1. This screenshot shows how you can easily prioritize issues by thenumber of users affected. Armed with this information, you can use Crittercism

to get detailed stacktraces, diagnostics, and even re-trace the users steps

leading up to the crash, saving you time trying to gure out what is occurring.

Best Practice:

After wrestling your worst crashes to the ground, you need a detailed view into

whether service calls are slowing down your app.

Figure 2. The screenshot below shows all web services your app interacts

with (both your own or third party) broken down by latency, error rates, data

transferred and more. It makes it easy to monitor and troubleshoot network orservice issues that affect app performance.


6/16 6


3. Measure

Once you have managed operational issues and are condent the app is

performing optimally, it is now time to start measuring app store performance

and user engagement.

Optimizing app store performance requires monitoring two metrics:

1. Discoverability and 2. Categories. Discoverability refers to how people nd

your app in the app store, and is usually done through keywords. Categories

is a bit more complicated where users will pick two categories that are chosen

through competitive analysis and other methods, and measure how they are

ranking in each of those categories. If needed, users can buy an ad to purchase

a bump in category rankings.

The second dimension to measure is user engagement. User engagement

can be carved up into many facets, and the solution used to measure it is

analytics. As an example, you may have the number of downloads, but how

will you know if you are getting people to take the nal pay-off measure?

More importantly, how will you get insight into all of the events that are

occurring and nd where people in the funnel are falling off?

The tools used for measuring analytics are different from mobile app

performance management (mAPM) tools. mAPM solutions look at correctness

to answer questions like, Are the app and associated services performing

as we would expect? Analytics tools are used to answer questions such as:

Okay, the mobile app is working correctly, but can we make it perform better

in terms of our business objectives?


7/16 7


It is important to understand that the two are complimentary, but the

management aspect is foundational. For example, it would be suboptimal to

start measuring and optimizing user engagement if the app is crashing for

50% of your users.

Recommended Vendors:

Some of the tools that will help in this space are Applause Analytics, App

Annie and appFigures. There is a lot you can do with App Annie, including

diving deep into competitor intelligence, but the most popular features are App

Ranking and App Reviews. These provide a check on whether rankings are

trending up or down, and App Reviews give important clues to bigger issues

that may need to be resolved.

Figure 3. This App Annie screenshot shows the ranking of an app over its

lifetime. Note, you can choose the time horizon. As you can see, the app was

previously ranked in the top 100 nance apps, then slipped into obscurity.

The reason for the decline was due to new, well funded entrants into the

marketplace, and radical changes to AppStore search algorithms (after Apple

bought Chomp, the app didnt rank as well). This highlights the kind of issues to

keep abreast of.


8/16 8


Figure 4. The screenshot below shows the most favorable reviews.

The next important question you will want to answer is: Given that we want

users to perform some conversion action, such as buying an upgrade or

clicking the contact us button, at what step in this funnel we want them to go

through are they falling off?

There are a number of great tools, such as MixPanel, KISSmetrics, and

Localytics that can answer these questions. Obviously your choice will also

depend on what tools, if any, youre using for the rest of your business. That

being said, it is recommended to keep your options open by installing a kind

of super SDK; that is an SDK where you can pick and choose the analytics

provider. Segment.io is the recommended vendor.

Figure 5. The screenshot from Mixpanel shows the results of a simple funnel

for a mortgage calculator. It shows the number of users who launched the

app ended up clicking on the email button (this button emails a lender, which

is how this app is monetized). About 3% of users ended up converting, and

though it isnt an awful result, it can be optimized.


9/16 9


With an analytics package like Mixpanel, Localytics, or KISSmetrics installed,

you might start asking yourself, WHY are the users falling off at that specic

step in my funnel?

AppSee is a tool that provides user videos and heatmaps. It will give you

insight into how a user is interacting with your app, and show exactly where

on the UI they are tapping, swiping or pinching.

The main benet of a solution such as AppSee is that it gives you visual,

user specic analytics. For example, you can tell if people are tapping on

something they think is a button and then abandoning the app because

theyre getting frustrated.

Figure 6. The AppSee screenshot shows (on the Crittercism Executive

Dashboard app) where users are tapping and swiping in a login screen. In this

case, the app seems to be working well, but in the past Ive seen issues where

the 100% of taps on a given UI element (a twitter signup button for example)

were unresponsive typically a bug and xing this immediately improved

conversion and retention rates.


10/16 1


Best Practice:

If there are conversion events that you want users to perform, whether that is

signing on for a subscription plan or buying a virtual power-up package, you

should be thoughtfully creating, monitoring and optimizing funnels.

4. Modify (A/B testing)

Once you have a handle on the previous three Ms: operational issues

(manage), as well as a clear understanding of your business objectives

(mission) and how your app is performing in that regard (measure), it is

time to start modifying your app to optimize it further.

There are really two kinds of modications you want to be making: 1. Addingnew features, and 2. Optimizing the existing user experience. Additional

features are often driven by external motivators like customers requesting a

feature, or an important partner requesting just one more thing, so adding

them are often no-brainers. In addition, a frequently updated app usually gets

a boost up the rankings.


11/16 1


However, optimizing the existing user interface is usually driven from internal

data and measurements, so it can be more difcult to determine if and how

a given feature should be changed. For example, a commonly tweaked

component is new user onboarding; however, how do you know whether

the new UI is actually better than the old one?

Thats where A/B testing comes in handy; by running A/B tests you can

compare the new variation on a subset of your users and get actual data

about whether your tweaks are making things better or worse.


What youll run into pretty quickly is the frustration of having to go through the

AppStore approval process for each test you want to perform. Luckily there

are now several A/B testing services that allow you to avoid these, including

Apptimize. Apptimize lets you visually design A/B tests in real time by tapping

on user elements you want to experiment with, designing those tests on a

website, then pushing those tests live all without an AppStore update.

Figure 7. Apptimize shows how a (running) app can get edited through their

web tools you can change copy, position, colors, etc.


12/16 1


Figure 8. View the results of such a test in this case variant A outperforms

the baseline (the existing variant), signifying you should push variant A to your

entire user base.

Best Practice:

When A/B testing, there are two kinds of modications to make: 1. Add new

features, and 2. Optimize existing user experience.

5. MonetizeNow that you have a nely-tuned, high-performing app, it is now time to start

adding fuel to your app monetization re through paid user acquisitions.

Paid user acquisitions come in many forms and is a large and complex topic

where success is extremely app dependent. An acquisition strategy that works

for a game might not work for a mortgage calculator.

However, there are a couple of steps to take before spending too much

on advertising. The rst one is understanding which of your various ad

campaigns are actually driving installs and conversions.


The recommended tool to accomplish this is TapStream.com. After installing

the SDK, you can create custom short links to use in your campaigns which

then track your users from a click on a specic call-to-action, through installing

your app and even converting in some way.


13/16 1


Figure 9. TapStream.com shows how a campaign is converting, including the

7 day Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Notice how there are over 600K

clicks on these links, but only around 144K actually end up installing.

The second nice thing about TapStream is it provides real-time conversion

information. What that means is that your app can provide a custom

onboarding experience based on which call-to-action a user clicked to install

your app.


14/16 1


Figure 10. A custom (even personal) onboarding experience below.

Best Practice:

If you are spending money on paid user acquisition, you should have an

effective and automatic re-engagement strategy in place. That is, you should

have a system that detects when users stop using your app, then reach out to

them (via email or push notication) to try and get them to use the app again.

Recently Leanplum announced their marketing automation feature, which

seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

F

igure10


15/16 1


Conclusion

Making your app successful is an ongoing process, but with the right tools you

are heads and shoulders above the competition.


16/16

2014 Crittercism, Inc.

About Crittercism

Crittercism provides the worlds leading mobile application performance management (mAPM) solution and enables enterprises to accelerate their mobile

business. The companys solution monitors every aspect of mobile app performance and provides a real-time global view of app and transaction metrics

across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 apps. The companys investors include Google Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Opus

Capital, Shasta Ventures, InterWest Partners and Accenture. Learn more at http://www.crittercism.com.

Crittercism App Success Playbook

Documents

Transcript of Crittercism App Success Playbook