Ways to tackle App Growth
Part 1 of a Series on: Experimenting for sustainable App Growth
By Caterina Toniolo
This series is based on a presentation I gave at the Epic Growth Conference in Moscow in March 2018 and revolves around app growth at Skyscanner. See a video recording of this below.
This is the first post of this 5 post series. I will cover some of the main challenges we face when talking about app growth, but also give the first case study of how we tackle learning through experimentation at Skyscanner.
This series is now complete so you can move on to the other four posts when you’ve finished this one:
- App Store Keyword Optimisation for Acquisition
- Icon Localisation in Google Play
- Paid Optimisation of Blind Networks
- Star rating optimisation
The main challenges of App Growth
When aiming to achieve fast and sustainable app growth we are bound to face some challenges, both from within the product and from limitations of the market place. The main challenges we see in our case are:
- Get an Accurate CLV (Customer Lifetime Value, also known as LTV). To be able to accurately calculate it we need a better understanding of:
- Cross device Behaviour (that is quite tricky when you do not have mandatory log in)
- Halo effect (also known as incremental ratio), basically asking ourselves, ‘how many more organic downloads do we get if we spend more?’
2. Attribution model: while ‘last click’ has served us so far, in order to scale even more, we need to look at more complex multi touch attribution models.
3. X-Device experience: ensuring a smooth experience between web and app is also challenging. And we all know that this is not as simple as just creating a normal web link.
4. Data: making sure we do not work in data silos has surely been one of our main challenges, given the variety of useful data sources the app marketplace offers.
With these challenges in mind, I collected some interesting experiments on our own App Growth to share. Not only to look at the results, but rather to have some real examples on how to apply experimentation to our daily Growth efforts.
Case study #1 HALO EFFECT in India
Tribe: APAC Growth / Squad: India
The Challenge: Validating how big the “Halo Effect” is in India, and how much this can impact our paid acquisition sustainability threshold.
The Hypothesis: If we increase the total number of daily paid installs in India then we will see a statistically significant increase in organic installs.
Metrics: Organic Downloads
How will we know if we’re successful? We will know there is an “Halo Effect” if we see a statistically significant increase in “extra” organic downloads.
Method: As it’s impossible to do a proper A/B test we had to use our “causal impact” tool to calculate if there is causal correlation between the increase in daily paid install and the increase in “extra” organic installs, by looking at a control market where we did not implement any change in our paid efforts
Results: We have done 5 iterations of this test and we have seen that there is an optimal level of spend where we achieved optimal halo effect (up to 1.6 paid install needed to get 1 extra organic install).
You can find a more detailed deep dive into this subject in the blog post “Two Approaches to unlock the Halo Effect in Paid App Growth” by Skyscanner’s Arun Rawat and Shu Ming Peh.
Tip! Use a control market if you cannot set up a proper A/B test.
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About the Author
Hi, I am Caterina, I am part of Win Market by Market Tribe and I’m currently leading a cross Tribe initiative towards becoming really “App First” in our growth efforts.
Previously I was Growth Lead for the Growth Strategy squad, working on enabling Growth to prioritise efforts and to have the best growth metrics to measure success.
