Visualizing Your Shopify App Acquisition Channels
Start from the beginning: Introduction to Shopify App Optimization
When working to grow your Shopify app, it can be difficult to know where your customers are coming from and how they found you. Did they discover your app through your website, the marketplace, Google, or a referral?
Developing an instrumentation and tagging strategy for your Shopify app listing, website, OAuth installation process, and onboarding can help you better understand and visualize your acquisition funnel. By doing so, you can achieve the following:
- Identify which acquisition channels are bringing in the most customers, allowing you to measure the success of your product marketing messaging.
- Connect acquisition channels to revenue, helping you optimize for greater revenue.
- Identify unproductive channels to stop wasting time on.
- Understand customers’ expectations and show early value Time-To-Value (TTV), increasing activation and revenue percentages.
- Optimize marketing messages and channels to drive higher conversion rates by understanding customers’ expectations and profiles.
By nailing your acquisition phase, you can improve your success rate in each step down the Activation, Retention, and Revenue phases of the funnel. As the saying goes, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” Therefore, it’s important to optimize the funnel from top to bottom and address friction occurring in the bottom part of the funnel by fixing it in the top part.
In this article, we will explore what we did for Rush and how it impacted us. Although the article is focused on Shopify apps, most of the information can be applied to any standalone SaaS solution. By addressing the top questions and prioritizing efforts correctly, you can optimize your acquisition funnel and achieve greater success.
Poor Shopify support for Development Partners
One major challenge faced by Shopify Partners is the lack of support from Shopify in growing their business in the Marketplace. Although Shopify provides options to track conversions through Google Analytics and Facebook, they offer little support beyond that.
A helpful tool that can assist with optimizing your app listing and gaining a better understanding of your data is App Store Analytics. This tool organizes data from your Google Analytics account in a user-friendly manner, allowing for better comprehension and optimization of your app listing. For Partners seeking to grow their business, this can be a valuable tool.
The Solutions
We implemented the following steps to visualize our flows better:
- Tag with UTM tags the Shopify App listing and website CTAs.
- Redirected all sign-ups directly to the Shopify installation process instead of the App Listing.
- Passed information during installation from the UTM tags and link referral to Shopify authorization and retrieved it during the app installation (OAuth).
- Showed onboarding questionnaires after the user had installed the app.
We store user profiles in the database, and you can see examples of three of them at the following links:
Using all this information, we can determine:
- What drives customers to install the app?
- Where the customer installed the app from?
- What are the most impactful pages for install?
- What stops customers from installing the app?
- Which channel brings the highest impressions?
- Which channel brings the most installs?
- Which channel brings the most revenue?
Note that the last three are usually not the same channel.
Next, we will discuss what we did with each product.
The website
We developed a separate website (distinct from the main one) to test our tracking and tagging capabilities, as well as different marketing messages. This website is only accessible from within the Shopify app listing, which allows us to
- Iterate and test quickly without the need to make significant changes to the primary site.
- Keep the test environment separate so that referral and backlink noise is minimized.
Note that we tag all outgoing links, including those to customer support pages and the Shopify app listing for analytics purposes. Examples:
https://support.rush.app/something?
utm_source=web.rush.app&
utm_content={page_section_cta}&
utm_medium=click&
utm_campaign=web.rush.apphttps://apps.shopify.com/rush-app?
utm_source=web.rush.app&
utm_content={page_section_cta}&
utm_medium=click&
utm_campaign=web.rush.appAdditionally, when users click the “Try for free” button to install the app, we redirect them to an internal API point, where we attach UTM tags and referral information. The user is then redirected to the Shopify login screen, where they can pick the store that the app will install.
We pass a UUID in the state field that maps to the UTM tags and referral information sent earlier in the installation flow. When the user installs the app, Shopify returns this value to our OAuth system, allowing us to determine where the user came from. If UTM tags are missing, we know that the user installed the app directly from the Shopify Marketplace.
CTA leads to:
https://api.rush.app/auth/shopify/connect?
utm_source=web.rush.app&
utm_content=header_cta&
utm_medium=home&
utm_campaign=home&
http_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.rush.app%2Fapp-store%3Ftype%3Dcategory%26value%3Dupselling-and-cross-sellingwhich redirected to
https://accounts.shopify.com/store-login?
redirect=%2Fadmin%2Foauth%2Fauthorize%3Fclient_id%3D7f775ff89c11cb8ad75f9878589e6b78%26scope%3Dwrite_draft_orders%252Cread_products%252Cwrite_orders%252Cread_locations%252Cread_locales%252Cread_translations%252Cread_customers%252Cwrite_fulfillments%252Cwrite_shipping%252Cwrite_merchant_managed_fulfillment_orders%252Cread_reports%252Cread_analytics%252Cwrite_marketing_events%252Cwrite_script_tags%252Cwrite_content%252Cwrite_themes%26redirect_uri%3Dhttps://api.rush.app/auth/shopify/callback%3F%26state%3D083b5fbb-cf4d-4d5d-8e40-35dbdbb108b8Our analysis has revealed that customers who come to the website from Shopify are primarily interested in understanding the pricing model, including features and specific functionality.
Shopify App Listing
We have tagged all the links on the Shopify App Listing using Bitly, and our UTM tagging looks like this:
https://web.rush.app/....?
utm_source=apps.shopify.com&
utm_content={shopify_link}&
utm_medium=click&
utm_campaign=apps.shopify.comBy using Bitly, we were able to track how often users click on links:
- View demo store: 10% of pageviews (419 out of 4,460)
- See all pricing options: 1% of pageviews (25 out of 4,460)
- Website: 0% of pageviews (25 out of 4,460)
- Changelog: 0% of pageviews (3 out of 4,460)
- FAQ/Support portal: 0% of pageviews (3 out of 4,460)
- Privacy policy: 0% of pageviews (4 out of 4,460)
The percentage stays closely the same over time.
One common mistake I noticed is that many Shopify listings use the “View demo store” CTA to lead users to a demo store where the app is installed. However, it’s better to direct users to the landing page that explains all the benefits of the app and showcases its features. Adding screenshots or interactive demos can be helpful, but don’t miss the opportunity to convince the user to install the app.
Another insight we gained is that 80% of our users are on a desktop, so it’s important to optimize the images and listing for the desktop experience. Don’t be afraid to add more details in the first 6 images of the app listing to capture the user’s attention.
These insights have remained consistent over the last 365 days.
Onboarding
Although there is a lot written about onboarding for product-led growth, at Rush, we believe in understanding our users as much as possible from the start to segment them into different personas and onboard them based on segment.
To achieve this, we ask users to complete four questionnaires before accessing the app dashboard:
- What is the main goal you hope to achieve by using Rush today? (How do you expect Rush to help you?)
- What is your biggest concern about installing Rush?
- Which of the following terms best describes you?
- How did you hear about us?
By gathering this information, we can construct a more effective onboarding flow tailored to each user’s needs. It also allows our customer support team to provide the best assistance possible, whether by proactively reaching out or when users reach out to them.
We recognize that a lengthy onboarding process may deter some users, but from 4,000 installs, we have seen a low churn rate of only 1.37% of clients leaving before completing the funnel.
The result
After factoring in all of that and monitoring revenue by store, you can present several metrics, such as:
You can also map CLV, and AVG Subscription sizes to channels as well.
As you can see 70% of all company revenue is generated by 2 personas.
Bonus: Customer Support & Customer Success Manager enablement
Once all this data is in the database, enrich it a bit with (Shopify data and StoreLeads) you can further send Slack notifications — sharing all this information with your Customer Support and Customer Success Teams. Here are examples of what we did:
