Decide the Next Feature in Your App — Firebase&Google Analytics
Double your income in 2 Weeks with these tools!
You cannot improve what you cannot measure!
This is one of the fundamental rules in business development: You have to measure the impact you made first, and then you can decide your direction accordingly.
Of course, “Instincts” are part of the evolution in Mother Nature. I just wanted to emphasize the importance of supporting our natural instincts with some useful data :)
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool that helps us understand the behavior of our users. The main method he uses is “events” and graphics that will enable us to analyze behavior through events, tools, and graphical interfaces where we can chain events one after another and capture meaningful flows.
Haaaave you met Event?
An event, in short, is an instant occurrence. In other words, it refers to instant user behavior such as “signed in”, “app updated”, “notification opened”. An event is not a process, instead, it defines an instant action that happens at a certain point in time.
From the moment it is integrated into an application, Google Analytics starts collecting some events without us having to do anything else. These are events such as starting the user session, installing/opening the application for the first time, deleting the application, … You can access detailed information about auto-collected events here.
What about Firebase?
Actually, Firebase uses Google Analytics as infrastructure. It provides the developers with the ability to integrate the infrastructure of Google Analytics in its own SDK and by using analytics through the Firebase console, without leaving the Firebase ecosystem, it offers analytics among many other things your application needs.
It still gives you the option to trade via Google Analytics. You can follow the analytics of your application from the interface you want, according to your habits and the availability of the information you are looking for.
Understanding a User
— not as hard as understanding your partner, however…
First of all, it is good to know that there are different ways of generating income and different business goals for them in the product we have created.
Even if your app generates revenue through a single ad that can only be viewed on a single screen in a single condition, your business goal should be to provide your user with an environment where they can spend “more” and “more effective” time on that screen in order to increase your revenue.
The words “more” and“ more effective” here remind me of the concepts of Retention and Engagement. They may evoke concepts such as the frequency of using the application in our minds, continuing to use our application instead of other applications -loyalty-, the application creating a habit and commitment.
So, even in the simplest business model, Retention and Engagement provide a “transformation” that increases our revenue.
Conversion — Covert “events” into money
We can define Conversion as bringing a user to our business goal via an event chain we created.
As an example, let’s say we’ve set our business goal to be our user to share a post on our brand new social media app. So we simply want our users to share a lot.
Version 1: Number of Likes and Comments are not shown
A user shares a video about cats and starts to think about the next content that he/she will share. There is no feedback indicator such as number of likes/dislikes or comments to understand what other users are thinking about the last video.
Version 2: Introducing Likes Counter and User Comments
A user shares a video about cats and starts to think about the next content that he/she will share. He/she is constantly checking the counts and comments to understand the audience. This curiosity becomes an habit and this increases the user interaction and engagement.
Version 3: Replacing Likes Count with Number of Viewers
A user shares a video about cats and starts to think about the next content that he/she will share. In this version, our content creator retrieves the number of people viewed the video instead of active interactions such as comments, likes, dislikes.
How to decide between different approaches?
If you compare version 1 with version 2, it would be relatively easy to decide which way to go. What about version 2 and version 3? It is really hard to decide by intuition.
Tracking the Conversion
We can simply say that we have 2 main conversion definitions here:
- Number of contents shared by the content cretor (quantity)
- The amount of interaction that content recieves (quantity and also a quality indicator for the content)
So, which version above provides more motivation to our content creator to share more high quality content, we should go for that version.
The events that we should collect in this example may not be met by the events that Analytics collects automatically. Therefore, let’s assume that we create 3 new events and fire them at the relevant points in our application.
Event 1- Content shared
Event 2- Interactions viewed. To see feedback and people’s reactions, the shared post was viewed by the creator at least 2 times a day.
Event 3- Started a new Draft. The creator started a draft for a new content
If we create a flow with these events, this flow will allow us to display a Funnel similar to the ones below. Thanks to this Funnel, we can see how many users have sent the first event, how many of them have sent the second, and how many of them have reached the last point in Funnel, that is, the transformation point.
Let’s see Funnels and understand how it helps
A Funnel from Version 1
As you see, only 4 percent of content creators viewed the interactions by checking the content they shared. It is still a good thing to see 60 percent of creators who viewed their own post started a new post. It is called dedication my dear readers, we all need that dedication in our lives.
A Funnel from Version 2
As you can see, the engagement of content creators is almost doubled here! And the number of creators who started a new draft is also increased drastically! Getting feedback about what you do is really motivating.
A Funnel from Version 3
And we have a winner here 👏 The engagement of content creators is almost tripled from the first version! And the number of creators who started a new draft is increased as well. There is no perfect solution, trying different ways of showing feedbacks is also important.
Conclusion
Now we have 3 different Event Funnels and we can clearly see the real numbers and conversions instead of starting with predictions. In this way, we now know openly which model leads us to more conversions, and we can continue using that model with peace of mind.
Measuring is an essential element for optimization, and we can do this for free with the help of Firebase Analytics.
Events can be designed for each step that can be measured and improved in line with the business goals of our application and these goals. Through this method, the link between user behavior and business goals can be established and optimization can be made as well.
Hope you like these insights. I would love to hear your thoughts and own stories below in the comments. If you want to hear more statistics and insight, please let me know.
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