#flurrymobile

Where: Rainmaking Loft, Charlottenstraße 2, 10969 Berlin

When: Wednesday, September 28, 18:00-20:30

Where: Dojo St Martin, 41 Boulevard Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris

When: Tuesday, September 27, 18:00-20:30

When: Wednesday, October 12th, 6-8:30pm

Where: Tumblr HQ, 35 East 21st Street, NYC

Who: TBD

Experiment Your App Up To Growth 

By: Tobias Vogels, Mobile Developer Evangelist 

At Flurry from Yahoo, we interact with thousands of companies every day; from developers of small messaging apps to large game studios, everyone is looking for the right growth recipe. While there’s no magic ingredient, we’ll investigate the key parts of mobile growth. We’ll be talking to industry leaders in the next months in our new content series Keys to Mobile Growth (🔑📱📈), to discuss successful growth tactics and best practices.  

To kick off 🔑📱📈, we had a chance to chat with Sean Ellis about how you can set your app up for “Growth” success. When growth comes to mind, not many names stand out as much as Sean’s does. As the first marketer of Dropbox, founder of GrowthHackers.com, to coining the actual term “growth hacking,” Sean is one of the leading industry experts. What better way to start this new series, than with him?

Anything in quotes below is attributed to Sean Ellis.

Building a growth mindset

First things first, being able to show long-term growth starts with a “growth mindset” across your team and ideally across your company. Sean actually sees a growth mindset as an experimentation mindset since optimization and consequently growth come through experimentation. For example, “Facebook’s whole culture is around experimentation. So somehow that’s not accidental. The Facebook app used to suck and now over time it really has become addictive. But how do you get people excited about experiments? Correct, experiments are addictive when they work.” So before you run experiments, at which metrics should you look at?

What are my KPIs?

It sounds like a basic question, but it’s an essential one on your path to growth. Sean puts it this way: “I like to start with the most important metric and then think about what are the proxy metrics here.” While this might be more difficult than just picking a few of the most important KPIs, it actually helps you a lot on measuring your progress. “What’s the one metric that we can all look at and then say we’re succeeding or we’re failing and everybody kind of agrees. If half the people look at one metric and the other half look at a different metric, then one half usually says you’re succeeding and the other one says you’re failing.” To avoid this, it’s important to find a main metric that reflects the value that your customers are getting from the product.

As an example, the main metric for Airbnb would be nights booked. “If I book a night, that’s valuable for me as a person that’s staying somewhere and also valuable for a host who now has someone staying at their place.” To build your sub-metrics, you can then take a look at the two levers that can increase the main metric: (1) The number of people that book at least one night and (2) the average number of nights booked per user.

Don’t be fooled…

While metrics such as onboarding or sign up completion can affect those levers, they’re not your main metric. “Back at LogmeIn, right after we’ve launched, we had over 1,000 people signing up, and there was this VC who got really excited and started congratulating me. Back in my head I knew that 90% or more of these users were actually never really trying the product. So those numbers did nothing to indicate that we were making progress on delivering value to people.”

OK, let’s talk retention

Retention has become an extremely strong buzzword among us mobile folks in the last couple months/years and at the same time it represents a challenge that pretty much every app developer comes across.

“Ultimately, retention is a proxy for value delivered. And that comes all the way back to product market fit. So if you’re not able to retain people, the truth is, you might just be tactically really good driving growth, but you haven’t created real value for the user yet.” While there’s no unique retention metric target for product market fit (Marc Andreesen popularized this term about 9 years ago), Alex Schultz, Facebook’s VP of Growth, recommends looking at comparable retention metrics in your vertical to define success in terms of product market fit.

Did you know? To make things easier, we recently published a new app loyalty matrix that includes average retention and frequency of use statistics across the different App Store and Google Play categories. So how do you get people to stick around more and lower high churn rates? You optimize your product for engagement, which brings us back to experimenting and testing.

Test your way up

The key for a successful testing environment is to put a framework in place that makes it easy for people to (1) contribute to upcoming experiments and (2) learn from results of previous tests. Sean came up with the idea scoring framework called ICE Score that helps prioritizing experiments and simplifies the process especially when a lot of people are involved. ICE stands for: impact, confidence, and ease. “Every idea that I have is scored on a potential impact on the business, how confident I am about it, and how easy it would be to implement.”

“Ultimately, on a mobile app, experimentation is harder than it is on the web.” Therefore, “on an ease level, you don’t want to look only at how much time it will take to implement a test, but also how much time does it actually take to get it released and approved and what the opportunity costs are.” Because of that level of inflexibility on mobile compared to web, you often can run fewer experiments than on web which makes the prioritization process even more important. “I want to make sure that everything I do on mobile experiments has a very high confidence score and probably impact score as well.”

In terms of monitoring, Sean emphasizes the importance of documenting your experiments. “The more consistent you are on how you define your experiments, the easier it is to organize the results information afterwards: of what worked and what didn’t work and to make all of that accessible to the team. I think a lot of that really starts with having this information systematically organized and accessible. And nail that before you start involving the rest of your organization or you’re just scaling a huge mess.”

By: Chris Klotzbach, Director at Flurry from Yahoo

In 2012, there were approximately 1.4 million applications in the Google Play and App Store, combined. Now, with over three million apps across the App Store and Google Play, users have more app options to choose from than ever before.

This in mind, Flurry decided to revisit our App Loyalty Matrix for the first time since 2012 to understand how users are engaging in apps across category. When we last did this analysis, Flurry had a footprint of 230,000 apps. And just like the phenomenal growth we’ve seen in the app stores, Flurry now tracks over 830,000 applications.  

Expanded category growth has led developers to compete to capture users’ attention and retain their interest. Our analysis shows that users are spending less time and returning less frequently to apps across all categories.  

The Analysis

Our matrix plots application categories by how often they’re used compared to how long consumers continue to use them over time. Specifically, we plotted the median 30-day retention rate of app categories on the x-axis against the median frequency of use per week on the y-axis by App Store. For categories, we started by taking the categories defined by Apple and Google and in cases where a cluster of applications within a parent category showed meaningful usage differences, we created a sub-category.

Lali Kesiraju, Marketing Analyst

Home to the first-ever app blockbuster, Angry Birds, and current chart stalwarts Supercell and Spotify, Europe has played a starring role in the mobile app revolution. In fact, just this month Swedish gaming house King Digital Entertainment sold to Activision Blizzard for a staggering $5.9B. All this in mind, we thought it was high time we took a deep dive into mobile app activity on the continent, as we have done in the past for other areas around the globe.

Flurry from Yahoo currently tracks over 725,000 apps across 564 million devices in Europe. All Europeans love their smart devices, but there are marked differences in usage and preferences across the continent. Let’s take a look.

Sweden Leads in Smart Device Penetration; Italy Lags

For this analysis, we focused on the top 10 European countries by total population: Russia, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Ukraine, Poland, and Sweden. We next compared the total population and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of these countries, to the number of iOS and Android devices Flurry Analytics tracked in each of these countries throughout October 2015. GNI is a measure of a country’s wealth, as calculated by the World Bank in constant US dollars.

Unsurprisingly, smart device penetration is highest in the north. Sweden has the highest smart device penetration with 150% smart device penetration, or 1.5 devices for every man, woman and child in the kingdom. This is followed by The Netherlands at 136% and the UK at 130%. France clocks in at 81% penetration, followed by Germany at 77%, and Spain at 74%. Given the ratio of minors to adults in these nations, the data implies that almost every adult has a smart device.

Italy is the exception, with the lowest smart device penetration of any country in Western Europe at 66%. Russians on the other hand, are willing to spend more of their income on smart devices, bumping their penetration up to 75%, despite a low GNI.

Spain Joins the Phablet Revolution; Small Phones Near Extinction

So, what devices are actually in-use? To better understand their composition, we looked at the distribution of form factor types based on a sample of 100k Android and iOS devices in each country. As a reminder, we classify devices as follows:

As we reported previously, there has been a global revolution in phablet adoption and we see that Europe is not far behind the global trend. Spain is clearly leading the charge in Europe with 37% phablet share. Other countries are continuing to grow adoption with each having over 20% of their devices belonging to that optimum size: small enough for users to carry in their pockets and large enough to engage in reading and entertainment.

Consistent with the global trend, small phones have been nearly wiped off the map in Europe. Small tablets, like the iPad Mini, haven’t really caught on anywhere but the UK. It’s clear that like in the rest of the world, European consumers are becoming increasingly smitten with larger screen sizes.

Session Growth Still in Double-Digits for Western Europe

And how are Europeans engaging with increasingly larger devices? Looking at the number of sessions generated by each country, year-over-year, is a good indicator of mobile activity growth. Based on the apps that Flurry tracks, the global average growth in sessions from October 2014 to October 2015 was 64%. The US, for comparison, posted 52% growth, while emerging economies like Brazil and India posted gains of 189% and 107%, respectively.

In Europe, the growth of France and Spain is on par with global average at 63% and 66%, respectively. The UK and Germany’s year-over-year growth lags the global average and that of the US at 36% and 28%, respectively, which is not uncommon in more mature markets.

Italy again is the outlier at 31% growth, which is not surprising given the relatively lower penetration rate of smart devices in that country. It’s interesting to note that the app session growth in Vatican City is higher than the Italian average at 36%.

A Continent Divided: Gamers vs. Chatters

To understand what is driving all that activity in Europe, we examined which app categories users spent the most time in.

The British and French spend almost twice as much of their time in messaging and social apps, versus in games, at approximately 40% of total app time. Italy, on the other hand, spends the lowest percentage of their time in Messaging and Social, perhaps because only 66% of the population can be messaged via smartphone.

Germans, Italians and the Spanish spend nearly one-third of their app time in gaming apps. Despite their love for gaming, users in Italy also spend a significant share of their app time in Utilities & Productivity apps (18%) which is twice the share that users in France dedicate to the category (9%).

Music, Media & Entertainment apps seem to hold the same interest in users irrespective of the borders, around 10% of their app time.

Europe Picks Up Bigger Phones; Apps Continue to Entertain

Although Western Europe was amongst the group of early adopters in the app revolution, this growth shows no sign of slowing down, as market usage continues to climb into the double digits. Some countries have even surpassed more than one device for every man, woman, and child.

By Simon Khalaf, SVP of Publisher Products

On June 29th Bank of America released the findings of its second annual report on Consumer Mobility. The report showed that the US population is perpetually plugged-in with 71% of those surveyed disclosing they actually sleep with their smartphones. This prompted us to revisit the study we conducted in Q2 of 2014 in which we first uncovered the rise of a new breed of mobile users: the Mobile Addicts.

Worldwide Mobile Addicts Grew 59% in the Last Year

The chart below shows the results of the new research. It is clear from that chart that the trend Bank of America is talking about is not limited to the United States. In fact, that trend is global.  From Q2 2014 to Q2 2015, the total population of smart devices measured by Flurry grew from 1.3B to 1.8B, a 38% year over year growth. Regular Users, consumers who use apps between once and 16 times daily, grew from 784 million to 985 million in the same period, a 25% increase. Super Users, consumers who use apps between 16 and 60 times daily, grew even more in that same period from 440 million to 590 million, a 34% increase.

When we looked at Mobile Addicts, consumers who launch applications 60 times or more per day, we saw this group is growing at the fastest rate, from 176 million in Q2 2014 to a whopping 280 million in Q2 2015, a 59% increase.

The Nation of Mobile Addicts would be the World’s Fourth-Largest

Just to put things in perspective, if the number of Mobile Addicts there were in 2014 had been the population of a country, such country would have been the 8th largest in the world last year, slightly below Nigeria. In 2015, the growth of the Mobile Addicts population would have propelled that country to the 4th spot, just below the United States and ahead of Indonesia. It is hard to imagine a country can expand that fast in one year, but Mobile Addicts have.

Mobile Addicts Driven by Messaging and Social Apps

To help us better understand Mobile Addicts, we looked at the categories of applications they are using and found that Mobile Addicts usage over-indexed in all categories. So we simply focused on the top five categories, in which usage by Mobile Addicts over-indexed by more than 100% (which means that Mobile Addicts used apps in these categories more than 2 times that of average mobile consumer). The results are shown in the chart below.

Messaging and social apps are clearly the leading apps used by Mobile Addicts. In fact, Mobile Addicts use Messaging apps 6.56 times (an over-index of 556%) more than an average mobile consumer. This validates many of our analyses this year that messaging has become mobile’s killer application. Utilities and Productivity app usage was high as well, further validating our assumptions that Mobile Addicts are using their smart device as the sole computing device and conducting every aspect of their lives on that device. Please note that keyboard apps and web browsers are included in that category and have contributed to the fascinating growth in that category’s usage. But the largest contributors to growth are productivity apps, especially among college students which are part of Mobile Addicts as per our research last year.

Games, News, Media and Entertainment apps are also a big hit among Mobile Addicts but that was not a surprise to us. In fact, we believe that the only newspaper Mobile Addicts have touched is actually on a mobile app.

We were most surprised by the finance category. Mobile Addicts use finance apps 2.5 times more than the average mobile consumer (an over-index of 155%). This further validates findings by Bank of America that 48% of their consumers are active app users. This is an astounding finding given that Bank of America’s history dates back to 1904 and in just 8 years almost 50% of its consumers changed banking habits.