Optimizing your product in to two easy steps

At Stormly we’re all about product-led analytics. Our goal is to make sure we give you the insights needed to improve your product metrics.

There are plenty of tools out there that can tell you what your conversion rate is, but none of them will show you what behavior should be changed in your customer journey. And this is really the only way to find out how to improve your product metrics.

In this article we’ll show you how to get to the right insights that will improve your product goals, in two easy steps. Let’s dive right in!

Finding the bottleneck

In this example, we’ll be working with a photo storage app. The idea is simple. People can use the app to store photos and share their favorite memories with others like family and friends.

From a business perspective, the goal is that users will upgrade to a premium account, which will give them unlimited photo storage. The free version of this app offers limited storage.

It can be enlightening to see the different user journeys that lead towards the goal we’re interested in. Simply start by opening the “User Journey” insight.

We pick for our “Journey ends with” the Upgraded Premium action as a goal. When we run our insight, we get a visual user journey like the one below.

We see that users can take a few different paths towards the Upgraded Premium goal, but we’ll focus on one that seems most direct: 1) Installing the app 2) Playing a song 3) Signup 4) Upgraded to Premium.

This specific journey path can be seen as steps in a conversion funnel, leading up to conversion. We can see that the conversion rate is relatively low, around 1%. Compared to the industry average, which is around 3%, we have a lot of room for improvement!

Uncovering actionable insight to improve conversion

Now that we found a funnel we want to optimize, we can use the Aha-Moment insight to find behavior that optimizes for this exact funnel, and help those users jump past the cliff. Once we know what behavior leads to higher conversion, we can change our onboarding journey to force more people to take these steps.

Let’s get started! When we open the Aha-Moment insight, it asks us what the goal is we want to optimize for. As you can see, Stormy has plenty of options here – product optimization goals that matter.

As we’ve identified a funnel of actions that we’d like to optimize, we choose the goal “Completes the last step of a funnel”. In the next screen, we specify the funnel, based on the user journey we’ve uncovered before.

That’s all we have to do! Now run the Aha-Moment, and we wait a few seconds.

Once the results are in, we get a simple overview of behavior that leads to having a higher funnel conversion rate, all the way from installing the app to upgrading to the premium plan.

As we can see, the average conversion for all users is a bit more than 1%. But for everyone that plays more than two songs in the first 8 minutes of installing the app, the conversion is 60% higher.

We can see this also in the funnels below, which are automatically available in the aha-moment. They display the conversion per behavioral segment, and can confirm that for the historical data, everyone that plays more than two songs in the first 8 minutes, has much higher conversion.

What’s interesting about the aha-moment suggestions is that they also indicate the amount of time that is most optimal in terms of conversion. In this case, we have a window of 8 minutes after installing the app, where we want someone to play more than 2 songs.

This actionable behavior gives us the opportunity to come up with ideas on how to get more people to take this path. One example could be that after installing the app, we send a notification after 5 minutes, in case less than three songs have been played so far. This song can then be a recommendation based on what has been played, and/or the location and device.

Bonus points!

To really perfect our product improvement process, we should implement an A/B. This will test if the suggested journey we want to implement is really much better than the existing flow.

To do this, open the “A/B testing” Insight. As a conversion goal, we simply select “Completes the last step of a funnel”. Note that this is exactly the same goal as we’ve used for our Aha-moment analysis, and thus define the same funnel steps, as we can see below.

Once it’s been running for a few days, both variations of our experiment are 100%. As we can see, the variation had indeed higher conversion. It’s even a little bit higher than what was expected from our Aha-moment.

After reading this article, you should have a good understanding of how to use Stormly’s User Journey and Aha-Moment insights to improve your product goals. By following these two simple steps, you can start making changes that will impact your conversion rate and business metrics in a positive way. So what are you waiting for? Sign up today and get started on improving your product!