We sat down with Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare, to learn more about DEM, why it’s important for businesses and what makes Contentsquare’s CS Find & Fix different from other experience monitoring solutions.

A bit about Andrew

As VP of Product Success, Andrew is responsible for CS Find & Fix, a digital experience monitoring solution that enables business and technical teams to spot issues and slowdowns impacting their customer experience.

He’s been at Contentsquare for over five years, first heading up pre-sales for Northern Europe before moving over to product success.

What is digital experience monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) combines behavioral and technical data to provide real-time insights into your visitor experience.

“Digital experience monitoring is all about mixing two data sets (behavioral data and technical data) to see how they correlate,” says Andrew. “For example, you could monitor a correlation between high bounce rate on a landing page and a technical metric like Google’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) value.”

Learn more about what LCP is and other Web Core Vitals in our blog.

Why is combining behavioral data with technical data important?

DEM is crucial for understanding your visitors and creating an experience that delights them. It helps you understand what’s impacting their experience negatively and why you are losing potential customers.

Andrew shares an example of how it can be used for making creative changes to a landing page. “If you’re only monitoring behavioral data like bounce rate and it goes up after a creative change, you might immediately believe the new creative doesn’t work and needs to be changed.”

However, technical data like website performance or errors might reveal the creative changes impacted the performance of that page. “The actual root cause of high bounce rates could be a high LCP score due to a heavy or oversized image which is slowing down the loading of the page. That’s why you need to have both data sets to fully understand what’s causing customer friction, ” explains Andrew.

What are the key benefits of digital experience monitoring?

According to Andrew, the main benefits of DEM are time and cost savings. By monitoring both the technical and behavioral aspects of the customer experience, you can allocate resources more efficiently and make the right decisions quickly.

“Without the supporting technical data, you’re missing a 360 view of what’s actually happening, making it impossible to understand why visitors are bouncing,” says Andrew. “You might start redesigning new assets, spending time and money on changes even though the high bounce rate was actually due to your site’s performance—not the creative.”

Who is digital experience monitoring for?

Digital experience monitoring helps unite different teams, which is key to democratizing data across organizations. “Anybody can use DEM. It provides a single data source that aligns business functions, creative and technical teams with the same insights and understanding,” says Andrew.

Andrew believes this alignment enables organizations to make more data-driven decisions while reducing internal disagreements. “There’s a human impact to DEM; having a more holistic view enables teams to align and reduces conflict.” says Andrew.

How does digital experience monitoring go beyond RUM?

Real user monitoring (RUM) tracks performance data on real site visitors. It’s a part of digital experience monitoring and conveys metrics, like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), for every visitor experience. “RUM allows us to look at averages based on what users experience on a site,” shares Andrew.

On the other hand, digital experience monitoring is the synthesis of both technical data and behavioral. “With DEM you might look at bounce rate versus page performance or repeated clicks and the correlation with JavaScript errors,” explains Andrew. “It’s the combination of those two data sets that adds value.”

“We’re the leaders in the digital experience analytics space—we’ve got extremely rich, granular behavioral data that we’re combining with technical data sets, like performance metrics and page errors.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

How is Contentsquare’s digital experience monitoring capability different?

Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution incorporates behavioral and technical data straight out of the box with no upfront configuration required.

Users can seamlessly correlate behavioral metrics with Core Web Vital metrics that impact Google search performance, website errors and API failures on a page. “You could view performance metrics alongside your conversion rate and bounce rate metrics, for example,” says Andrew. “Our solution also allows you to set up automated alerts highlighting when an error is linked to an abnormal click, speeding up your time to resolution.”

Contentsquare’s solution conveys data in a visual, easy-to-understand way. “You can look at your performance metrics and Customer Journey Analysis to compare how people with good and bad performance behave,” explains Andrew.

“We’ve taken technical data that’s often a very complex subject, and combined that with visual data from Zone-Based Heatmaps and Customer Journey Analysis making it easy to digest. That’s what makes Find & Fix so unique” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

In addition to real user monitoring, Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution also uses synthetic monitoring. “Synthetic monitoring isn’t based on real user data but produces its own Lab data—it’s a bot,” explains Andrew. “It allows for better control of parameters such as specific device and network connection speed, which gives a solid baseline.”  As a result, it enables testing new experiences before even launching them to avoid performance blunders once they’re in production.

The challenge with only using real user data is user variability. “If a visitor on your page is starting to head down to the tube, their connection is going to get shaky, having a sudden negative impact on your performance metrics,” shares Andrew.

“RUM gives you a true picture of what’s happening in the field, but using synthetic monitoring gives you a solid baseline to check whether your changes have made an improvement or a degradation.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

Find & Fix Product Demo

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What’s next for Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution?

“Up next for us is to expand our capabilities for mobile app monitoring,” shares Andrew. “Our App Find & Fix solution combines behavioral data and technical data, like crash reporting with API errors and Impact Quantification.”

The post Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): What is it and why do you need it appeared first on Contentsquare.

At a recent Contentsquare client event, we were lucky enough to hear from Callum Barker-Nicol, Business Analyst in Product and Platform Engineering at Auto Trader about

In his talk, Callum discussed how he and his team used Contentsquare alongside other tools during the launch of its new Vehicle Insight product. 

The UK’s largest online vehicle marketplace

Auto Trader is the UK’s largest marketplace for buyers and sellers of vehicles. Today, visitors to its website can search from a selection of over 465,000 vehicles.

Over 13,000 vehicle retailers use Auto Trader’s B2B Portal to manage their digital forecourt, upload images and descriptions to build the adverts that appear on the consumer-facing website, and respond to queries from prospective customers.

More and more retailers also choose to manage their online orders in Auto Trader’s portal, meaning the company must ensure it can provide the automotive customer experience those retailers expect.

Callum works on Auto Trader’s data and insight products for the company’s retail customers—a role that keeps him extremely busy due to how popular the products are:

“In the last 28 days we’ve had over 26,000 users in our Retail Portal, and 40% of all ads on the Auto Trader website are created there,” he said. “It’s used by over 13,000 retailers, all the way from small dealerships up to the largest franchise groups.”

Struggling to find the right data

One of the unintended drawbacks of having created a Retailer Portal with so much functionality was that it wasn’t as well-integrated as it could have been.

As Callum put it: “We recognized that whilst there’s loads of great insight and functionality inside Retailer Portal, but because things were built at different times they didn’t necessarily line up as well as we’d have liked them to.”

Callum and his team worried that retailers were taking too much time to reach the data they needed due to products being siloed in different areas of the platform.

This meant there was a risk some retailers were not benefitting from the full functionality of the portal.

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Using Contentsquare to investigate the problem

Callum’s team used Contentsquare to dig into user behavior in the portal, investigating automotive customer journeys, looking for broken journeys as well as points where customers were taking more steps than they needed.

“We wanted to understand more about the potential problem and see if we could validate that there was an issue,” Callum said.

By using Contentsquare to understand user behavior, the team was also able to see which products were getting less traction because users weren’t able to find them intuitively.

As part of this discovery phase, Callum and his team realized that many data points in the retailer portal were siloed in different areas and not integrated well enough into users’ core journeys, as highlighted by Contentsquare.

“This meant that retailers really had to seek out the data they needed and that some had been neglecting certain products because they didn’t know where to find them,” Callum explained.

“As a business, we stress the importance of data as part of decision-making. But many data points across our retailer portal were siloed in different areas and not integrated well enough into some of the core journeys that we saw users going through when analyzing in Contentsquare.”
— Callum Barker-Nicol, Business Analyst, Product and Platform Engineering at Auto Trader

One specific negative impact of this siloed data was that Auto Trader’s Market Insight product was getting fewer visits than Callum and his team wanted.

Digging deeper into automotive customer journeys

After this initial discovery phase, the team wanted to go further.

Alongside Contentsquare they used other methods, including the business intelligence tool Looker, face-to-face interviews with a variety of retail customers, and user testing of proposed UX solutions.

“We had our problem statement and key questions, and this is where we dug into Contentsquare some more,” Callum said. “We wanted to drill down into specific journeys where we knew that we might be able to make some improvements and start prototyping solutions.”

Callum and his team used Contentsquare’s Zoning Analysis to find out exactly where in the platform users were clicking. “Contentsquare was really useful again there,” Callum said.

At this point the team used the insights they had gathered to prototype potential solutions, both on paper and using high-level wireframes. Using the project management tool Miro and the collaborative interface design tool Figma, the team progressed towards producing what Callum described as “a high-fidelity prototype”.

From that, they came up with the final design—a new dashboard-based Vehicle Insight product.

“This is ultimately what we rolled out to customers to solve the problem that we’d used Contentsquare to identify at the start and to provide a much richer automotive customer journey and experience,” Callum said.

This dashboard breaks down how retailers’ live adverts are performing on the Auto Trader website, ranking the ad’s quality, whether there are enough images, how many leads it’s generated, how the price of the car compares with Auto Trader’s valuations, market health and more.

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“What we did was pull together all our data into one place so customers could be served it in one quick glance as they were coming into the platform. That’s a massive time saver for them.”

“Contentsquare helped us throughout that process. It helped us identify the optimal journey for us to embed this new solution to start with, and which products were not being fully utilized. We also dug into why that might be, whether due to broken journeys or siloes or just too many steps.”
— Callum Barker-Nicol, Business Analyst, Product and Platform Engineering at Auto Trader

The combination of user interviews and Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis helped his team identify the top priority for their customers and which areas of the portal were more heavily used. That helped them decide the most valuable data to add to their new dashboard-based solution.

“Contentsquare also complemented some of the raw data that we captured in Looker,” Callum added, “because Contentsquare is a more visual platform, which helped us see patterns in the data quicker.”

From Discovery to Business As Usual (BAU)

Auto Trader rolled out the Vehicle Insight solution to their 13,000-plus retail customers. “It got great traction and feedback,” Callum said, though, his team wouldn’t have known that if they hadn’t immediately started measuring the success of the solution post-launch.

They started tracking sessions and actions in Looker. Then they set up an internal feedback area in Slack for customers to post feedback about the solution. They also got direct feedback from some customers.

And the last piece of that tracking puzzle? Contentsquare.

As Callum explains: “Obviously we wanted to see what was happening on that page and how well it was performing. With Contentsquare we’ve been able to see exactly how people were interacting with that page, how much time they were spending in certain areas, and how many views the page was getting. We can even dig into some of the session replays as well to see what people were doing on the page, which gave us some really great insights.”

Based on those insights from Contentsquare, the company has been able to continue making small tweaks and developments to improve performance even further.

“Contentsquare was a key tool for us while we were building the Vehicle Insight product. It helped us build an understanding of what users were doing before and after the launch. We fed that into our development process and have continued to do that since. It also complemented some of our other tools and techniques.”
— Callum Barker-Nicol, Business Analyst, Product and Platform Engineering at Auto Trader

What’s next for Auto Trader?

Callum and his team plan to roll out even more functionality into the Retailer Portal, including a trended valuations tool allowing retailers to see a powerful view of historic and forecasted vehicle valuations.

“Contentsquare will continue to be a really critical part of our product development toolkit on exciting projects that we’ve got to come, and it has become BAU as we continue to improve products such as Vehicle Insight,” Callum concluded.

The post Improving automotive customer journeys with Contentsquare appeared first on Contentsquare.

No wonder digital professionals believe that data-driven insights will be a top trend in the customer experience (CX) space for 2024. According to our What’s Next in CX: 2024 Digital Customer Experience Trends report, more digital experiences will be powered by data-driven insights provided by analytics platforms.

It’s safe to say decision-making based on gut feeling is a thing of the past.

As a player in digital experience analytics, this is music to our ears! Naturally, we had to dig a little deeper to see what trends are set to dominate the market next year.

So, here are our top five digital analytics trends with insights from experts at leading brands such as Zoom, Snaplogic and Snowflake.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI)

No surprises here!

Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, AI is more accessible than ever. Both tools have been instrumental in helping people understand the value of AI and adopting it into their daily lives.

Today, almost half (48%) of business professionals already use data analysis, machine learning and AI to address data quality issues. Having seen just how powerful it is, they’re likely to continue investing in AI-powered analytics.

But it’s not just about automation or fixing data quality issues; AI accelerates the time to insights and allows for data analysis at scale.

Analyzing data across devices, pages and the user journey is extremely difficult to do manually. AI-powered analytics automates this by predicting user intent and making recommendations, such as where to place content or how to structure pages.

But you can’t have a good AI outcome without the correct data.

In digital analytics, collecting every click, tap, swipe, and conversion is key in order to predict user intent. So before jumping on the AI bandwagon, Denise encourages businesses not to overlook their data strategy:

“Everyone feels the pressure of creating an AI strategy. But you can’t have an AI strategy if you don’t have a data strategy first. Data is the main component of AI—it’s like having a machine without fuel. So you need to start with the data strategy for your organization. Then, you can build toward your AI strategy on top of that.”

— Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake.

2024 Digital CX Trends

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2. ROI on customer experience

According to Forrester, 84% of tech leaders expect spending growth in data and analytics, with (you guessed it) the AI tech category getting the biggest budget boost.

Although budgets are set to increase next year, the pressure will still be on tech, marketing and product teams to prioritize spending. This is where measuring the impact of CX optimizations and the return on investment (ROI) will be crucial.

Digital experiences must be tied back to revenue, cost of doing business, customer lifetime value and even sustainability. It’s often surprising to see that even large brands don’t have complete visibility into the performance of their website and apps and the impact that UX design can have on revenue.

It’s crucial that all teams work on shared insights to ensure that the changes they make have a positive impact on the business. Tim shares his thoughts:

“Measuring AI and making things actionable for data practitioners to execute will be key in 2024. So, turning data into reality and actually rolling it out. One of the things that my team struggles with is that we have all this data but have limited resources to execute those things. So how do we prioritize our work to have the biggest impact?”

— Tim White, VP of Marketing at Snaplogic

3. Scaling experimentation and optimization

Today, most businesses are set up to analyze data but not necessarily to take action.

In 2024, there will be a shift from speed to insights to speed to action. Experimentation provides businesses with the perfect opportunity to safely do this by showing that small incremental changes can make a big impact over time.

In fact, a recent survey by Kameloon revealed that organizations that invest in web experimentation are 350% more likely to grow.

Clearly, optimal scaling is crucial for businesses looking to drive results in 2024. Here’s Suman’s take on it:

“There’s always some buzzword flying around; first, it was the next-best action, personalization and now it’s Gen AI. But I think 2024 will be all about how you can scale effectively. It doesn’t sound sexy, but with all the great capabilities that are being introduced, it’s a matter of knowing who uses what and how they use it most optimally. So 2024 is going to be about optimal scaling.”

— Suman Patnaik, Vice President of Digital Analytics and Experimentation at Blackrock

Pierre also highlights that the economic uncertainty of 2024 will force businesses to be selective in their experimentation and optimization projects:

“People are still going to be constrained in 2024 by the macroeconomic environments. So it’s going to be about choice. We’ll have probably 20 ideas that we will want you to roll out as changes or optimizations, and we will have to find a way to select the five. It’s really going to have the best impact.”

— Pierre Casanova, Chief Revenue Officer at Contentsquare

4. Mobile-first optimization

Our 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark report showed that almost 70%  of all online visits now come from mobile, while just over 30% are from desktop. 

It also revealed that conversion rates on mobile fell last year, and are significantly lower than on desktop (2.19% mobile vs 4.03% desktop), meaning a mobile-first mindset is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses to make gains. 

Yet, the focus is still often on web-first. We see this flipped around, with businesses designing for mobile, and then scaling for desktop. And that’s where predictive mobile analytics comes in, helping businesses better understand mobile user behavior across devices and channels.

Alexandra highlights how important it is to understand user behavior to effectively optimize for each channel:

“We’ve been saying mobile-first for quite some time now, but it’s important to understand what your app is actually used for and why your customers are using your app mobile versus desktop, especially in a hybrid world. And then you should build for that in mind because it might not be a one-size-fits-all solution and your customers might be using your app for different aspects.”

—Alexandra London, Head of Digital at Zoom

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5. Insight-driven collaboration

Measuring CX is challenging not only due to fragmented tools and KPIs but also ownership.

CX is a cross-team, cross-functional and cross-journey sport. Tech, product and marketing teams must all align on common metrics with shared outcomes to deliver the experiences that people expect and deserve.

In 2024, digital analytics tools will help businesses democratize valuable data so that every function can access the same insights (without the help of data analysts or IT). Seamless data sharing and visualization will be key to fostering cross-team collaboration and insights-sharing.

Here’s what Paul says:

“The future of digital analytics is end-to-end; taking the user from start to finish. It’s about having a holistic experience with the customer. But it’s also about cookieless, multi-touch attribution and through-the-line analysis. So not having ‘above the line’ over here and ‘below the line’ over there. It’s about how can we bring them together so that we have a holistic view of analytics and digital.“

— Paul Mabb, Marketing Analytics Manager at Liverpool Victoria

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5. Private and secure by default

And that’s the way the cookie crumbles…

With the long-awaited phasing out of third-party (3P) cookies in 2024 and increased privacy concerns, businesses will need to take effective action to safeguard data security.

Consumers are more aware than ever before of their own data being exploited (thanks largely to the data breaches of leading brands). Government regulations have also become stricter, and companies are now required to follow increasingly stringent data protection laws—from GDPR in the EU to CCPA California.

A first-party data collection strategy will be imperative to creating meaningful experiences that are tailored to unique user needs. Analytics platforms must take a privacy-first approach to give website owners detailed insights into their user behavior without the use of 3P cookies.

Contentsquare is a good example of a privacy-first Digital Experience Analytics platform that uses intent-based customer data and insights to help businesses unlock a deeper understanding of customers without compromising security.

Veronika believes 2024 will be a balancing act between data protection and implementing CX trends like AI and hyper-personalization:

“In the realm of digitalization, 2024 will see a shift towards hyper-personalization, with AI-driven algorithms tailoring user experiences at an unprecedented level of granularity, while also prioritizing user consent and data protection in compliance with evolving privacy regulations.”

— Veronika Morozová, CRO Manager at IU International University of Applied Sciences

Get more insights into the latest digital analytics trends

Download our What’s Next in CX? 2024 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report to dive into ten digital customer experience trends set to dominate the landscape next year, as identified by a survey of 2700+ business professionals in marketing, UX and product roles from retail, B2B, financial services, telco and many more.

Get the report to find out:

• Which digital trends digital professionals think will matter most
• How digital professionals think about these trends (and how to adapt to them)
• What you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond

Plus, find out how our digital experience analytics platform is already putting these future trends into practice to help brands increase customer happiness and drive growth.

2024 Digital CX Trends

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The right metrics help you find improvement opportunities and create a standout digital customer experience. They’re also essential to measure the impact of individual product features and help with product performance analysis. 

But wait, which product metrics matter most? And how can digital teams use these metrics to encourage user engagement and drive business growth? 

We’ll go over five essential product analytics metrics to track and why engaging digital experiences are built on analytics that go beyond metrics. 

1. Daily Active Users (DAUs)

DAUs measure the number of unique users interacting with your product (i.e., performing an action or accessing your app‌.) This user engagement metric clearly shows how many customers actively use your product. 

To calculate DAUs, count the number of unique users who interact with your product‌. Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics, product analytics platforms like Heap and digital experience analytics platforms like Contentsquare to track this metric. 

2. Monthly Active Users (MAUs)

If DAUs measure daily interactions, MAUs give you insights into user engagement in the last 30 days. It’s the perfect metric to measure how your product keeps users over time and how regularly they come back to use it. 

Calculate MAUs by counting the unique users interacting with your product in a month. Similarly, platforms like Google Analytics, Heap and Contentsquare can help track MAUs. 

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much are you spending to bring new users to your product? 

That’s what CAC helps answer – a chief concern of anyone reviewing budgets, product strategy or the efficiency of your sales and marketing funnel. 

Calculate CAC by adding up the sales and marketing costs associated with attracting new leads and customer acquisition. Divide this number by the number of new customers gained in that period.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

As per the name, CLV describes how much a customer spends during their relationship with your business.

You’ll know how much you can afford to spend to gain a new customer. More importantly, you’ll know how valuable your product is to customers. 

CLV formula: Average customer revenue/month  average customer lifetime in month 

5. Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

How do you fix a leaky bucket? 

You can either pour more water to make up for the lost water, or fix the hole. 

In product analytics, customer churn rate measures how much water you’re ‘leaking’ – or the percentage of customers who stop using your product. High churn rates show user dissatisfaction or low engagement –  something you want to address as soon as possible. 

Calculate the monthly churn rate by dividing the number of customers you lost over the month by the number of customers you had at the beginning. Multiply the result by 100.

How to use product analytics metrics to improve product engagement 

Making decisions based on assumptions isn’t proactive or efficient. Thankfully, having the right data on hand can help you avoid this sticky situation. 

We’ve outlined two situations where referring to product metrics can help you make intentional decisions to improve your product and grow your business.

Situation 1: A high DAU but a low MAU. 

This situation suggests users are using your product frequently but irregularly. 

You could try to improve this by adding new features or content to your product that addresses your customer’s needs, or by identifying user friction in your digital customer journey to make it easier for users to return regularly.

Situation 2: A high CAC but a low CLV 

When your metrics trend in this direction, it suggests you’re spending too much money to acquire new customers.

It’s not an ideal situation to be in. 

But don’t fret, there’s a way out. 

To reduce CAC, focus on more efficient marketing and sales channels, or improve customer retention by investing time to understand their digital needs and expectations. 

Track your product analytics metrics with Contentsquare 

Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics platform that helps you track and analyze user behavior across all of your digital channels, including your website, mobile app, and email.

With Contentsquare, you can track all the critical product analytics metrics along with other metrics to get a full picture of your customer journey from acquisition to conversion to retention.

Contentsquare tracks behavioral metrics like: 

• Session length
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Product feature usage

Any of these burning questions seem familiar to you? 

• What features are users using the most?
• Where are users getting stuck or dropping off?
• What are users searching for?

Contentsquare’s insights help you answer these questions, and more. 

In a world where customer acquisition costs are on the rise and competition is fierce, you’ll need ready answers to these questions. 

By monitoring these product analytics metrics, product teams can understand how they’re meeting customer needs and identify opportunities for improvement. 

The result? With the right insights, you’ll know how to retain existing customers, build lasting relationships and give them more value – a win-win for your customers and business bottom line.

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In an exponentially growing global app market where customer acquisition costs are spiraling, user retention is what separates the app pack leaders from the rest.¹

To retain users, you’ve got to engage users. But that isn’t easy—particularly when even non-social apps are competing for attention with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.

We’re here to make it easier. Keep reading to find out:

• Why mobile app engagement matters so much
• 5 in-app design tips to increase engagement on your app (with best practice examples from Duolingo, Strava and MoneyCoach)
• How to use app analytics to measure and optimize engagement

Why engaging app users matters

Users who consistently and purposefully interact with your app are considered ‘engaged’.

Engaged users use your app on a regular basis, and tend to interact with it to achieve a particular goal—whether that’s finding some entertaining content, buying a new pair of sneakers or making a bank transfer. And they’re more likely to:

• Spend with you (through in-app purchases, subscriptions and/or exposure to advertising)
• Spread the good word about you
• Leave a glowing review for you on the app store

Unengaged users, by contrast, will either:

• Forget your app exists (only to uninstall it without a second thought when they need to free up some smartphone space)
• Decide your app isn’t worth using and uninstall it immediately
• Uninstall it immediately and leave you a poor review

Engaged users are valuable users, and growing your app engagement rate will grow your user base and grow the loyalty and lifetime value (LTV) of the users who make up that base.

5 tips for maximizing mobile app engagement

1: Optimize your onboarding process

Your app should be engaging users as soon as they open it for the first time.

Here’s a quick three-point checklist on how to make your onboarding experience as engaging as possible:

1. Keep it brief: New users want to start using your app as soon as they can. If your onboarding gets in the way of that, they’ll quickly feel unengaged—or worse.
2. Sell your app’s benefits: Take first-time users on a product tour during onboarding to show them what they’ll get out of your app if they use it correctly. Echoing again on brevity, keep it concise: 3-5 panels should be enough to get the value across.
3. Make it interactive: Get new users to answer questions, set their own goals and try out features during onboarding. This will get them using your app straight away, make them feel invested in the experience, and provide you with data that will help you craft a more engaging app experience.

We go into a lot more detail on how to optimize onboarding in our article ‘App Onboarding: How to take yours from okay to outstanding’.

2: Engage through education

Educating your users shouldn’t stop with onboarding. After all, many users will skip onboarding, while those who didn’t skip it might still forget what you showed them in it. Plus, any new features you add to your app will require highlighting and future explanation.

Remember, educating users doesn’t just make them better users—it makes them more invested in using (and not deleting) your app.

Here’s a few ideas about how to go about that:

• Product tours: As onboarding, 3-5 panels can be deployed to draw attention to new features, especially after users have updated your app
• Tooltips: Hints, tips and descriptions that pop up over key features before they’re used for the first time. (Careful with these: A smartphone screen can get overcrowded, fast.)
• Messaging/notification section: to deliver news to users, or to prompt them to try or learn something new.

3: Gamify wherever possible

As anybody who’s ever stayed up until the early hours playing Call of Duty until their fingers and eyes hurt (just me?) can attest, tech doesn’t get much more engaging than video games.

App gamification seeks to harness that addictive power by borrowing principles and mechanics from game design and applying it to app design.

Fundamentally, this boils down to incentivizing engagement by rewarding app users for taking actions—encouraging them to repeat actions they’ve taken before, and/or take new actions to get different or better rewards.

What gamification will look like differs for different apps:

• Shopping and food ordering apps could give users points for purchases that can eventually be exchanged for a complimentary item. That’s what Starbucks does with its “star” system, in which app users get stars for using the app to spend, and can exchange 150 stars for a drink of their choice.
• Finserv apps are increasingly giving out points/badges that recognize users’ achievements, such as saving a certain sum of money.
• Health and Fitness apps often set targets for users to reach (e.g. reach 10,000 steps in a day)—and reward them with achievement badges that can be shared both within the app and through social media

As you can see, rewards don’t have to be financial. As video games have demonstrated, you can incentivize people with virtual rewards that have no tangible ‘real world’ value. The important thing is they have a personal value for users in representing their own achievements.

Take the language learning app Duolingo, for example. Duolingo is great at making users feel rewarded for completing lessons with virtual rewards like XP points, gems and streaks.

These gems and points may just be pixels on a screen, but they have real value for Duolingo users, who will keep coming back to collect more of them.

This benefits Duolingo, of course, but it also benefits the app’s users, making learning their language of choice a daily habit.

4: Make your app sociable

People want to connect with other people, and if you can design your app to tap into this desire you can drive engagement through the roof. (Just ask Facebook.)

A simple way to get started is to place social buttons on your app, enabling your users to share their in-app activity on other platforms.

But for really engaging results, your app should include social elements of its own.

Here’s why: If you make your users feel part of an app-based community, they’ll be less likely to leave that community (and uninstall your app).

Make your app a point of connection between your users and their real-life friends and you’re on the way to making it an indispensable part of their lives.

The fitness tracking app Strava serves as an exemplary model of the power of adding social elements to an app that isn’t primarily a social app.

You and your Strava-equipped friends can follow each other (and other members), give each other “kudos” for workouts, leave comments and add each other to activities when you’re working out together.

Users can also set up group challenges and create and/or join public and private clubs and compete to head up leaderboards.

Here, social media tactics meet gamification—and the result is next-level engagement.

5: Personalize your app experience

Providing your app users with connections to their friends is one way of driving engagement. Being a friend to your users is another. And that’s where personalization comes in.

While being careful not to come across as intrusive, your team should be drawing on the data users have consented to share with you to tailor their experiences for optimal engagement.

The goal here is not only to give them a better experience—it’s to make them feel like your app ‘knows’ what they need from it, cares that they get it and is giving them it.

And the best time to start this process is…? Immediately.

That’s what budgeting app MoneyCoach does. Early in the app’s onboarding process, users are assured that their experience will be personalized.

They’re then asked to submit information about their financial income and outgoings and to specify what they hope to achieve by using the app.

Henceforth, every piece of advice the app gives each user will be based upon this initial personalization—and crucially, they know it.

They’ll also be reminded how valuable MoneyCoach has been in helping them to save money.

The message is clear: MoneyCoach knows them, and knows how to get them what they want, so long as they keep engaging with the app. This is a valuable relationship—and that’s a hard thing to break up.

Bonus tip: In-app notifications

Hey, we know we said 5 tips. But we couldn’t write a blog about mobile app engagement without at least mentioning in-app notifications.

In-app notifications can be used to remind users of all sorts of things—incomplete tasks, items requiring their attention, new products or promotions they might find interesting, etc.

They’re also proven tools for engagement: Sending in-app messages that are specifically tailored to their profile and/or behavior on your app has been shown to improve user retention rates.

A word of caution, though: There are few things more annoying than an app that goes overboard with notifications, particularly if they’ve got nothing to do with our preferences and in-app behavior.

So be smart with the notifications you send. They should be concise, laser-focused and above all necessary. Remember: just because you’ve got something to say doesn’t mean it needs to be said in a notification.

How to measure mobile app engagement

Many articles on the topic of measuring mobile app engagement will feature something like the following equation:

Monthly (or weekly, or daily) active users / Total users  x 100 = Engagement rate

In fact, your app’s level of engagement can’t be boiled down to a single metric.

To understand how engaging your app experience is, you need to build the most comprehensive and nuanced picture of that experience possible by measuring relevant engagement metrics at every level of the experience.

What constitutes “relevant” here will depend on what your app is and what your goals are. Shopping apps will want to measure cart addition and purchase conversion; news and content apps will monitor daily usage, time on site/page, articles read per session, and so on.

Whatever metrics you’re measuring, though, you’ll want to measure them at three levels:

• App-level: To give you an overall picture of your app’s engagement level and understand how effective your overall strategy is.
  • Examples: Bounce rate, conversions, conversion rate, screen-view average, revenue, session time average and number of sessions.
• Screen-level: To give you an understanding of the engagement level of particular screens, helping you ‘zoom in’ to resolve issues.
  • Examples: Bounce rate, conversion rate, activity rate, screen height, fold height, time spent/interaction time, landing rate, and load time.
• Zone-level: Zone-based analysis shows you exactly how users are interacting with on-screen elements, which elements are and aren’t working—and how this ties into conversion and revenue.
  • Examples: Tap rate, tap recurrence, conversion rate per tap, revenue per tap, swipe rate, and time before first tap

Measure, analyze and optimize mobile app engagement with Contentsquare

CS Apps, our app analytics solution, enables you to track your users’ behavior at every level of the app experience.

And what’s more, it gives you tools such as Journey Analysis and Session Replay, with which you can investigate the ‘why’ behind that behavior.

Let’s say you notice app users aren’t tapping on a particular CTA button (and it’s impacting your app’s conversion rate).

By rewatching an affected session on Session Replay, you may realize that users are tapping on a non-button element instead, suggesting this element is misleadingly designed.

That’s just one of countless examples of how CS Apps can help you understand your users and your mobile app experience so it can be optimized for better outcomes.

And if you’d like to book a demo today, we’d be happy to show you some more of what CS Apps can do.

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• • 1. Simplicity DX: New Research Shows a 222% Increase in Customer Acquisition Costs Puts Renewed Focus on E-Commerce Profitability, App Developer Magazine: The mobile app market is still growing to hit 571 billion by 2030

The post Mobile app engagement: How to measure and master it appeared first on Contentsquare.

Keep reading to find out why crashes are customer retention kryptonite, and how a DEM solution will help make sure app crashes don’t crush your app’s reputation.

Crashes (when they’re not caused by users) are the oh-so-annoying but inevitable by-product of the complex, fast-paced app development process.

Best practices and processes around development should help you limit the frequency and impact of crashes, but to serve users a (relatively) crash-free app experience you need to crush the pesky bugs that will get through even the tightest procedural nets.

And for that you need mobile app analytics—and digital experience monitoring (DEM).

In this article we’ll explain how DEM acts as a crash barrier for apps. But first, let’s remind ourselves of the reputational and financial damage crashes can do.

Everytime your app crashes, it costs you users…

As we explained in our recent blog on app onboarding, user retention is the name of the game when it comes to running a successful app.

And while there are many ways to engage users and keep them onboard, there’s no quicker way of losing them than serving them a buggy, broken, crash-prone app experience.

Customer expectations around the app experience have never been higher—and what customers expect above all else is that an app works. And, of course, they don’t always work.

You can probably think of times when an app you’ve been using has broken down—especially if that happened at precisely the worst moment it could happen.

• How about that time you tried to log in to use payment information for a 3rd party payment provider on an app, pressed ‘submit’ and were told to try again later?

• Or when you filled in your delivery details at the checkout and then the app only went ahead and crashed (and when you reopened the app, those painstakingly entered details had melted away)…

• And then shouted something very rude at your phone, which was really intended for the app (and the app developers) that you’d never say in front of your granny?

When this sort of thing happens, what you do next depends on two things:

1. How much you trust and depend upon this app—if it’s important to you, it will take a lot more than a crash to make you uninstall
2. How many times the app has crashed before (and how recently it last crashed)—if it’s crashed multiple times before—and has crashed recently—you might decide enough is enough

That’s why, if (say) Spotify or TikTok crashes from time to time, though it will do them some damage, it isn’t necessarily a complete disaster. That’s because both apps:

1. Are deemed essential to their users
2. Malfunction comparatively rarely—so much so that when a major malfunction happens (as it did to Instagram in May 2023) it makes the international news

Most apps aren’t Facebook—and so aren’t given the leeway that ‘essential’ apps like Facebook are, particularly in the first few weeks and months of usage.

During this period, the user’s commitment to your app is precarious. A single crash or malfunctioning button could be enough to prompt an uninstall.

This is particularly true of crashes and bugs that interfere with crucial user actions.

• At checkout on an retail app, where a crash could frustrate a customer who’s excited to make a purchase, or even prompt security fears…
• Or when a customer is filling in a form on a banking app to make a transfer or pay a bill, have entered various pieces of information and—thanks to a crash—now have to start over again (Grrrrr.)

A badly timed crash can be extremely damaging to your users’ patience with and trust in your app—and that can spell disaster for your reputation.

… And can deter potential users, too

The cost of frustrating app users is much higher than the cost of failing to engage them.

If they’re bored by the experience they’ll likely not use your app and they’ll probably uninstall it—but they’re unlikely to complain about it.

Really unhappy customers make themselves heard. Many will vent their frustration on social media—as NFL app users did recently when the app repeatedly crashed during games.

Others will leave negative reviews on app stores, possibly knocking your app’s rating down a half or full star (or more) and making it less attractive to download in the first place.

For example, here’s a review that appears near the top of the current pile for Kindle’s app on Apple’s App Store.

A review of the Kindle app, taken from the App Store

Doesn’t exactly fill you with excitement about downloading it, does it?

Again, Kindle is such a popular (and, for Kindle readers, essential) app that it can weather the storm of one or two bad reviews—at least for a time.

Your app might not be so lucky.

How digital experience monitoring helps minimize app crashes

It’s no secret that keeping an app up, running and up to date is extremely challenging. (The pressure it puts on developers is one reason they make the minor coding errors that can cause crashes.)

Unfortunately, it’s also extremely challenging to locate, understand and resolve technical issues as fast as they need to be resolved to avoid seriously impacting the user experience.

Unless you have a digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution to support you.

DEM solutions monitor the availability, performance and quality of app user experiences to proactively identify and resolve technical and performance issues.

Our own app analytics solution CS Apps, which gives businesses actionable insights into every area of their app user experience, features powerful DEM capabilities.

We’ll touch on those capabilities below, as we run through the three main ways that a DEM solution should help you track down and take down those pesky bugs.

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1. Real-time error and app crash detection

Finding out your app is crashing or bugging out via a bad review (or a flood of them) is far from ideal. Damage has already been done, and you can’t delete those bad reviews!

Time is, therefore, of the essence in detecting errors and crashes. Your response needs to be as proactive as possible.

A DEM solution will make that possible, detecting errors for you and sending real-time alerts to your dev team.

Of course, there could be dozens of errors to deal with at once, some more high-priority (a.k.a. damaging) than others.

That’s why a high-caliber DEM solution can help you detect errors, and then prioritize those detected errors for you according to their prevalence and projected impact to your app experience and business.

How CS Apps helps

2. Mobile app performance monitoring

Your app’s performance (that is, how well it functions and how responsive it is to your end user) has a huge impact on both your quality of user experience and the frequency of crashes.

Consumers are used to fast, seamless experiences, and keeping them waiting even a few seconds can be disastrous. Performance dips will result in users feeling frustrated at “best”—and at worst will cause app crashes.

There are many factors that can slow down your app’s performance, including:

• Dead code which is still executing despite its output not being used
• Redundant features that are mostly unused but still ‘bloat’ your app
• Non-optimized images eating up resources and slowing down your app
• Malfunctioning APIs with latency and reliability issues

The list goes on. But to address these underlying (and often tricky to detect) causes, you need to know when and where you have a performance problem.

A DEM solution should help you here, giving you vital insights into how your app is performing (down to the level of individual screens) at all times.

That’s because there’s a direct relationship between your app’s performance level and technical errors, so being alerted to errors puts you in a great position to discover and fix performance issues.

How CS Apps helps

3. Understand the ‘why’ behind app crashes

When it comes to fixing errors and preventing crashes, knowing that something is going wrong is only half the battle.

The other half? Working out why things have gone wrong, so you can do something about it.

A good DEM solution will help you fight this side of the battle, too.

Combining error alerts and performance data can be enough to point your team in the direction of a root cause—but they won’t always validate it.

For example:

• An error alert tells you that XX thousand sessions have been affected by an API error on your app’s checkout screen…
• Where you know there’s a payment button which could be the potential cause…
• However, there are other potential culprits on that screen—so how do you test your hypothesis?

A great DEM solution will give you the analytic tools to see things from an affected users’ point of view, and to analyze the behavior of users who have experienced an error in order to more accurately and quickly get at the underlying cause of an error.

How CS Apps helps

CS Apps arms you with investigative tools to surface granular behavioral data that will help you understand the root cause of errors and crashes.

Using Session Replay, for example, your team can play back individual (anonymized) user sessions that have been impacted by high-priority, revenue-impacting errors and understand where and why things have gone wrong.

In the case of our example scenario, Session Replay would allow you to watch back sessions affected by the checkout error and confirm if the API errors are related to a payment element or functionality on the screen.

As well as helping to confirm hypotheses based on macro-level error analysis (such as an API error), replays can be shared with technical teams and decision makers to speed up issue resolution.

CS Apps users can also discover if errors are related to particular journey paths by using Customer Journey Analysis.

For example, you might see that users are experiencing crashes when navigating from ‘product screen X’ to ‘product screen Y’—but not from ‘product screen Z’ to ‘product screen Y’.

This suggests that (product screen) X marks the spot. Dig around here and you’ll probably discover the culprit behind those crashes.

With CS Apps, you can make your app experience friction-free and delight-full

Hopefully, this article has shown you how CS Apps helps take friction and frustration out of your mobile app experience by reducing the negative impact of bugs and app crashes.

But that’s far from all that our comprehensive app analytics solution can do.

With CS Apps, you can:

• Optimize every user journey from end-to-end with app analytics that goes beyond traditional touch and tap metrics to offer rich contextual behavioral insights
• Understand how users are interacting with your app, how they feel about it, and how to improve the experience to drive retention and conversion
• Quantify the impact of issues and opportunities to prioritize your workload and development roadmap and optimize your user experience on a continuous basis

In short: CS Apps can take your app experience from sub-par to five-star.

Don’t believe us? Book a demo with one of our experts today and you can see for yourself what your app’s currently missing.

Elevate your app, giving users a five-star experience and driving growth for your business.

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The post Crash and churn: How to stop app crashes from ruining your retention rate appeared first on Contentsquare.

Bringing together extraordinary guest experiences

Atlantis Dubai is a leader in the travel and hospitality industry with its iconic destination, including two world-class resorts, Atlantis The Royal and Atlantis The Palm, and the world’s biggest waterpark, Aquaventure. With the region’s most awarded Michelin stars in one destination, it’s also considered one of Dubai’s premier dining destinations.

“We aim to deliver extraordinary experiences to all our guests,” says Declan Kilcourse, Marketing Director at Atlantis Dubai. “Whether you’re staying in one of our underwater suites at The Palm, one of our Sky Pool Villas at The Royal or trying some of our record-breaking slides at Aquaventure—it’s about creating unique experiences you can’t get anywhere else, all in one destination.”

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What key challenges is your digital team facing?

The team at Atlantis Dubai started this year with a bang, launching their second resort Atlantis The Royal, in February of this year.

Opening a new hotel is no small feat and for Declan’s digital team it meant refining their digital strategy and managing a brand new website. All three websites live under the same domain, atlantis.com, which has made “understanding website users and their digital journeys challenging,” says Declan.

The team lacked the data-driven insights to grasp how their users navigate and interact across their different websites. “This is why we turned to Contentsquare,” says Declan.

“Understanding who your customers are and why they’re coming to your site will help you ensure you meet their expectations and provide the best possible digital experience.” —Declan Kilcourse, Marketing Director, Digital and CRM, Atlantis Dubai

What stood out to you about Contentsquare?

First and foremost, Declan highlights how easy the data visualizations in the Contentsquare platform make it to understand data insights.

“What stood out to us about Contentsquare was the simplicity of the platform and the ease of use.” —Declan Kilcourse, Marketing Director, Digital and CRM, Atlantis Dubai

He points out four features that have impressed the digital team the most about Contentsquare.

Firstly, the signature sunburst visualization in Customer Journey Analysis provides helpful insights into how their users navigate their websites and allows his team to “dig deeper into their digital journeys”.

Secondly, he mentions Zone-Based Heatmaps, that reveal how users interact with each site element. “It isn’t just a standard heatmap that shows you somebody scrolling through your website,” says Declan. “There’s so many different filters and metrics that can be applied that provide powerful insights”.

Thirdly, he says that Session Replay was a big draw for his team: “Being able to jump into a replay of this session that a user has taken adds more context to certain questions that you might have about what’s happening.”

Finally, he highlights the scalability of the Contentsquare platform. “The capability is there to get granular, detailed data, but you can also stay on a surface level to get a bird’s eye view,” shares Declan. The Atlantis team have been able to create custom dashboards and funnels, which in his words, “was something that we couldn’t get as easily in the other analytics tools that we were using”.

“We’re thrilled with the Contentsquare platform and their customer success team. They’re very engaged and active with us—they’re always sending us use cases, helping us get the most out of the platform. Plus, they’re friendly, engaging and easy to work with.” —Declan Kilcourse, Marketing Director, Digital & CRM, Atlantis Dubai

Why are digital guest experience insights so important?

“Our website is our brand’s digital front door,” says Sylvana. “We want our guests to have a seamless journey across all our digital touchpoints.”

Sylvana highlights that with a platform like Contentsquare, they can pinpoint friction in those journeys, understand why it’s happening and take immediate action. “We’re able to make it effortless for guests to finalize whatever they need to across our websites,” she says.

Not only does Contentsquare allow the digital team to find the cause of an issue or error, but it allows them to segment different audiences. “We can drill down into the date, channel, source and page and watch the users’ session on replay to find the root of the problem,” explains Sylvana.

This detailed insight allows them to personalize the journey for each user segment. “We can segment users landing on our site from a specific campaign and then test, optimize and personalize their journey,” says Sylvana. “Contentsquare shows us if our test results are positive or negative, helping us continuously enhance our guests’ digital experiences across our website.”

“Our goal is to give our guests a better, more intuitive digital experience. Whether they’re looking to stay at one of our resorts, book a restaurant, explore the waterpark, or simply find out what Atlantis Dubai is, we need to give them a frictionless experience and meet their expectations when they land on our website.” — Sylvana Maalouf, Digital Marketing Manager, Atlantis Dubai

What key learnings have you made with Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform so far?

Declan shares how after launching their second resort, Atlantis The Royal, the team wanted to understand whether users behaved differently across their sites.

Using Contentsquare, they were able to discover:

• How guests interact between the different sites.
• Whether guests search for potential availability to stay in both properties.
• How guests search for availability in their new hotel.
• How guests explore Waterpark offers and F&B options.

“It was fascinating understanding the steps guests take as they explore our destination landing page ,” says Declan.

Digital experience analytics is also helping align the digital team at Atlantis Dubai around the same data insights. Sylvana chimes in: “All the data analysis we do is shared with the brand team and other business units to ensure that we are collaborating and making the right decisions when it comes to making changes to the website.”

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You’re recommending us to a friend in your industry. You have 30 seconds; what would you say?

“Contentsquare has changed how our team works on our website and how we optimize content by delivering valuable insights into how users are converting. It enables us to make well-informed decisions and, ultimately, elevates the website impact across different goals—whether it’s conversions or brand awareness,” says Sylvana Maalouf.

A quick word from Contentsquare

“It’s been a pleasure to have worked with Atlantis in Dubai, a renowned hotel brand and a global icon. I see it as a true partnership between Atlantis, Contentsquare, and Like Digital, where we have all contributed to a frictionless digital journey for Atlantis customers,” said Ahmad Salama, Vice President & General Manager, MENAT at Contentsquare.

To find out how you can align your team around data insights and optimize your digital experience and customer journeys, watch our 6-minute product tour or book a personalized demo with one of our experts.

The post How Contentsquare is helping Atlantis Dubai ensure a world-class digital guest experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

Onboarding is an essential but fiendishly tricky art for all app developers to master.

In this article, we’re going to help you master that art, covering:

• Why getting onboarding right is vital to your app’s success
• 8 UX principles you can follow to improve your onboarding process (with best practice examples from Headspace, Duolingo, Revolut and Calm)
• How an app analytics platform can help you take your onboarding from functional to exceptional

Why onboarding is the most important factor in retention

Retaining users is what separates successful apps from not-so-successful (or outright disastrous) apps, and the project of user retention starts from the moment your users start onboarding.

Not only is app onboarding crucial for keeping users hooked in the first seconds and minutes post download, but it also determines your chances of holding onto them through week one, two, three, four—and beyond.

According to Hubspot, there are three phases of customer retention:

1. Short-term retention: Week one, where your aim is to get users to use the product more than once
2. Mid-term retention: Week one to four, where you’re trying to get users to establish a pattern of regular usage
3. Long-term retention: After week four, your aim is to make your users see your app as an indispensable tool

While you might be forgiven for thinking that onboarding only helps with the short-term stage here, it’s actually the essential first step that makes short, mid and long term retention possible.

To explain why, let’s look at…

The critical functions of app onboarding

1. Get users registered

At its most functional level, an onboarding process should guide new users through your app’s registration and log-in process (if it has one).

Registering and logging in during a first session will save new users from having to log in every other time they open your app, but it will also enable you (with their consent) to start collecting their data and begin personalizing their experience through tailored notifications and recommendations.

This will help you start engaging them, which gives you a better chance of them establishing a pattern of usage and starting to feel connected and loyal to your app.

2. Teach users how to use your app—and the value of it

Onboarding should also educate users on how they can best use your app and why using the app is worthwhile, sharing important features and capabilities, tips and tricks, and benefits.

Communicating the value of your app is critical. If your users are able to immediately grasp why your app is beneficial to them, they’ll be much more likely to use it more than once, establish a pattern of usage and—ultimately—come to view your app as an indispensable tool.

Let’s say your app is a banking app that offers the following capabilities around budgeting:

• Categorizes the user’s spending
• Lists their active subscriptions
• Enables them to set saving goals (and helps them achieve it)

This is all great stuff, and will certainly have a big impact on the user’s ability to manage their finances. Make that crystal clear at this stage by talking about the benefits, like so:

• Understand exactly where your money is going each month with categorized spending
• See all your subscriptions at a glance (including the ones you’re paying for but not using!)
• Set yourself a savings goal and we’ll help you stick to it (and suggest extra ways to save yourself money!)

By including the benefit of these features, you’ll have helped your new user start painting a mental picture of how much better their life will be if they start using your app in earnest.

3. Make a great first impression

The onboarding experience is where you get to roll out the red carpet for new users, giving them a flavor of the sort of experience they can expect from your app once they start using it.

If that experience looks good and feels good, they’re going to go into their first experience of using your app in an excited, receptive mood—and that can make all the difference.

8 UX principles to improve your app onboarding process

In a world of shrinking attention spans, consumers are short on patience—particularly when using their smartphones, where on-screen notifications and off-screen events are constantly vying for their eyeballs.

This means that your app onboarding process has to be extremely engaging to hook users, and keep them hooked, so that they don’t skip important steps.

You also have to avoid frustrating new users in any way—by confusing them, for example, or simply by taking up too much of their time with tutorials.

Your onboarding can be off-putting (or just not engaging) in all sorts of ways, but here’s eight principles you can follow to help make yours as engaging and frustration-free as possible.

1. Keep it brief

Onboarding should be as simple, smooth and fast as possible. Otherwise, it quickly becomes less of an aid to users than an annoyance.

Time is of the essence. In one survey, almost three quarters (72%) of respondents said that completing all onboarding steps in less than a minute was important in their decision to keep using an app.

So clear the path to completion of anything that doesn’t need to be there. Your onboarding process shouldn’t contain too many steps, too much copy, too much explanation—and not enough progression.

2. Show progression

Speaking of progression, it’s important to give users a clear indication of how much progress they’ve made—particularly if your onboarding process is necessarily a little lengthier.

A progress bar will help them feel less impatient (and will help your developers laser-focus on keeping things as brief as possible).

Duolingo’s wildly popular and beautifully designed app, for example, asks new users to answer a series of questions about their skill level and goals.

This is a necessary process for an app that offers personalized learning—but there’s a risk that users could feel frustrated if they don’t know how long the onboarding process will take.

Et voilà! (I’m learning French.) By adding a progress bar, Duolingo reassures the user this won’t take too long—and, incidentally, subtly makes them feel that they’re already making progress on their learning journey.

3. Sell your app’s benefits

Remember: Just because they’ve downloaded your app doesn’t mean they’re bought in.

Onboarding is your chance to make it crystal clear exactly why users should be using your app regularly—and how it will improve their lives.

Of course, explaining how to use your app’s key features is an essential part of a tutorial-type onboarding process. But if users can’t quickly (and we mean very quickly) see why they should use those features, then (newsflash!) they won’t use them.

Make sure the benefits that come with using your app are communicated loud and clear during your app onboarding process.

That’s what money management app Revolut does. Even before the user has logged in or signed up they get a quick, Instagram-story style tour of what they can do with the app, complete with animations demonstrating the functionality (and a progress bar!).

4. Make your app onboarding interactive

Ever heard of the principle: “Show, don’t tell”? It’s often applied to movies and TV shows, but it can be applied to lots of things, including software product demos—and app onboarding.

Telling your new user about the features and benefits of your app can work perfectly well, but showing them how things work by having them interact with your app—particularly if your app experience is highly interactive—can be even more powerful.

So ask them questions. Let them set their own goals. Have them try out features.

This serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it engages the user straight away, instead of serving them a series of slides to passively consume (and possibly just skip through).

At the same time, it enables you to personalize the user’s subsequent experience and make it immediately more engaging.

The meditation and mindfulness app Headspace provides a shining example of making onboarding interactive.

After asking some initial questions to establish the new user’s goals, the app launches into a (skippable) short exercise in which the new user takes a few protracted breaths, guided by an animated on-screen bar, and after which the user is asked how they’re feeling.

This is a fantastic little lesson in using interactivity to demonstrate how your app works and the benefits it can bring during onboarding. (We particularly like how Headspace uses haptic feedback to focus the attention of the new user.)

5. If you require information, explain why

Many users are justifiably wary of handing over personal information to yet another platform/app when registering.

Clearly, you need to reassure users that their data is safe with you, but this also offers you an opportunity to demonstrate that value we were just talking about.

Make it clear to users that sharing their data will help personalize and improve their experience so they get even more value out of your app.

Intermittent fasting app Fastic does this in a subtle and effective way by leading with the benefit (“let’s personalize your plan to get you the best results”) and then reassuring users that their data is protected—with an icon linking to more information if users require it.

6. Use app onboarding to sell new users on push notifications

Push notifications can be an irritant to app users (and, if they’re not already a fan of your app, a reason to delete it)—but they’re also a powerful tool for securing user retention.

One study found that app users who received one or more notifications in their first 90 days had an average retention rate that was 3x higher than users who received no push notifications.

Because of the potential annoyance factor, you should always ask new users if they wish to receive notifications (Android 13 requires it of apps, in fact), and onboarding is the natural time to do this.

And, since you want them to allow you to send them push notifications, you should frame your request by explaining how notifications will benefit them—as in the examples from Calm and Duolingo below.

7. Enable registration through social and platform accounts

While entering a few registration details (like a name or an email address) might not seem like a hugely time-consuming process, to first time app users, it can be an irritant that overshadows their whole experience.

Popular apps now offer the option to register through Facebook, Google, Apple (etc.) with a few taps of the thumb. Remember: Whatever smooth onboarding or log in experiences are offered by the leading apps, app users tend to expect across all apps.

8. Be visual—but keep it simple

A picture can tell a thousand words, and a short animation a hundred thousand, so you’ll probably want to make use of eye-catching graphic elements when designing your onboarding process.

However, remember that new users are liable to be overwhelmed (and irritated) if you throw too many visuals at them at this stage—and may get the impression that your actual app experience is likely to be visually over-busy, too.

Few brands have a greater stake in not overwhelming new users than Calm—and their commitment to minimalist UX is immediately obvious when a user onboards for the first time.

The first screen new users of Calm see is maximally attention-grabbing because of its minimalism—and is followed by a very simple menu of usage-goals (that also functions as a list of benefits).

This is elegant design—highly engaging and not all overwhelming.

How app analytics can make onboarding outstanding

Apply the principles we’ve shared above to your app onboarding design process and you’re likely to see improvements in both your onboarding completion rate and overall user retention rate.

However, the next level of best practices for app onboarding—the practices that separate the apps people love from the apps they don’t use—only become an option when you measure your success and user experience with app analytics.

By monitoring your users’ behaviors in granular detail, both during and after the onboarding process, you can really understand how effective that process is, and how effective your subsequent optimization efforts are.

Without an app analytics platform, you’ll be forced to track your onboarding process by building your own Google Analytics funnels and manually tagging screen elements—which, aside from being a highly laborious process, yields limited insights.

Knowing how many steps in the onboarding process users are taking on average isn’t going to tell you why they’ve mostly taken (or not taken) those steps—let alone helping you understand the effect that taking those steps has on their subsequent usage.

With the right app analytics platform, however, you can get real visibility into how users are experiencing your app onboarding, both throughout and after the process.

Here’s just a few examples of onboarding-related behavior you can track:

Completion rate

How many users made it through the whole onboarding process, how many skipped steps (or skipped the whole thing altogether), and what difference this made to users’ long term rate of retention, engagement and spending.

Time spent

How long it took users to complete the onboarding process—and how long they spent on specific screens and steps within the process.

This will enable you to identify ‘problem’ steps within the process which are taking up too much time, and also where users are potentially skipping important information.

On-screen actions (taps, scrolls, etc.)

By understanding where users tapped and scrolled on screens you can determine if screen elements are placed optimally and if there are UX problems which are leading to users getting stuck and/or abandoning.

Conversion rate for actions taken after app onboarding.

This will give you an idea of how effectively your onboarding process is communicating the value of using your app. Examples of actions you might track include:

• Signing up for an account and logging in
• Depositing money after onboarding (you can track if they did it in the same session)
• Making an in-app purchase
• Engagement rate with features in your app that are covered in your onboarding

Optimize app onboarding—and your entire app experience—with Contentsquare

You can track all of the above behaviors—and much, much more—with CS Apps, Contentsquare’s comprehensive app analytics solution.

With CS Apps, you can:

• Optimize every user journey from end-to-end with app analytics that goes beyond traditional touch and tap metrics to offer rich contextual behavioral insights
• Use capabilities such as zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis and advanced session replay to really understand how users are interacting with your app, what’s delighting and frustrating them about it, and how to improve the experience to drive retention and conversion
• Use error and crash analysis to detect and solve issues that are causing user frustration, uninstalls and bad reviews at speed—before they do too much damage
• Quantify the impact of issues and opportunities to prioritize your workload and development roadmap and optimize your user experience on a continuous basis

And that’s just scratching the surface. To find out more about CS Apps, we recommend reading this blog about it by Lesley Wasserman (Product Marketing Manager for CS Apps).

Or better yet, book a demo with our experts today.

Elevate your app, giving users a five-star experience and driving growth for your business.

Book a demo

The post App onboarding: How to go from okay to outstanding appeared first on Contentsquare.

There are millions of apps out there, and to stand a chance at engaging, retaining and delighting users enough to make your app a non-expendable one, you need to know how people are using it— and how they’re feeling about it.

Without understanding what makes their app users tap (and tap out), app teams are flying blind, possibly straight into a solid cliff face of one-star reviews and mass uninstalls.

To ensure your app avoids that unfortunate (and all-too-common) fate, here’s what you need to know:

• What app analytics is and why you need it
• How it can improve your mobile app user experience
• What a great app analytics platform needs to do

We’ll answer all those questions (and more) in this article, the first in a five-part series explaining how you can use our app analytics platform, CS Apps, to optimize at every stage of the app user journey, from onboarding to conversion and retention.

It’s going to be app-solutely tremendous. (Look: We’ll try to keep those puns to a minimum, but we’re not promising anything.)

So, let’s dive in with a quick introduction to the fascinating world of app analytics…

What is app analytics?

App analytics platforms gather, analyze and report on data from mobile apps.

They track this data using software development kits (SDKs)—collections of tools, including guides, code samples, programs, libraries and APIs, which developers need to build and operate apps—and identify users by their device or operating system ID.

There are (broadly speaking) two categories of app analytics that gather different data types.

1. App performance analytics deals with data concerning the app’s technical performance (its uptime, responsiveness, resource usage and crashes). This alerts developers and technical teams to issues in the app user experience that are obstructing or actively repelling users.
2. Behavioral app analytics gathers in-app behavioral data, enabling teams to understand how people are using their app, how they’re engaging with it (positively or negatively) and how they feel about the experience.

While app performance analytics is essential to providing a satisfactory app experience, behavioral app analytics is where an app experience can be elevated from satisfactory to stand-out.

By understanding what users love, like, dislike, hate or feel ‘meh’ about in the app experience, you can make data-driven decisions to increase user engagement, retention and (if applicable) conversion, optimizing what works and discarding what doesn’t.

What’s more, by segmenting your user base, you can more accurately personalize your app experience and deliver truly customer-focused marketing and re-engagement.

When combined with app performance analytics (which ensures everything is running smoothly from a technical perspective), behavioral app analytics enables you to deliver the most engaging, least frustrating experience possible—an experience that will drive more revenue for your business.

Why does your app need app analytics?

1. Getting the mobile app experience right can pay off—big time

According to data.ai, the app economy is currently worth approximately $500B and is growing fast, with H1 2023 seeing a record $67.5B in consumer spend and 76.8 billion app downloads globally.

It certainly seems like the only way is app for this market (hey, we did say we can’t make any promises)—which is potentially great news for businesses.

That’s because app users are your most valuable customers.

This is self-evident if your business is entirely built around an app, but it’s also true for businesses that serve customers via a website.

Think about it: To visit and use your website, customers just have to find it and click a link.

But with app users, things are different. Before they can even start using your app, your users will have had to download it (taking up precious memory and home screen space) and will probably expect to have to log on and onboard.

All this requires effort and time, and indicates—to a much greater extent than visiting your website—a commitment to engaging with, and potentially spending money with, your brand.

Anybody who downloads your app is, if only tentatively, bought in.

Unless you somehow mess things up, your app users will be walking around with a direct line to your business in their pockets. You’ll be able to communicate with them, market to them and sell products and services to them without them having to log in more than once.

No wonder, then, that according to a study by Google and Kantar, 87% of retailers say app users have a higher lifetime value than nonusers.

But with all these rewards in mind, what’s stopping every brand from launching a highly successful app? Glad you asked…

2. Engagement and retention are hard—and most apps fail fast

According to Statista, there were over 3.55 million apps available on Google Play Store in Q3 2022 and 1.64 million available in the Apple App Store (which conducts more regular purges of apps that fail to meet their stringent and ever-changing standards).

However, only a tiny percentage of these millions of apps actually succeed.

Statista reports that in Q3 2022 the average retention rate for Google Play Store apps after 30 days was a mere 2.6%. The retention rate for Apple App Store apps: 4.3%—better, but hardly spectacular.

Make no mistake: Engaging and retaining app users can be extremely tough.

This is partly due to the challenges that come with engaging (and not frustrating) highly distractible smartphone users, most of whom already have far too many apps on their smartphones.

Lesley Wasserman (Product Marketing Manager for CS Apps) covered these challenges extensively in her fantastic blog on CS Apps. (Check out a few below.)

But it’s also about the standard set by app store titans like TikTok, Instagram and Spotify, which have led consumers to expect fast, fun, seamless, secure and reliable experiences.

And without app analytics to let you know how engaged (or enraged) your users are when using your app (and what exactly about your app experience is engaging/enraging them), it’s practically impossible to provide the near-perfect experience app users demand.

What should an app analytics platform be able to do?

Hopefully by now we’ve convinced you (if you needed it) that app analytics is a must-have for any business with an app. But what features are must-haves for an app analytics platform?

While any app analytics platform is better than nothing, nothing is better for your mobile app user experience than an app analytics platform that:

• Enables you to understand and optimize your complex app user journeys at every stage of the journey, from end-to-end

• Renders insights easy to understand and explain via visualizations that can be shared with the business
• Equips your team with the investigative tools they need to discover the root cause behind behavioral trends and individual user complaints
• Alerts you to technical issues with your app so you can fix them before they do damage to your retention rate (and app store score)
• Quantifies the potential impact of making improvements and fixing issues on your revenue and conversion goals
• Protects your users’ privacy (and your brand’s reputation) at all times with built-in PII masking
• Uses a lightweight SDK so your app experience isn’t slowed down or interrupted

A great app analytics platform will (of course) report on high-level metrics like churn rate, retention rate, conversion rate and active/monthly/weekly active users.

But it will also let your team get more granular, tracking macro and micro behavioral metrics like session depth, session length, time spent on individual screens and average screens viewed per visit.

And, crucially, it will let you see exactly where users are (and aren’t) scrolling, tapping and swiping on every screen throughout your app experience.

Armed with an app analytics platform that does all of this, you’ll be able to:

• Optimize your mobile app experience for engagement, retention and conversion
• Find and fix errors and crashes with minimum effort and resources
• Make smart, data-informed business decisions about your app—and prove the value of them to the business

But what app analytics platforms offer all of the above capabilities?

We’re a little biased, of course—but truthfully, we only know of one.

Our app analytics platform: CS Apps

CS Apps is our comprehensive app analytics solution. Using CS Apps, your business can easily understand the experiences of your app’s users and the impact on that experience (and on your business’ KPIs) of your app-design decisions.

Over the course of this series of articles, we’re going to explain how app analytics (and specifically CS Apps) helps you:

• Upgrade your onboarding process to hook customers from day one and teach them to be power users
• Find and fix frustration, quashing technical errors (including app crashes) and removing user experience obstacles
• Gauge user engagement—and maximize it for retention by monitoring where users are (and aren’t) tapping and interacting and running optimized A/B tests
• Kick conversion up a gear with an AI-enhanced understanding of the impact of issues, opportunities and decisions on your conversion rate

So, if you’re interested in upgrading your app experience in the near future, bookmark our blog and watch this space. (In the meantime, you should check out our how-to guide to optimizing mobile experiences.)

Or, if you feel ready, arrange a demo of CS Apps with one of our experts, who’ll show you how impactful Contentsquare-powered app analysis can be.

Elevate your app, giving users a five-star experience and driving growth for your business.

Book a demo

The post App analytics: The secret behind every five-star app experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

No one wants a bad user experience. Improving customer experience is essential as it boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty, provides a competitive advantage, increases conversions and sales, reduces customer churn, fosters a positive brand perception, and facilitates data-driven decision-making. Prioritizing a seamless online customer journey enhances a business’s reputation, attracts new customers, and ensures long-term success. 

However, you first need to truly understand your customer. Speaking at CX Circle Toyko,  Golf Digest Online’s CMO/CIO Tomoyuki Shiga and Gaprise’s Customer Success Team Manager Yosuke Kamata, how they used data from Contentsquare to understand user behaviour to improve UX and resolve errors. 

Golf Digest Online (GDO) provides golf-related Internet Services such as golf equipment sales and golf course reservations. They also operate other businesses such as media management, lessons, DX for driving ranges, score management applications, and a portal site.

It goes without saying that a seamless online experience is crucial for their success. 

Using Contentsquare to Improve UX 

Working in cooperation with their golf course reservation business division and verifying their golf score management application in partnership with Gaprise, GDO realized that new bugs could occur as an inadvertent result of UX improvements. 

They used Contentsquare to analyze the GDO golf score management application to identify bottlenecks. A golf course typically has 18 holes, and once the scores for all holes are entered into the app, the round is complete. The challenge with their app was that there were many instances where users left the app without saving their scores after inputting their scores for the entire round. Without saving the data, the purpose of using the app for users is lost. 

GDO was able to identify the percentage of users that were leaving, but they didn’t know why they were leaving without saving, so they turned to Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis.

Yosuke Kamata explains. “This screen depicts data collected at the 18th hole; we drilled down to see what users did in the application after completing their game. While some users were able to complete saving after inputting the information and others could input it again, there were instances where errors occurred. Upon closer analysis, we found that users who encountered errors were following a repetitive journey of reviewing the scorecard and then looking at the scorecard again. We then drilled down using Session Replay to verify what screens the users who followed this journey were actually looking at.

In this image, users were experiencing an error message that said data could not be saved because some information had not been entered despite users filling in everything. This resulted in users returning to the scorecard entry page to check and then leaving the app. 

GDO realized that the reason for this error (framed in red) was not because of their score but that the people they were playing with had not entered all of their scores. This is only depicted as a tiny dash, which makes it easy for users to overlook. Further, the app is meant to track only their own scores and not that of their companions. 

Thanks to Contentsquare, they were quickly able to fix this issue. 

Using Contentsquare to reduce time spent on user testing  

User testing products is a time-consuming process that requires considerable resources. For GDO, this process follows this flow before launching a new product:

1. Requirements are defined 
2. Implementation 
3. Acceptance testing

For a new golf course reservation system, GDO wanted to see if they could use Contentsquare to help streamline the process and reduce the resources required. They created 2 segments of users: 1  that knew how to use the system and 1 that could not understand the UI. Typically, GDO would only user test with 5 people due to limited resources, but were able to work with 78 people this time.   

“We created a journey in Contentsquare based on a sample of 78 users and found that during the booking process, there was looping behaviour on the confirmation before the journey was complete.” Yosuke Kamada said. To understand the reason behind this, they used Session Replay. 

In the first line of this error message, users were informed that their entry was incomplete. However, the third line states that “the start time is sold out”, which indicates that their reservation choice was fully booked. This led to users being confused and unable to complete the booking and tried to solve the problem by returning to the previous page. However, the original page is structured so that they cannot return to it, so they get stuck and drop off.  

 The team discovered a further problem: 15% of users reached the error page without the same looping behavior. The reason for this was later discovered due to a system error – and it was thanks to a tag-team of Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis and Session Replay that GDO was able to understand user behavior and uncover errors ahead of launching their product. 

“It is very likely that these problems would not have been uncovered in our typical user test of about 5 people. Also, if an error occurs only a few times, we might have missed it. But with session replay, all errors are recorded, and we can fix it by following user behavior throughout their journey.” Yosuke Kamada said. 

He ended the session with a parting message: “I found it very good in that [Contentsquare] allows us to work on positive improvements. Session Replays clearly reflect user behavior, so developers and marketers have a common understanding of journeys and problems. I think the key is that everyone can work on solving issues together and be aligned with the user’s point of view.”

The post Golf Digest Online on the value of improving customer experience appeared first on Contentsquare.