How to Do Retention Analysis with Rakam?
What is Retention?
Retention is a metric that, helps you to understand how often users return to your app/website after their first usage. The data is formed by the two events, which are First event and Returning event. Retention data can be charted daily, weekly or monthly.
Why Retention Is Important?
As explained above, retention analysis allows you to see how often your users come back to your app after their first usage. This data is essential and will help the product teams to understand how many of the visitors/users will return back after the first visit. If the return rate is lower than expected, then the product team can work towards improving it.
If the return rate of users/visitors are not analyzed, there are high chances the product team would be under the impression that the app/webpage is doing well based on just the first visit count. This could lead to bad decisions, one of them being spending tons of money to acquire new customers assuming that, newly acquired customers will stay as customers and when they don’t stay as a customer and Mr. CFO will not be happy because your team spent ton of money to acquire new customers who won’t stay. In order to prevent that, we need the “Retention Analysis” and of course Rakam.
In which Industries Retention is crucial?
Often companies try to optimize one main metric, if your monetization is based on ads, then the time spent on your application is the key metric that you need to track. That’s where retention comes in, because you spent money for acquiring the customers so paid acquisition is not really the best investment in order to make people spend time on your application. If this is organic, users will be willing to spend time on your application and helps you to make money. You need to create an application that makes people love and come back over and over.
Gaming
Retention is a very important feature for mobile games, especially for the freemium games. Freemium games make money from ads they place inside their games and in order to make money they need a big loyal audience that will come back and play after their initial experience with the game. Knowing the retention rate of their users is very crucial, for example if the retention rate is higher on iOS devices and lower in android devices this may mean that, android version could be worst in terms of user experience and product teams can address the issue to make it better.
Social media
Just like the gaming, social media companies make money from ads in their applications. Its very important to gauge what is their retention rate because they need to sustain their newly acquired customers in order to have massive user base to make money from the ads.
E-commerce
If you’re playing to a niche such as fishing or golf, then your best bet is to create a brand with a credibility that would make people to buy from your company whenever they need to buy from the niche you are covering. It is important to see whether your customers are continuing to buy from your company after the initial purchase and this is where retention analysis comes in.
How can you get the best value out of retention?
Companies are spending too much money on acquiring new customers but the question is, will they stay as a customer? It is always possible to attract new customers inorganically with paid ads but doing so increases the expense of the company, without knowing whether the customer will remain loyal to to your product, you could be burning cash for nothing. Let me explain what I mean with a simple math. If customer lifetime value - user acquisition cost< 0 than it means your company is burning cash to acquire new customers with no return, because these customers won’t be staying for longer.
In retention analysis you can use the group by feature to segment your users by operating systems, connection types, language, platform, region etc. This feature allows you to drill down in ti your data and helps you to drill down on your customer segments. In Rakam you can easily do all of that with just few clicks, yes folks you heard it right no coding required!!!
North Star Metric
North Star metric defines what is the core value company is offering to its customers and the revenue that the company is estimating to generate from it.Retention helps companies to measure how effective their north star metric is. For example Airbnb’s North Star metric is, per night bookings. By applying retention analysis you can see whether the customer who booked from the company will come back and book again.
How To Do Retention Analysis on Rakam?
In Rakam we offer Retention Analysis feature with just few clicks. Our non-technical background friendly UI makes it incredibly easy to get your analysis done.
So lets do an example retention analysis on Rakam. For the sake of argument lets say we are an e-commerce company. For the first event we will choose “log-in ” and return action will be “view product”. Than we set the date range and than press to that big blue query button and kaboom!! You will see this beautiful visualisation of retention.
So in this analysis, we picked e-commerce as an example but don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that retention is only crucial for the e-commerce Industry. We have customers from gaming, social media, ride-sharing and food delivery industries too. But use cases of retention is not limited to industries.
Hope you guys enjoyed the article, feel free to try Rakam for yourself here!!
