The best-laid plans of app developers are often belied by the actions of actual users.
When Guy Tal, CEO of Bel Media Group, an Israeli app publisher with around 100 gaming, social and utility applications, soft-launched Tinder-like Android dating app WeMeet, he and his team assumed users would be easily attracted to the service because it’s free.
But they noticed right away that users weren’t spending very much time inside the app. Second-day retention was low and although users were swiping right, matches weren’t necessarily resulting in chats or engagement.
“We thought giving away features for free would do the job, but it was clear that we had an engagement and retention problem,” said Tal, who noted that WeMeet has just under 500,000 global users clustered mainly in Russia and India.
Low engagement is a serious problem for a nascent app that monetizes primarily through advertising.
But rather than running a standard re-engagement campaign of push, paid search and paid social to woo dormant users, Bel Media turned to its long-time monetization partner, mobile marketing and insights platform StartApp, to jazz up the WeMeet in-app experience with data-driven enhancements.
“WeMeet’s KPI was very straightforward: to improve the ratio between matches made and conversations,” said Ran Avidan, CTO and co-founder of StartApp.
It’s tough, though, for a small app with a modest and still-growing user base to gather enough insights from its own users to make statistically sound decisions.
Continue reading »
