Developers

Introduction
Youve done the hard work and built a great app congratulations!
But youre not done yet. Theres more to creating a successful app than engineering and code.
Your next steps can be a challenge: measuring your performance across platforms, growing your
audience, improving user experience... the list goes on.
The key to addressing these challenges is an eective analytics solution. In the U.S. today, people
are spending over 4 hours per day on their phones, and 86% of that time is spent in apps. But
while its becoming increasingly important to understand in-app activity, it can be confusing to
choose and implement the right tool. To guide you, weve come up with these 5 best practices to
help you grow your audience and set up your app for success.

Table of Contents
03
05
07
10
11
13

Mapping your customers journey

Optimize Conversion
Improve your Retention and Lifetime Value
Define your key segments
Automate your marketing
Final Checklist

#1: Improve Measurement by Mapping Your Customers

Journey

Before you invest in a specific analytics solution, its essential that you think about both analytics
and advertising use cases in your specific app.
What are the key actions people typically take? Are there key points where it would make sense to
insert ads? What in-app events do you want to log in order to better understand how a person is
interacting with your app? You may want to discover when people are leaving your app so you can
craft a plan to keep them more engaged.
The combination of insights is endless, but its important to be clear about what you want to
accomplish with analytics, and how it will make an impact on your apps success.

Recommended events to track and measure:

Each app is dierent. Depending on your goals and app category, some events will be more
relevant than others. However, for most apps youll want to track the following events:
App Installs
App Launches
Completed Registration
Completed Tutorial
Viewed Content

You know your app best, so youll need to set goals and identify the actions and in-app events that are
important for achieving them. Here are a few key events for dierent types of apps that we recommend:

Retail & Purchasing Apps

Gaming Apps

Improve product discovery and

purchase flow
Search
Add to Wishlist
Add to Cart
Initiate Checkout
Purchase

Improve the game experience and

drive repeat plays
Level Reached
Achievement Unlocked
Engagement

Entertainment Apps

Social & Dating Apps

Improve every interaction with content

Play Video
Add to Playlist

Improve use, engagement, and growth

Send Message
Upload Photo
Friend Request
View Profile
Invite

Already familiar with analytics? If youre ready to dig deeper into your
data, we recommend that you also log parameters in addition to events.
For example, if you have an e-commerce app that logs an Add to Cart
event, you can add parameters to that event that help you understand it
in more detail.
You could get more specific insights by setting parameters like Content
Type= Shirt, Description=The Oxford, and Price=$49.99. These
parameters help you re-engage with your customers using more
specific, personalized messaging.

#2: Optimize Your User Flow with Segments and Funnels

Funnels help you discover when customers are having a problem using your app so that you can
start improving their experience.
Whats causing your customers
to drop o? Whether a checkout
flow is asking for too much
information, a level is too hard
to beat, or theres a bug in your
latest release, funnels help you
find and get to the bottom of the
problem.
We recommend using funnels to
understand how you can improve
processes in your app like:
Registrations
Purchases and checkouts
Invitations
Sharing flows
Before you get started with funnels,
youll need to log events for the
key actions in your app (refer to
Best Practice #1: Mapping Your
Customers Journey).
From there, your next step is to
understand the conversion rate
for your funnel. A strong analytics
solution helps you see how
dierent groups of users move
through the funnels in your app.

If you add parameters to your app eventsas

recommended in Best Practice #1: Mapping
Your Customers Journeyyou can also filter
your funnel by those parameters and determine
the conversion rates for specific products,
product groups, and more. For example, you
can build funnels and test new experiences,
breaking down the results by attributes like
language, country, device, and more.

You can build segments based on specific attributes such as country, type of device used,
demographics such as age or gender, and more. Then you can use these segments to filter your
funnels to understand how specific groups of people are using your product.
For example, you can filter your funnels based on:
People using a specific version of iOS
People on older versions of your app
People under the age of 34
People who speak a specific language

MomentCam is an app that lets you snap photos

and turn them into funny cartoons. Using funnels
with demographic breakdowns, MomentCam
discovered that people who speak Arabic
languages were having a higher failure rate when
they used the app. Previously, the MomentCam
team had debated whether they should translate their app into
Arabic or Portuguese first, but Facebook Analytics for Apps made
this decision easy by showing them that Arabic users needed some
extra support to improve their user experience. As a result, the
company achieved a 6% increase in conversion.

#3: Increase Your Retention and Lifetime Value with Cohorts

Two key metrics for understanding your apps performance are:
1. How many people youre retaining over time.
2. Whether people are taking the key actions you care about.
The keys to your apps success are retention and lifetime value of users. To eectively measure
these metrics, you need to use cohorts.
Cohorts help you compare the actions of people using your app at dierent points in time. With
cohorts, you can group people based on the time they took an action togetherfor example,
when they first installed your app. Lets dive in a little deeper to understand how cohorts can help
you to improve your apps performance.

Improving Retention
Cohorts can show you retention and churn over time so that you can understand how often
people who installed your app come back.

To improve retention with a particular group of people, you often need to go a step further to help
your people get more out of your app. For instance, you can add things like tutorials to show people
how to use your app, or incentives to help motivate them to get to the next level. These tactics help
keep people interested and engaged while showing that you care about their experience.

Boosting Lifetime Value

Understanding lifetime value is critical for mobile apps because it often costs you more upfront to
acquire a new user than you can earn back from them in their first month of use.
If you can acquire users and earn their loyalty, youll eventually be able to see them spend more
money in your app (and on your website) than it originally cost you to acquire them.
In other words, lifetime value is all about the big picturethis metric helps you plan and optimize
for how you can earn more value from your users in the long term.

Quick example to explain lifetime value: imagine that you run an app that sells subscriptions for
people to stream music and videos. We can do a quick calculation to determine how much its
worth to acquire a new customer, based on a few assumptions.

Simplified LTV case

Entertainment app
$10/month subscription fee
25% profit margin (after licensing fees and costs)
10% churn rate (% of customers who cancel each month)
Monthly Revenue X Margin / Monthly Churn = $25 estimated LTV
$25 to acquire a new customer

One of the biggest challenges for online measurement today is that consumers have shifted
from purchasing solely on a single desktop computer to using products across multiple devices.
Its important to take into account these cross-device conversions when thinking about lifetime
valuein fact, 40% of people complete their purchases on a dierent device than the one they
started the transaction on.
If you have an app as well as a website that also has items for purchase, only Facebook Analytics
for Apps lets you leverage cross-device analysis. This helps you match web conversions with
people who installed your app on mobile.

#4: Grow Your Audience by Defining Key Segments

To grow, you need to know your customers better. Segments are powerful filters that you can use
on top of your funnels or cohorts to answer questions about a group of users who youd like to
understand better.
For example, you can create a segment of Android users that accounts for the top 10% of your
sales to gain insights into their behavior and what they enjoy. This is how segments help you refine
your target audience and content accordingly.

The best analytics tools help you re-engage your key segments in an automated way or find new
customers based on your best segments this leads us to tip #5.

10

#5: Improve Your Marketing Eciency through Automation

To market your app and grow your audience, its important to focus on relevance, recency, and
revenue. Looking at behavioral signals and building audiences based on your best customers helps
you improve your overall marketing eciency. Smart marketers take advantage of analytics and
advertising tools that help you automate this process in the most ecient way possible.
Lets explore two strategies that are key to a successful marketing strategy: acquisition and re-engagement.

Acquisition
Acquiring new customers is always challenging, but there are many tactics you can use to bring
people into your app. For free/organic marketing, you can work on optimizing your apps presence
in app store search engines and landing screens to improve results. You can also host real or virtual
events to drive awareness along with creating a public relations strategy to recruit influential sites
to write about your app.
For paid marketing, you have a lot of advertising options to choose from to tailor your targeting
and creative to connect with the right audience. In addition to demographic, geographic, and
interest targeting options, one of the best solutions is to use lookalike targeting, which creates
audiences that share similar characteristics as your best customers.

Lookalikes enable you to find new customers that

look like your best customers. Mobile gaming
powerhouse, TinyCo wanted to drive mobile
app installs and in-app purchases for its game,
Family Guy: The Quest for Stu. With Lookalike
Audiences, the company was able to find other players similar to its
existing high-value audience to eectively scale its reach and drive
revenue. By incorporating Lookalike Audiences into its strategy,
TinyCo saw an impressive 64% higher click to install rate and a 46%
higher average revenue per purchasing user.
11

Re-engagement
Re-engagement allows you reach users that have already expressed interest in your product
through other channels. Re-engagement is most eective when marketers leverage dynamic
audiences and relevant creative. While you can manually upload lists of existing customers that did
or didnt take certain actions, using an automated solution like audiences built on App Events is a
more robust and scalable way to solve this problem.
Here are a few recommended solutions for improving re-engagement:

Prevent churn: target ads to those whove installed your

app in the last 14 days but havent opened it in the last 7
days.
Engage active users: target ads to people who looked at
many products but didnt purchase.
Re-market specific products: target someone who
looked at a specific product but didnt purchase it.

Gaming company Zynga wanted to re-engage

lapsed players around the world for its game,
FarmVille 2: Country Escape. To achieve its goal,
the company used Facebooks Custom Audience
tool to reach players who had lapsed. Using App
Events to track players who installed the game and made purchases
in it, Zynga was able to create lists of paying and non-paying players
who hadnt used the game for a while. To drive engagement and sales,
Zynga advertised a 10%-o discount using localized creative and
messaging to better connnect with a global audience. The mobile
app ads and photo ads included a Play Now call-to-action button to
encourage immediate action. The strategy proved successful, driving
a 5.6X return on investment in 3 days and the mobile app saw reengagement with 2,285 reinstalls on new devices at $3.90 eCPI.
12

Checklist to Help You Get Started

Facebook Analytics for Apps helps you understand how people are using your iOS or Android
app. It comes with a number of built-in graphs for common app actions, such as the number of
people launching your app every day, or purchases by people in your app. Ultimately, you can use
Facebook Analytics for Apps to gain deeper insights about your audience so that you can optimize
for success and grow at scale.
Heres your checklist to get started:

Map out your customer path and log events for each key action people take in your app
Combine funnels with demographics to find opportunities to improve your user experience
Take advantage of cohorts to optimize for retention and lifetime value
Use segments to build audiences for acquisition and re-engagement
Check out our Analytics developer docs and help center for videos and best practices

Get Started

13

Developers

5 Tips to Grow Your App

with Facebook Analytics
Nov.10.2015