The user journey: activation and commitment
By: Chetan Maddipatla
Tags: Monetization, Insights, Google Play, Android App Development, Android Developers

The user journey: activation and commitment

Part 3 of 4: User journey guide for Google Play apps and games

This article is part of a series of articles by the Google Play Growth Consulting team that focuses on increasing app performance by optimizing the user journey. (You can also catch up on our previous topic, understanding KPIs for apps and games, in this article and webinar series.)

Now that we’ve covered what the app user journey is, and walked through onboarding and the importance of educating new users, let’s explore how to engage those users successfully in the activation and commitment stages.

The App User Journey

This article will answer questions including the following:

How do I know when a user has graduated from onboarded to activated ?

? What is the relationship between committed users and revenue ?

? How can committed users be valuable, even if they’re not spending?

The basics of activation

The app user journey engagement stages

The differentiation between a user that is onboarded and a user that is activated is simple but crucial: in order for a user to be considered activated, they must have engaged with the core action on their own.

A ride-hailing app user should book and complete a ride.

A dating-app user should swipe (or whatever the designed mechanic is) through potential matches until they find a match and begin a conversation.

A puzzle-game player should complete a level.

That means, as long as you know and understand your app’s core action, it’s simple to recognize and track which users are activated: just look at whether they have consistently engaged with the core action, without assistance (e.g. after onboarding prompts have been removed).

The metric of monthly active users (MAU) is among some helpful key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to measure your app’s overall growth, but remember that activated users are only a subset of MAU, so it’s important to measure activated users as a distinct KPI. For example, activated MAU are monthly active users who have not only logged in but also completed at least one core action in that month. This KPI will help you differentiate users who are still in the education stages from those that have graduated to the engagement stages. That, in turn, will help you have a more granular view of engaged users in your app.

Lastly, don’t forget that there is another engagement stage in the user journey, reactivation, that comes when a user meets the same activation criteria again after lapsing or churning from your app. We recommend developing specific strategies for reactivating users in this stage of the user journey. Remember, for a user to be activated, they must engage with the core action on their own — so you’ll want to design their re-onboarding experience with this in mind and provide opportunities for them to be reminded of the benefits of using your app, especially if they’ve been absent long enough to forget.

Commitment: the ‘holy grail’ of product development

Think of moving from activated to committed as a kind of graduation:

They are your most engaged and loyal users .

. These users demonstrate a sustained product-market fit . This means what you have promised in your value proposition has come true for them (or they believe it will).

. This means what you have promised in your value proposition has come true for them (or they believe it will). Once your users achieve this state, they are less likely to churn , so they help keep your user base stable.

, so they help keep your user base stable. Committed users are also more likely to convert into payers, so depending on what type of app you have, committed users offer a strategic opportunity to grow your business by targeting the right cohorts.

All of these reasons are why the committed state can be considered as ‘the holy grail’ of product development.

In our experience working with product teams, it has been an extremely useful method to understand why and how committed users form the bedrock of a business:

They are the base of users who stay loyal through seasonal trends and downturns in the market.

in the market. They unlock new opportunities that weren’t evident before — for example, you can use committed users to test new concepts before scaling them more broadly.

that weren’t evident before — for example, you can use committed users to test new concepts before scaling them more broadly. They often become community evangelists and influencers, which will help you increase reach in marketing campaigns and feature releases.

Commitment, defined

Consider your committed users as an elite club — they have ‘bought in’ to what you are offering, and therefore they represent the top-tier of most valuable users in your overall target audience. Because of all the great ways you can leverage them, it’s important to define your committed users the right way from the beginning. This means the definition of commitment will be specific and relevant to your own app.

Think through the below criteria when defining who your committed users are:

Recency of use: A committed user is someone who has logged at least one session or completed at least one core action in the last set number of days (e.g. 7, 14, or 28). Only recently active users should qualify as committed. Frequency of use: A committed user is someone who has successfully engaged with your app repeatedly over a set cadence (e.g. daily, weekly or monthly). Naturally, different app categories lend themselves to different usage patterns. Make sure that you’re not trying to optimize for unrealistic usage patterns for your app — like expecting a monthly destination app to have daily destination usage patterns — otherwise you may cause unnecessary user churn. Tenure: A committed user cannot be a new user. Only include users who have installed the app more than a set time ago (we recommend at least 30 days). This is because new users typically have erratic engagement patterns, so including them may alter your analysis of committed user trends.

If you follow these criteria, you’ll ensure that your identified committed users are truly your most loyal user base and can therefore effectively help you in the ways mentioned above.

App categories and committed user behavior, at a glance

Let’s look at committed user behavior across a collection of top-performing global apps* in dating, education, finance, and health and fitness:

*Normalized sample of the top games in each category as defined on the Google Play Store. Recency measured by logins in last 28 days. Source: Internal Google Play data.

In this graph, committed users are shown as a percentage of monthly active users (blue), and their revenue is shown as a percentage of overall revenue (red). From this data, it’s easy to see that while committed users may be a small percentage of your user base, they can contribute a significant percentage of revenue.

Also, note that the percentage of MAU who are committed varies dramatically across categories. This fact underscores the need for a nuanced definition of commitment for each app, based on the criteria.

Case study: Truecaller and committed users

Truecaller is a popular communication app which provides caller ID and spam blocking services to more than 250 million users.

The team discovered, after tracking revenue from committed users and measuring it against revenue from daily active users (DAU), that committed user spending was 200% higher than DAU spending. This showed that there was value in converting more of their DAU into committed users.

Truecaller screening

Truecaller refers to committed daily active users as comDAUs. This group is important not just because they drive substantially higher revenue but also because the app gains more data points about potential spam calls when more users engage with it. This means comDAUs, as the most loyal and engaged users, are actually helping to improve the overall app experience for everyone else.

This is another example of how, if you carefully define what commitment means for your app and look closely at this group’s behavior, you can use this data in meaningful ways to grow your business and discover new opportunities.

Non-paying committed users are normal — and helpful

You may be tempted to turn all your committed users into paying users or to increase spend of committed users who pay.

While it’s true that there will be natural overlap between your most loyal users and users that will spend, not all committed users are, or will be, payers. A user can still be classified as committed and otherwise meet the requirements of this cohort without spending money. Again, these users can still contribute to your app in other ways:

Brand evangelists or influencers that share app content with their social networks will help build a community around your app.

Influencers that create content related to your app can bring in new users.

Early adopters can provide much-needed feedback on new features or events, which tells you whether it’s a good investment to deploy these to the rest of your users.

It’s a good practice to recognize the value of your non-paying committed users and to give them opportunities to stay engaged with your app.

Engagement stages: conclusion

When thinking through the long-term success of your app or game, remember to plan strategically for these stages in the user journey:

Develop strategies to graduate onboarded users into activated users — and activated users into committed users.

onboarded users into activated users — and activated users into committed users. Make sure your activated users can complete your app’s core action on their own.

on their own. Define what ‘committed’ means for your app. Use the definitions above for recency, frequency, and tenure to figure out what the appropriate criteria should be.

to figure out what the appropriate criteria should be. Test your decision by tracking and measuring the behavior of your committed users, as per your new definition. Find out what they can teach you about your app’s features and design. See if you can harness their knowledge to help graduate other users into becoming committed, too.

Use this knowledge to build a roadmap that grows your community of committed users and keeps them coming back. Once you understand more about what motivates these users, you’ll be in a much better position to keep your most loyal users happy and engaged.

What next?

If you enjoyed this overview of activated and committed users, be sure to subscribe and check out our next article in this user journey series, which will focus on disengagement and reactivation.

Happy analyzing!

What do you think?

What metrics are you most or least familiar with when analyzing app performance? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.