Whether you’re launching a new feature, redesigning a product tour, or tasked with improving overall adoption of your product, you’ll maximize your chances of success if you start with an understanding of how your product is being used.
That’s exactly why we added no-code tracking and measurement to Appcues earlier this year. Any Appcues customer can now define and track in-app events, like when a user engages with a new feature or clicks a call-to-action. These events can be used to target Appcues experiences, create user segments, define goals, and most importantly, visualize user engagement and adoption over time. All without writing a single line of code.
Saved charts and dashboards
Appcues customers love the ability to compile their saved charts into insightful dashboards, which provide digestible views into product usage. Many are already using them to make strategic product decisions and streamline user experiences.
How? Let’s take a stroll down metrics lane, shall we?
Lucid
Lucid is a research technology (ResTech) platform that delivers programmatic access to first-party survey data. With large customers like Google, Spotify, Verizon, and HubSpot, it’s critical that Lucid delivers not just a high-value product, but one that’s easy to use and adopt.
Jeremy Sanders, Principal Product Designer, knows the importance of using data to drive design decisions. He regularly relies on tools like FullStory for visual and qualitative views into user behavior and Google Analytics for high-level behavioral analysis. But until he began using Appcues’ insights features, getting access to detailed product usage data typically required putting in a request to the engineering team.
When Jeremy learned about Appcues’ click-to-track and Events Explorer features, he knew the exact question he wanted to answer.
One of Lucid’s primary product views is the page on which customers find and manage their surveys. Jeremy and his team want to help customers find the survey they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and they offer many different ways to find surveys, including searching, filtering, navigating through pages, etc. But their team was left wondering… how are customers using the page? Which method of navigation is most effective?
Enter Appcues.
Jeremy and his team set up the tracking and created a report that showed how much each mechanism was being used. Overwhelmingly, their customers were searching. “We have all these other ways, but they’re just searching,” Jeremy said. This led their team to consider removing the other ways in order to simplify the experience for the user. “If search is what we want them to use, then that’s a potential place where we could use Appcues to drive the ideal behavior,” Jeremy said.
“As a product designer, you're looking for ways to potentially streamline the experience for the customer, right? And if there are 10 options, you're gonna always be looking for ways to say, okay, what are the top three? What's the most important?”
GetResponse
GetResponse serves 350,000 customers (think IKEA, Zendesk, and Stripe) in 183 countries with their all-in-one online marketing suite, which includes a Website Builder, email marketing tool, webinar hosting, and more.
As a product-led business that attracts and acquires new customers with a 30-day trial CTA, improving activation and feature adoption is a key focus of the business. Earlier this year, GetResponse PMM, Tom Barragry, was tasked with improving activation within their email marketing solution. To start, Tom wanted to understand how new users were currently engaging with the product (i.e. what they did, when, in what order, etc). Typically, gathering this type of data could take weeks and carry a high development cost. But using Appcues’ click-to-track and Events Explorer features, that wasn’t the case.
In the span of a 30-minute meeting, Tom and a group of colleagues decided what to track, set up the tracking (code-free), and started watching the data roll in. They found that of the 4 options their users could take to complete the goal they were measuring (clicking next out of the editor) - one option boasted a massive 57% majority - making it super clear to them which journey they should be pushing.
Tom and team used this data to identify the optimal journey for new users, then created a new onboarding flow to guide them. They didn't want to re-invent the user journey - “we just wanted to educate the remaining 43% to take the same journey.” Within days, GetResponse increased new email creation by 60% and email sends (GetResponse’s activation moment) by 16%.
“Getting these types of insights used to take weeks and carry a high dev cost. Now that product marketing has this power and autonomy, everybody benefits. We're relying less on intuition and more on data." - Tom Barragry, Product Marketing Manager
EZ Texting
EZ Texting has enabled over 165,000 customers to quickly and effectively reach and engage their mobile audiences using SMS. With a high volume of new users starting free trials each month, it’s critically important that EZ Texting makes the process of getting started and sending an SMS message as smooth as possible.
One of the first steps in this process for users is uploading new contacts. So when Lorelei Fara, Senior Product Manager at EZ Texting, learned about Appcues’ no-code event tracking, she finally had the tools she needed to start optimizing the experience. Her first step: to measure the success rate of users uploading contacts.
Uploading contacts to EZ Texting is a multi-step process, some of which are required, others optional. For example, users have the option to use a downloadable template or create a new group. The final step is to click on the "Finish" button. Lorelei used Appcues to track and chart each step.
The data showed that 93%+ of users uploaded contacts successfully, giving the team confidence that uploading contacts wasn’t a significant point of friction, while demonstrating there was room for improvement. They also found that their downloadable template was not being used and could potentially be distracting users from the task at hand.
As a next step, the team used Appcues to create an in-app feedback survey that reaches users who trigger the success event. The survey asked users how satisfied they were with the process of uploading contacts and for suggestions to improve it.
Ready to start measuring product adoption?
Both click-to-track and Events Explorer are now live in every Appcues account as of today. If you’re already an Appcues customer, simply log in to start tracking and measuring events right now. Not using Appcues yet? Sign up for a free trial to get started!
