What are the best metrics for measuring user engagement for travel apps like AirBnb? Sunil Thomas, CEO for CleverTap recently answered this question on his Quora channel.

In a b2c marketplace you want to ensure that BOTH sides are healthy and doing well. You might be focussing primarily on one side at different stages of your app’s life-cycle but its critical that your app metrics instrumentation lets you know in case any one side sputters at any point in time.

In other words instrumentation of user-actions (or events) you record with the app/site should be for both sides:

Let’s take AirBnB for example – and I’ll list the top 5 events or metrics they should be recording:

  • On the buyer side, you would want to instrument events like:
    1. Buyer Registrations and Logins
    2. Searches (for properties) by city / region
    3. Inquiries (for properties i.e. email/questions) sent to property owners
    4. Booking/Reservations confirmed
    5. Reviews/Ratings (for properties) submitted
  • On the seller side, you want to instruments events like:
    1. Seller Registration and Logins
    2. New Listings (for properties) created by city / region
    3. Responses sent to Property Inquiries (and time taken to respond)
    4. Booking/Reservations confirmed
    5. Reviews/Rations (for buyers) submitted

Recording and analyzing these 5 user-actions across the mobile app and website over time will give you a great sense of the health of your marketplace. Comparing one over the other (for example seller daily logins as compared to buyer daily logins) will give you a sense of which one is doing better over the other. Same thing for reviews/ratings for example.

I would also recommend breaking up basic metrics like DAUs (Daily Active Users) and MAUs (Monthly Active Users) to be broken up by buyers and sellers so you get a sense daily.

Irrespective of the analytics tool you are using, there’s a great blog post one of our customer success team members had written – it’s a great guide to event design; just remember in a two-sided marketplace you need to think about both sides independently i.e. do the exercise twice over.

Last updated on January 29, 2025

Author

Mrinal Parekh LinkedIn

Leads Product Marketing & Analyst Relations.Expert in cross-channel marketing strategies & platforms.

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