How to measure user engagement metrics for travel apps like AirBnB

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. 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. 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.