What are the best metrics for measuring B2C user engagement

What are the best metrics for measuring b2c user engagement for desktop and mobile apps like AirBnB, Uber and Craigslist? Sunil Thomas, CEO for CleverTap recently tackled this question on Quora and provided the following informative user retention and engagement tips.

In a two-sided marketplace you want to ensure that BOTH sides are healthy and doing well. You might focus primarily on one side at different stages of your app’s life-cycle but its critical that your app metrics instrumentation lets you monitor activity in real-time.

In other words, instrumentation of user-actions (or events) should be recorded for both customer and business sides for your mobile app/website.

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 provide you an engagement overview 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 performing better. The same metrics would apply for web and app 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 monitor activity daily.

Irrespective of the web or mobile 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.

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