7 Million MAU π, Unlocking Categories, and other updates
Instagram automation failure, new software development process, and figuring out our user KPI's are all wrong
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User Accounts
207987 β 216794
Updating our User Account Metrics + Category Feature Update
We are starting the process of updating our user account goal. For a long time, we have been trying to boost the number of user accounts, and many times these updates are a net negative for the user experience. Take for example account locking of the categories feature.
Categories is a really popular feature and is a large part of our traffic from google. 5% of all clicks we get from google go to the categories page. It is so popular that the team figured it would drive account growth by account locking this feature and for a while it did. Recently though as our account daily account numbers continue their steady and slow slide down, we have started to take a deeper look at specific user behaviors.
We found 210,871 other new users such as the one above that bounced when they landed on the categories page. This represents 210,871 missed chances to convert a new user into a returning user. Locking this feature might have helped maximize our user account metric, but it sure as hell didn't offer an excellent experience from the user's perspective.
In this new paradigm of putting usersβ experience first, if we wanted to improve the number of user accounts we would first study new users that create accounts and optimize the features that are already causing users to decide to make an account.
So we looked into just this. Using google analytics I broke down all of the users and started focusing on the actions of new users who created accounts in the last month, below is the result.
~9,000 users created an account when they viewed the favorites or following page with no accounts
~1,000 users created accounts after getting to the categories page
~30,000 users created accounts after normal usage. Creation time ranged from 2 min to over 200 hours of site usage.
The account lock only makes up 1000 new accounts in a given month. Based on the numbers we would only need to convert 0.5% of users that reach categories page as their landing page and bounced to get better performance than the account lock. Itβs a no-brainer and we have added changing this to our next update.
Pro-Metric Ads
Been having issues finding quality video producers, so we decided to expedite the process by hiring two people to complete the same work. Allowing us to test and compare the skills of two qualified individuals in the hope that we will be able to find the best candidate for the role. This kind of situation can sometimes result in awkwardness so I generally try to head it off and communicate why we are doing this. It lessens the tension and lets you set the tone for this friendly competition between candidates. We are also paying them for the time they spend. I've always had success hiring like this and suggest you consider a similar practice in your team or business.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Categories Feature Update + Unlock (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Payments System + Admin Panel Delay
The work on the payment system and admin panel is complete pending styling work. Once this is tested we can launch and it will allow us to launch the all-user premium pop-up and finish our Ad network mediation system.
Premium Pop-up
After doing deeper user research we have finalized the pop-up triggers and are hoping we can get feedback from our readers on how they should appear.
Like Based Popup based on an exponentially growing number of likes (14, 30, 60,...)
Follow Based Popup shown on an exponentially growing number of follows (4, 8, 16, 32,...)
Content view based pop-up shown every 100 views
All pop-ups are disabled after viewing a pop-up once during your session. Pop-ups can only display every 3 days
Please comment below with feedback and opinions about the new triggers.
Road Map for Growth in Revenue:
Refactored and improved payment system (In Dev Testing)
All user direct premium pop-up (In Progress)
Ad Network Mediation System (Blocked)
Social Traffic
0.6 β 0.6
Automation Failure
Earlier this week our Instagram account was banned for 24 hours. After some debugging and log diving we figured out we got banned because of excessive server queries and unfollow activity. We have since updated our automation software to reduce the chance of this happening again. We have had no further issues and have seen great growth recently surpassing 100 followers.
The best news is that our content seems engaging enough to garner regular likes from accounts that started following us a week or more ago. An excellent sign that our growth in engagement will continue. Perhaps one day our organic growth will take off and we might not need automation anymore.
User Generated Collections
The team is on board with this new project and we are excited to start working on user-generated collections as soon as next week. We will have some preliminary designs for our MVP by next week's update.
Road Map for Growth in Social Traffic:
User Generated Collections: Create and share (Design Stage)
Facebook Automation (Back Log)
Twitter Automation (Back Log)
Road Map
This week we are wrapping up all individual projects and moving to a more focused team-driven development style. Every week, we choose a project to focus on and work together to solve the issue tickets. Our hope is that this will mean more chances to pair-program, work together on single issues, and spread project knowledge across more team members.
We will update you guys on whether we are able to reach our goal with this software development process
This week
Payment System (Dev Testing)
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)
Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (In Progress)
All user direct premium pop-up (In Progress)
New native advertisements (In Progress)
Menu bar update and Quick Access buttons (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)
Email Verification (Blocked)
Monetization Update and Optimization (Blocked)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)