Announcing the 2019 Product Benchmarks Report
Quick: name a product built successfully without any data or customer feedback. It’s nearly impossible. Today’s most successful companies not only measure and analyze their product performance but also compare themselves to industry peers. It’s the best possible way to find out how your company is doing, learn where you need to improve, and identify your own achievements to be celebrated.
Following up on the success of our 2017 Product Benchmarks Report, we’re happy to share the latest version of our flagship content piece. The 2019 Product Benchmarks Report breaks down the data you need to understand how your product stacks up. Based on Mixpanel’s internal data on 1.2B users across 638 products, 4 industries (SaaS, Finance, Media, and eCommerce), and 3 platforms (desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps), this report uncovers the key product trends and reveals the path to innovation and competitive advantage.
This year, the structure of our flagship report closely follows the metric framework outlined in the Guide to Product Metrics. We’ll cover the following four strategic areas:
- Reach. What is a good monthly rate of user growth for a business in your vertical?
- Activation. What percentage of new users usually experience a product’s value in the first 7 days?
- Active usage. How do you define “active usage” across different industries? What’s a good weekly growth rate for active users?
- Engagement. How engaged are your active users compared to peers? What are the best days to engage them?
- Retention. What’s a good 7-day and 30-day retention rate? What can you do to improve retention?
In this report, we’ll share the difference between median and 90th percentile results so you can benchmark your performance against best-in-class products. You’ll also see how engagement varies by day of the week—across all verticals.
Key highlights
18X is the new 10X.
The gap between the average and the best products is getting wider. The best (90th percentile) products grow 18X faster than average products. As consumer demand is constantly shifting, use data and analytics to accelerate speed to market.
Across all industries, new user growth is driven primarily by mobile.
A pullback in desktop user growth indicates that improving mobile experiences is now table stakes for any business. This is particularly important for the online shopping sector, where e-retailers see negative growth in desktop users and a surge in mobile app users.
SaaS product adoption is slow, but building a mobile app can give you an edge.
As SaaS continues to eat the world, very few products can turn casual users into active ones. Whether the slow user adoption is a result of poor user experience, insufficient onboarding, or lack of perceived value, the numbers don’t tell. The numbers do show that SaaS mobile app users are more engaged, indicating an opportunity to better serve users on the go.
User retention in eCommerce is at an all-time low; use personalization to reward your most valuable customers and encourage loyalty.
At below 5%, monthly user retention is low on average across all industries, and extremely low in eCommerce (1%). Armed with the right user data, you can personalize your lifecycle marketing to deliver relevant content for each customer at the right time to boost engagement and reduce churn.
For more insights and trends, check out the full report.
We’d love to hear your feedback. Shoot us an email at content@mixpanel.com and join the Mixpanel Community to discuss.
