Analyzing 50B data points from 1.3B users
The 2017 Product Benchmarks Report comes out today. In it, you can find industry-by-industry benchmarks that will show how average and elite mobile apps perform in key areas of product health such as usage, engagement, and retention. In this sneak preview of the conversion section of the report, you can see how your app compares to the competition in terms of getting users to the actions you want them to. To get the full updated report, just drop us your email here.
There’s a reason for the quasi-religious language around conversion metrics. The leap of faith required to move from non-believer to an adherent is an enormous ask of any would-be customer. It’s one that requires knowing the customer well enough to have built a product they want and to present it in a way they cannot resist.
In this section, we were able to boil conversion down to its most basic state: once a user is through the door, are they achieving the goal we set out for them? Across industries that means the same thing, one way or another: money in your company’s pocket.
What do we count as conversion?
For conversion, the most straightforward definition is that the user completes a goal action, often related to revenue. For e-commerce and SaaS, that generally means a one-time purchase or a subscription purchase. For financial services products, we measured transactions. The general idea for all three is the same: if a money-generating action occurred within 30 days of usage, it’s a conversion.
For media & entertainment, we defined a conversion as “viewed media.” Because many companies in this space do not take direct payments, we tried to make the conversion close to the business outcome of “content consumption.” By focusing on the more common ”viewed media” event, the media & entertainment products tend to have the highest conversion rates by a wide margin.
What are typical conversion numbers?
In the end, visits aren’t enough—what good is a window shopper? Media & entertainment companies want viewership, e-commerce wants to sell products, finance apps want users to complete transactions, and SaaS apps want paying subscribers. For e-commerce companies, converting one in twelve visitors into a sale puts them firmly in the middle of the pack.
Because SaaS is asking businesses to subscribe to a service, its conversion numbers are unsurprisingly lower than the other sectors; even starting from “signup” rather than “visit” only pushes the numbers up to 3%. The benefits of this approach are clear, though: once a customer has bought a subscription, all they have to worry about is renewal.
How hard is it to make a repeat customer?
What’s better than a customer? A repeat customer, of course! This table shows how often customers who converted—that is, viewed media, purchased a product, or completed a transaction—then complete the same conversion again.
You can see how difficult it is to convert a visitor into a repeat customer. Getting even one in fifty visitors to make a second conversion puts a company ahead of the median in finance and e-commerce. All the while, SaaS products, having gotten past low initial conversion rates, just get to watch those subscription payments roll in on a monthly or annual basis.
But once a product manager has identified repeat customers, they can target them with personalized emails, push notifications, and in-app messages through Mixpanel.
Get the full report now
These conversion numbers are based on over 50 billion web events generated by 1.3 billion users, but there is a lot more charts, tables, graphs and insight in the full report.
Sign up to get the full 2017 Mixpanel Product Benchmarks Report today and see more conversion data as well as whether your company is closer to the median or 90th percentile in its industry in usage, engagement, and retention.
