Analysis Of Decreasing User Engagement On Platforms
There’s a huge demand for personalized services these days. With such a high demand for personalized customer experiences, making it a core part of the company’s customer engagement strategy is a must.
Internet is littered with varied ideas of user engagement given user engagement comes in equally varied models. But they all share this common notion: Customer engagement begins with a customer’s first interaction with your brand and extends beyond the point of purchase. User engagement can be a very important metric in measuring the growth and health of the product the platform portrays. A lot of companies use ‘user engagement’ as a KPI in measuring their growth. Unfortunately, this KPI has been on a sharp decline recently and this could be of great concern to any company since user engagement is a measure that correlates to a product or service’s success or failure.
While the decline could possibly arise out of unsatisfied expectations of the consumers from the products and services of the company, there are factors extending beyond the products and services contributing to this change.
In this article, we’ve summed up some possible Data science perspectives that could be considered to address this issue and its intricacies.
Time:
For data analysts, a time-series graph is nothing new. Therefore, plotting the engagement levels over some time is very easy to detect irregular trends. Some of the analysis that could be made using the graph is:
- Whether the decline was a gradual one or a sudden one: Gradual declines are mainly caused due to changes in user behavior, whereas sudden drops can be caused due to any new upgrades engineered in the platform.
- Whether the decline occurred repetitively or just once: Again, a repetitive trend can be caused due to changes in user behavior. Decline occurring just once could be due to a technical issue or problems in the marketing campaign.
- Seasonality of the trends: In other words, observing if the drops occur regularly or on a specific day of the week/month/year. Regular drops could again be concluded as a technical issue
Location:
Keeping track of engagement levels region-wise is important as different companies can advertise/produce products specific to a particular region, or portray them on their platform keeping in mind the internet censorship rules of that particular region. The following questions can be asked:
- Is the drop in user engagement limited to a particular region, or is it distributed globally? Drops exclusively to a region can be caused due to the cultural differences of the inhabitants of that region.
- Another question that can be asked is if there are any changes to the laws governing the internet censorship of that region, which could deny users access to the platform.
Drops across the Product Line:
Drops in user interaction can be across different products the company advertises. Sometimes, the drops in one product can also lead to a drop in other products. It is very crucial in keeping track of product-specific engagement levels for identifying potential upgrades in the company:
- If the drop is across other product features rather than being product-specific, then there is a larger problem at hand which would require organizational level investigation.
Platform:
The drop in engagement levels could be a problem of the platform itself rather than the products’. The question that can be asked:
- Is the decline specific to a particular platform (such as Androids, iOS, Desktop Windows, etc), or is it commonly occurring across all platforms? Specific declines can be resolved by re-engineering the designs in those platforms. And again, a drop across all platforms means there is a larger problem at hand which would require organizational level investigation.
Competition effect:
How well the competitor is performing can be leveraged using internet articles, google searches, or third-party data. This data can then be analyzed to compare the differences in performance levels between the company and its competition. Insights can be derived on what extra services/features the competitors are providing for the customers, and what can be done to tackle this issue.
Other factors:
- Tracking Code: Issues in how events are logged can be misleading. Events should prioritize logging of all such instances which could indicate that the user is dropping off (such as closing the portal directly without any server calls, spending a minimalistic amount of time in the platform, and so on.)
- Problems in bots of the website: Most of the company bots are highly active but could be less efficient in providing the required service for users. It is imperative to determine any events triggered by bots (as such events are generally instances of user interactions).
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) guides high-traffic websites, and changes in the search engine can cause significant changes in the platform website traffic.
- One-off events, such as holidays, special sales on other sites, negative press, or successful campaigns can also lead to a major decrease in user engagement.
Making hypotheses and evaluating them is often the most important part of this problem.
It’s impossible to provide an exhaustive list of possibilities for this kind of problem, but here are some of the possible approaches to this issue. Loyalty programs are another great way to give back to your customers. When they feel as though they are valued then they will invest in you. Their connection with your brand will be stronger. Maximize their fear of missing out — the FOMO effect will boost their long-term engagement and keep driving them back to the company.
Concluding, we can infer that the gravity of the situation is extensive and immense for both the companies and their stakeholders. Since this is directly correlated to the bottom of the pyramid, a comprehensive analytical approach with variedly explored solutions should be taken into consideration keeping the attainable aggregations in mind.
Reference:
https://www.codefuel.com/blog/what-is-user-engagement/
https://dotdigital.com/blog/what-is-customer-engagement-and-why-is-it-important/
https://towardsdatascience.com/yammer-investigating-a-sudden-drop-in-user-engagement-7c9c4093c038
https://mode.com/sql-tutorial/a-drop-in-user-engagement-answers
