What is Product Engagement, and Why Does it Matter?

Product engagement is a critical factor when it comes to driving revenue, retention, and adoption of your mobile app. Engaging customers within your product experience is key to converting casual users into your most valuable customers.

In this post, we’ll go over the basics of product engagement and some tips to increase product engagement.

What is product engagement?

Essentially, product engagement measures the level to which customers are active within your product. So, not just measuring active users but actually understanding which customers are engaging with your product and why.

Measuring customer engagement is critical to understanding how customers interact with your product and what drives customers to become more active. Actively engaged customers generally make more purchases and add more overall lifetime value.

Why is measuring engagement important?

After you launch a product, release a new feature, or even send out any sort of communication through your product, you need to understand the impact that activity holds. You’ll want to know how customers interact with your product and what drives more engagement.

Measuring engagement can help you answer questions like:

• Why aren’t customers exploring this new feature we just launched?
• Why does this cohort of customers tend to spend more time browsing versus this cohort that spends less time?
• What drives customers to move from free accounts to paid subscriptions?

In order to invest more in improving your product, you need to understand how your most valuable customers engage with your product. Because who doesn’t want more of those high-value customers? In the image below, you can see how important it is to turn unhappy customers into superfans. They’ll make repeat purchases, do your marketing for you, and help recruit new customers.

The bottom line: Consistently keeping a pulse on engagement helps product managers understand where the product is falling short and how to improve it to create more high-value, loyal customers.

How do you measure product engagement?

Before you jump into improving engagement, you have to understand what it means for your team in terms of metrics. Do you want to just measure active users? Or is there a behavior indicator that more accurately measures more engaged users? Every product, app, and brand will have different metrics that indicate success, so you’ll need to clearly define those first.

How do you improve product engagement?

Improving engagement all comes down to consistently capturing, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback.

1. Capture: Make sure you have a tool like Apptentive in place to capture all of this customer feedback data in the first place. You won’t be able to make accurate decisions about your product without actual data to support it. (Pro tip: Read this article to better understand how to use specific tools like surveys to drive customer engagement.)
2. Analyze: Dive into your data to fully understand what drives customers to be more engaged than others.
3. Act: Once you find answers to your questions, start building features into your product roadmap that you know will drive more customer engagement.