Bitcoin is a decentralized, anonymous, digital-only currency that’s lately gotten a lot of public attention. Like any new technology, there are many different aspects and a lot of ‘noise’.
In this 4min video, I tried to focus on the important stuff.
Read more: Crypto-currency 101 and the bitcoin revolution
This is the 3rd episode of “The Zen of Monetization”.
It covers three principles for users’ retention:
One of the useful features of Google Analytics is the ability to track specific events. It gives you insight into how users filled your forms or on which buttons they clicked inside the video player. You are getting into the world of measuring actions inside your pages and not just between them. In the demo below we will see how to track a ‘download’ button click event and how to track the form filling. It’s super useful when you wish to learn if users use the Autofill feature with your forms.
It’s an easy API that you should leverage, so let’s jump into it.
Events (in our world of Google analytics) are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, forms, embedded elements and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events.
Event hits can be sent using the send command and specifying a hitType of an event.
The send command has the following signature for the event hit type:
ga('send', 'event', [eventCategory], [eventAction], [eventLabel], [eventValue], [fieldsObject]);
You need to make sure to add the GA script tag to your page.
Something similar to: Continue reading
Last night, I read this article. What I like most was the short paragraph that gave few recent examples of ‘big’ failures:
…With original ideas, failure is inevitable, because it’s impossible to predict how technologies will evolve and tastes will change. Mark Cuban passed on Uber. In the early days of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell their search engine for less then $2 million, but their potential buyer turned them down. Publishers rejected Harry Potter because it was too long for a children’s book. Executives passed on Seinfeld for having incomplete plot lines and unlikeable characters. Pay a visit to Jerry Seinfeld’s bathroom, and you might find a memo hanging on the wall that calls the pilot episode of Seinfeld “weak” and says “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.”
We know that most startups will fail. Moreover, in many cases, they will fail even if they had a good idea and executed well (see: “Why Startups Succeed” for more details).
So be willing to fail and try again.
You are in a good company.
The first video of “The Zen of Monetization” is out!
Well, it’s a series of videos I’m creating, in order to cover different aspects of monetization. The goal is simple: help developers earn more from their work. In the first episode, we cover how to use In-App Payments. It’s a brief overview that gives the macro view. We have in the pipeline few more episodes that will cover it in more details with (of course) code samples.
If you wish to get it as an article (and not a video) check this “Android in-app payments” post.
One of the driving principles of the mobile marketplace is that users want NEW. New apps, new updates, new content. In fact, over 60% of users who go onto digital marketplaces, do so, because they want to try something new. While this is fantastic for user acquisition, this presents a problem for user retention because if you’re not keeping the user’s attention, they’ll quickly be looking for something that will.
The key to effective user retention can be broken down into three:
All of this starts with understanding your users. If you don’t understand what they want, how they act, or their opinions, you really can’t craft a strategy on how to keep them happy. First, check out your Cohort analysis report.
Why?
BecauseCohort Analysis is a powerful report that allows customers to measure and compare users based on their specific customer journey. You can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns on specific days, see how effective they are in generating loyal users, and compare which campaign performed best. Continue reading
I know, it sounds scary. But the true is that it’s not complicated, and once you get the logic behind this report, you can gain lots of useful information out of it. It can help you to gain insights and actionable items so let’s see how and when to use it. First, let’s define it.
Cohort analysis is a subset of behavioral analytics that takes the data from a given platform (e.g. eCommerce site, web app, game etc’) and rather than looking at all users as one unit, it breaks them into related groups for analysis. These related groups (=cohorts), usually share common characteristics or experiences within a defined time-span.
In the charts below you can see a popular cohort analysis: It groups customers based on the date when they made their first purchase. Studying the spending trends of cohorts from different periods in time can indicate if the quality of the average customer being acquired is increasing or decreasing in over time. You can also see if your marketing efforts at the time made a difference. In the case below, we can see during 2013 (the circles) it was a slow start, but after a new campaign, that took the first two weeks of March, things got better. As for 2014 (the triangles), we had a good start, but between March and May there was no growth, later during May major improvements in the product boost the spending to a new record. Continue reading
In October, Google announced a new open source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.
Why it is important?
Well, one look at the history of these posts will prove you that there is a real need for speed!
The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight web pages.
The basic ‘hello world’ version of your HTML page will look like: Continue reading
Quick stats that shows why it’s a “mobile world”.
Time spend on mobile grows 117% year over year. One quick look at the image below will show that we have a new form factor that is taking all others in terms of growth.
Phablets have become the unstoppable media consumption device. What a proof? Check the quarterly form factor distribution forecast (below).
Amazing. In the next 6 quarters, we might be in a place where phablets are 60% of all mobile devices. Continue reading
Overall, it was a very interesting and busy year. A quick overview on some of the fronts that kept me busy.
On the coding front, it was a year that the ‘progressive web app‘ revolution started. It will be interesting to see what developers will build during 2016. You can see the main projects that kept me busy on this blog (e.g. monetization, startups, web forms) and on my project site. It always great fun to meet developers around the world that are passion on the same topics you are. Here are a few presentations that I gave.
I started to push the monetization efforts, both in code (e.g. like this demo or this article on Autofill) and with two courses with Udacity . Check out the courses, they both great (and yes – I’m totally objective on this one).
On the running front, I had the pleasure to run all over the world. From “down under” to Europe, San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, Paris, London and even in the holy land. On the cycling part, I had the pleasure to participate in 110mile event that few good friends in CA organized – It was one big loop, from Mt. hamilton to Livermore and back. There were also, a lot of good rides in Ben Shemen and other woods. Continue reading
