Pikabu Android | 10 low-hanging fruit of mobile app growth

Mobile App development task

Pikabu had 2 specific challenges needed our operation:

Retention rate improvement.
Ad revenue improvement without risks of alienating the community and harm the product.

First changes had borne fruit. In the first month of cooperation with our company revenue improvement amounted 30%, which recouped development costs. That was just the beginning. How did we define what solutions can yield results ASAP?

Pikabu is one of TOP 20 most popular websites in Russia according to Alexa Internet.

Its audience reaches up to one hundred million visits per month.

The active monthly audience of Android mobile app which we were focused on.

5 pictograms that conceal our growth knowledge

After going through all the stages, we modeled the impact of the changes that we can make on the mobile app. Each of the changes could bring its fruit in the form of growth indicators. After that, we asked ourselves the question: «What are the low-hanging fruit on our tree of solutions - just within arm’s reach?» The answer to this question was a list of 10 tasks that we immediately sent to work in the first month of development.

Role of design in Mobile App Development

1) Solutions Guide

Feature Discovery — application solutions guide. These tips are shown only once to a new user and help to quickly cope with the main barriers while using the app.

Now it will be harder for a first-timer to miss something and, as a result, to «give up» the application.

2) A button for the most important action

Floating Action Button (or FAB) is the most important button in the application. Google recommends to devote it to the core value. For Pikabu users, this is the creation of content, which the next users are coming for. More content - more reasons to return, thus an increase in retention rate. Therefore, we pulled the “Write Post” button from the menu to the main screen.

3) Inspire a reader to be an author

«Add post» feature promotion is done with the help the card placed between other publications. This will be a motivation for readers to enter a new “class” of content creators.

4) Inspire a commentator to be an author

Now let’s turn commentators into authors! If someone writes long comments they can turn a comment to a post straight away. New authors - new content. Content rules!

5) Tips

Tips and improvements on posting will help to reduce the time spent working on content.

In order to track the effectiveness of this solution, a «beacon» is set up for each of the posting elements, which records a user's actions. And we will be able to understand whether we have helped users to overcome the barriers they face, or not.

A total of 128 beacons were created in the «encyclopedia of events» by Pikabu, and within a month we monitor and process 1,500,000,000 (one billion and a half) user actions.

6, 7, 8) NOTIFICATIONS FOR READERS, AUTHORS, AND COMMENTERS

Push notifications and e-mailing based on the behavior of users. Now, if you are a reader, author of a post or a commentator, you can receive notifications about events in the feed, in your posts and comments. Enabling of certain notifications can be easily adjusted in the settings. Push notifications are the easiest and most powerful tool for retention rate growth.

9) ADVERTISING INSET

A mobile application provides more opportunities for readability than a mobile version of the site. Now we will tell about them to site visitors hoping that they will choose a mobile product and get involved in our Pikabu mobile ecosystem.

10) MONETIZATION MODELS

We proposed a few changes to the monetization model. The development of a KPI calculator has shown that placing another block with advertising can drastically affect the company's revenue. Pikabu managed to quickly integrate this recommendation, and we received confirmation of the hypothesis.

SEE ADMIN AND DO NOT DIE

I am the founder of an online community where users create content themselves. We have a small company, so I deal not only with product management but also with marketing. My goal is to make the community better and more convenient for users. I was looking for a company that could make a first-class design for some of the most important screens of an Android application. “Manufactura” works fast, carefully considering the ideas of the client and the final product. Other agencies with which I had to work sometimes did not fit into the mentioned terms. The guys from the “Manufactura” don’t have such a problem, everything was completed on time. At the same time, all solutions meet both technical requirements and my standards. They are great for our community, and users quickly adapt to new solutions after launch. We received a high-quality product and I am sure that users will highly appreciate it, so I’m ready to recommend this team to anyone looking for a design studio.

Pikabu Admin, whom, according to the legend, no one has ever seen

FIRST RESULTS OF DEVELOPMENT

10 changes will be launched within the next three updates. So far, users have come across only some of them, but this has already brought the company a 35% revenue growth.

Which of the changes gave what result - only we and our client know.

THERE IS A REASON TO ORDER A MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT SERVICE TODAY

The first two steps we go through with the client during pre-sales negotiations. You will receive our vision for your project for free.

Pikabu started paying for our services after one month of changes! This is an excellent result that we strive to achieve for each of our clients in the application development service.