Taking contextual ads to the next level

I recently stayed at Novotel, and I noticed these ads from Calm at the front desk and elevators:

A few thoughts crossed my mind when I saw these:

“This is pretty cool! Looks like a win-win deal for everybody: the guests, Calm, and Novotel.”

“Is this an ad, or is this a partnership?”

“I wonder what the results are, though. Are they being able to measure this properly?”

Later at night, I found this article that explains the whole partnership.

In a world where everybody seems to be pushing for short-term results and cheap conversions, this felt like a breath of fresh air to me.

A Shortcut to Measuring Engagement

How to measure your product’s stickiness today without going hardcore on data crunching by using GA4 or Firebase:

Write down how often your customers need your product to do their thing: daily, weekly, monthly (quarterly or annually could also be an option, but it’s not covered on GA4). That’s your product’s “natural usage frequency”. There are fancy ways to calculate this. But, honestly? If you know your customer, you don’t need any of that (you can always ask your founder or customer support person – they’ll know for sure).

If it’s daily, then DAU (Daily Active Users) is your main metric. But, you can compare it to weekly to make it more insightful.

So, in this example, you should be looking at DAU/WAU.

The question it answers: from all the users we’ve had in the past week, how many interacted with our product in a single-day window? That’s it. That’s how you instantly know your product stickiness.

Here’s how to find that info: open your Google Analytics 4, click on Engagement, and scroll down. You’ll see your “User Stickiness” there. That’s what you’re looking for.

Now, look at the trend. You can instantly know if your engagement is flat, rising, or dropping. Cool, right? It could be better, but it’s better than just looking at daily visitors or MAU.

“I don’t get it. Looking at Monthly Active Users (MAU) is just as useful”

Not true. If your customers use your product daily or weekly, it’ll take 3-4 weeks to realize what’s going on, which can be quite dangerous for your business.

“What if my product has a quarterly/yearly usage?”

GA4/Firebase doesn’t offer this, primarily because the more inaccurate it gets as you stretch the time window. In this case, an in-house solution would be better, or you’d have to upgrade to a tool like amplitude.

“But on GA4, there’s a lot of visitors, not real customers. Their dashboard isn’t reliable.”

It’s a matter of configuring your GA properly. You can then filter for logged-in users only if that makes sense. There are better solutions. But, the reality is that most teams don’t have the BI support to extract this information, so it does come in handy.

Another option is always to learn a bit of SQL, but that’s a story for another day.

🛠 Tools I’m using
I’ve been playing around with Descript for a while now, and the more I use it, the more I want to use it. This shit is magic. It even works in Portuguese (it’s not as good, but it gets 85%+ of the words right).

At the moment, I’m using it to prepare a few shorts and interview drops for my YouTube channel:

 

📕 Books I’m reading

Anything you Want by Derek Sivers: If you want to hear a story of a guy who built a multi-million dollar business trying to make his business smaller, not bigger, and delivering value above everything else, this book is for you.

Derek is in my top 5 favorite non-fiction authors, and he once again crushed it with this book (I have no idea how I forgot to read it sooner). Just like the Calm ad, this book feels extremely refreshing, especially compared to all tales we’re bombarded with about trying to get rich fast and growing companies like crazy.

Here’s one of my favorite parts (Portuguese):

Quote of the week

Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you – The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, by Eric Jorgenson

Resurfaced using Readwise

Extras

I usually don’t brag, but the content we’ve been putting out in the App Bakers newsletter is just lit. If you work with apps and you’re thirsty for high-quality content on how to grow an app, then I really recommend you subscribe now.

PT-BR: recentemente eu liberei as entrevistas todas do meu curso de App Store Optimization de graça no YouTube.