As discussed before, funnel analysis is a powerful analytics method to display important events along the user journey for online businesses, subscription apps included. From the funnels, we can see clearly how users develop and convert until they reach the bottom—— the ultimate goal of all the hard work.
Funnel analysis can help identify where the bottleneck lies, seek growth opportunities, and more. In this article, you can learn four main benefits of funnel analysis and how to create your own unique funnel to grow your subscription apps.
Benefits of Funnel Analysis for Subscription Apps
Before we head into how to create a funnel, let’s first introduce four main benefits that you can directly get from funnel analysis.
Monitor App Subscription Performance
Funnel analysis for subscription apps maps out a flow of user behaviors in the app, in which the number of users in each stage and conversion rates between two events are clearly shown. A typical funnel for subscription apps is: install>trial>subscriprion>renewals. These metrics help you monitor your subscription app’s current performance and get insight into how successful your funnel is.
Understand Subscriber Behavior
With funnel analysis, you can track how different users interact with your subscription app before they reach the final goal of conversion. This insight, compared to your carefully designed funnel with the ideal highest conversion rates, can help you better understand your users' behaviors in your subscription app.
Identify Conversion Bottleneck
From the funnel, you can directly identify where the conversion rate is the lowest. This is where the conversion bottleneck lies. Dive deeper into your funnels and see where your app users go instead of the next funnel stage. Get more insights to identify areas of improvement to improve conversion.
Determine the Most Effective Marketing Campaign
Some funnel analysis tools, like appflow.ai, can track the post-install conversion funnel of users from each specific marketing channel or campaign, like Apple Search Ads. You can directly see the conversion rates when you select one of them. So you can determine directly what the most effective marketing campaigns are and which channel brings the users of the highest quality. 
funnel-analysis-appflow.ai
How to Use Funnel Analysis for Subscription Apps
App marketers and product managers usually use conversion funnels to analyze the app's performance, understand user behaviors, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
With funnels, they can easily know the number of visitors who flow to the next step, the conversion rate from one step to another, and the entire funnel. From these insights, they can concentrate on the stages with the highest churn and try to fix the issues to improve conversion.
To perform funnel analysis, many tools can help. Each funnel tool may feature different functions. You should choose the most appropriate one according to what type of funnel analysis you want to do.
Depending on the goal of your conversion funnels, Usually, there are 3 types of funnels that we mostly heard of:
- Marketing Funnels
- Sales Funnels
- Onboarding Funnels
No matter which funnel analysis you decide on for any part of your subscription app business, the principle of creating a funnel is much the same. So now let’s talk about how to create one.
Imagine that you are taking advantage of Apple Search Ads for promoting your apps. Now you want to know the quality of the traffic from each campaign—how many visitors who have installed the apps have been converted to paid users.
That’s called Apple Search Ads post-install performance, one of which Appflow.ai is good at tracking. It can track the effectiveness of ASA on the level of keywords and campaigns, so you can know which one is the most valuable for growing your subscription apps.
Funnel Analysis Step-by-step Guide
Step 0: Pick a tool.
Explore funnel analysis tools and find the one that meets your need. Installed the SDK snippet if needed.
In this example, we are using appflow.ai’s funnel analysis to track the post-install events of app users from different ASA campaigns. To use this subscription analytics platform, we need to integrate Appflow.ai into your app first.
Follow the guides on Appflow.ai Document and install the subscription SDK.
Note that funnel analysis tools are not necessary: you can also do the funnel analysis manually but the work may be complicated, a little tedious and most importantly, time-consuming.
Step 1: Define the events that you want to track in funnels.
Although Appflow.ai can track subscription events—installs, trials, subscriptions, refunds, and renewal-off, automatically for you, sometimes you may want to track other in-app events as well.
In-app events here are what users do in the app. For example, users receive an in-app message and read it carefully without closing it directly after installing the app.
So if you want to track your unique in-app events that may be crucial for conversion, you should come up with a list of events to track. Tracking how your users perform in your app would somehow deepen your understanding of your users.
But if you find it sufficient to use Appflow.ai‘s built-in events to track the effectiveness of your ASA campaigns, you can skip this step.
Step 2: Send the customized in-app events to the funnel analysis tools.
Sending customized in-app events to the funnel analysis tool, in our case, Appflow.ai, is usually easy with a few lines of code. You may need a developer to help if you are not one yourself.
Note: you can skip this step if you don’t want to track extra in-app events.
Step 3: Create the funnel.
If you finally decide not to send custom events or just finish sending them, it is time for funnel visualizations.
Creating a funnel with Appflow.ai is a piece of cake. You just need to select the ASA campaign or keyword you want to study on and what events to be shown on the funnel. If you have sent personalized events, you just need to click and decide on the timeline of the events. And then a funnel will be shown to you in a minute.
Step 4: Analyze and get deep insight from the funnel.
With the funnel visualized, you can at least get the following three insights to understand your campaign effectiveness and see how your efforts are doing from appflow.ai’s post-install funnel analysis.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign: From the funnel, you can know how many users have made it to the next step or the final step of the funnel along with the percentages. This insight together with the ROA can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
- Recognize which campaign or keyword brings the most valuable users: By creating and comparing funnels for every campaign, you can see clearly how each funnel goes and understand which campaign or keyword brings the most valuable traffic to your apps.
- Identify areas of improvement: Funnel is not just measuring the conversion rate. The numbers on them need context to offer meanings. So you should drill down to the details of each stage in the funnel to identify what needs improvement, especially when tracking unique in-app events.
The above are all the steps to do a funnel analysis using Appflow.ai to measure the post-install performance of Apple Search Ads. They are easy and applicable for any kind of funnel: pick a tool>define the events>send custom events(can skip if not want to send)>funnel visualization>analyze and gain insight.
Conclusion
Funnel analysis is used in many processes of the app businesses. They help monitor real-time subscription performance, understand the user journey, measure the value of existing marketing campaigns and discover opportunities for new ones.
Appflow.ai’s funnel analysis, integrated with Apple Search Ads and Adjust, brings all the subscriptions from different marketing channels and campaigns together in one dashboard. This facilitates clear decision-making about where to invest more and where to scale back for app marketers.
The good news is that Appflow.ai’ s funnel analysis is available in the Free plan! You can create a free account(no credit card required) to start doing funnel analysis for your subscription apps right away!
How to Use Funnel Analysis for Subscription Apps
