.png)
A question I get frequently is “How should I define my Activation metric?” Most of us are familiar with Meta Facebook’s famous example of “7 friends in 10 days,” but in reality hashtag#Activation is a journey.
Usually, it’s not as clean-cut and there may be no single feature or use case that drives the desired long-term KPI, such as retention.
For this reason at we examine two types of activation metrics: Simple and Complex.
✅ The Simple, like the Facebook example, pins the answer to a single metric within some time period.
✅ The Complex is not so easy - as you’ll see from the example below, representing the case of a video creation platform company.
SIMPLE EXAMPLE:
Completed 3 exports in the first 7 days. It's easy to communicate and report on. However, in many cases, it is also less accurate - you can push this metric, but the KPIs would not really move.
COMPLEX EXAMPLE:
Completed 2 exports, one integration and shared twice.This is much harder to communicate, but is much more accurate.
So what should you do? There is actually no wrong or right solution. Many teams go for the simple approach, perhaps adding a few additional constraints.
👉 However, another interesting method is to report on the simple case to leadership and in weekly/monthly reports, but internally ensure that your hypotheses and experiments actually move the more complex KPI as well. 💡 💡 💡
Ultimately, the choice between Simple and Complex activation measures depends on your team’s goals and resources. By balancing both approaches, you can deliver clarity for management and in reporting, while building your own peace of mind by pursuing deeper insight and accuracy with more complex measures that remain in the background until the causal effect is proven.
-Tom.
