How would you measure the success of Gmail?
- Tina Greist
Clarification
- Gmail has both consumer users and business users. Should I focus on consumer users here? [Sure]
Product
Gmail is a free email service, where the email address is also the users’ google ID. From Gmail, user can send/receive/search for emails; chat with other Google users using text, voice and video; and use the same Google ID to access other Google services such as Google drive, calendar, photo, map, youtube, Chrome.
Goal
As Google has already reached very high user penetration, the most important goal for Gmail is to keep Google’s user engaged so that they will stay with Google’s app and services ecosystem.
User Journey
- Users visit mail.google.com, or alternatively, powered up an Android phone, or downloaded the Gmail App.
- Users create a Google ID
- Users login into Gmail
- Users use various Gmail features; or move on to use other Google services, such as drive, calendar, hangout.
- Users generate purchases at services such as drive, youtube, Play, etc.
Metrics
- Acquisition
- # PV to mail.google.com
- # downloads of Gmail
- Activation
- # users that creates ID at mail.google.com/Gmail App
- % Conversion rate from PV to Signup
- # users who log into Gmail
- % Conversion rate from signup to login
- # users who read at least 1 emails in Gmail
- # user who send at least 1 emails in Gmail
- Engagement and Retention
- DAU, MAU, 6-MAU
- Avg Face time or avg session time per day
- Avg App Swaps to front screen or avg sessions per day
- # emails sent/read per session, per day, per month
- # of Active days in 30 days
- 7 Day, 30 Day, 180 Day Retention rate
- # of other Google Services also used
- % Gmail user who also use other Google Services
- Average Account ages
- Churn rate, users who didn’t log into gmail for over 30 days or 60 days.
- Monetization
- ARPU
- LTV
Analyze metrics
To measure Gmail’s success, we can focus on the engagement metrics, such as
1. Avg Face time per month should be stable or increasing over time.
2. # of emails sent/read per month.
3. # of Active days in 30 days.
Metrics 1 is difficult to measure accurately, also it might be slow to detect trend that users still visit, but read/send less and less, which indicates Gmail are losing importance to the user.
Metrics has similar limitations as metrics 1.
Metrics has similar limitations as metrics 1.
Recommendation
I would like to use the # of emails sent/read per month per user as the success indicator.
We can also visualize the value of gmail to Google by breaking users into buckets based on their monthly read/sent mails, and measure their corresponding total Google Apps usage (facetime), # of Google Services used, ARPU, and LTV.