What would be the top six metrics for WhatsApp? Now pick one from the six. Tell me three things you would do to improve that metric.

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Answers (4)
Parent company goal
WhatsApp is part of Meta group product.  Meta’s goal is to connect people across the world and give them the best experience in sharing their content. Meta’s major revenue stream is an advertisement for better targeting they required a good amount of user data.
Product Goal
WhatsApp is the biggest messaging App in the world with 2B+ downloads.  They have a few business models which describe below
  1. WhatsApp (For normal consumers)
goal: help people to share data with their social circle, help them to communicate
Business model: share user data with parent company meta for better targeting
feature
  • Enrich message types like text , video ,image, gif ,voice , documet , link,location etc
  • create group
  • broadcast message
  • create story
2. WhatsApp Business ( For small size businesses)
goal : support small or mid-size businesses by providing better feature
Business model: share user data with parent company meta for better targeting
feature :
  • Business Profile
  • Quick Replies
  • Automatic Greeting Message
  • Automatic Away Message
  • Contacts Labels
  • Message Statistics
  • Catalogs
  • Facebook Shops Integration
3 WhatsApp Business API (For big Enterprise business)
goal : Give more advanced features to big enterprises so they can grow their business
Business Model : For this WhatsApp charges fix amount of fees per message like in India 0.3 to 0.45 rs.
Feature :
  • Unlimited message broadcast
  • Get a Verified green tick
  • Better customer case support setup
  • Integration of chatbots is easy
  • send retargeting broadcast campaigns
Among the three of them, I would like to choose WhatsApp for the normal consumer. WhatsApp has 2B+ users so instead of new user better to focus on retention and enhancing user experience
Metrics
  • No. of notification clicks per user
  • DAU
  • No. of messages sent by user
  • No. of time spent on status tab vs No. of time spent on WhatsApp
  • No. of call/Video calls placed
  • No. of calls/Video calls connected
  • No. of Status updates per day
  • No. of new groups created/day
Among all, I would like to focus on No. of the message sent by the user
Solutions
  1. poll creation : people allow to create polls in groups for better engagement.
  2. Calendar integration: For special day reminder sets, WhatsApp can add special occasions by leveraging AI and Facebook data. Users can initiate some events and taker voting and opinion via this.
  3. Auto text suggestion: save user type in short time user can send more messages

WA is messaging service that helps in communitcation. Communication can be between 2 persons and multiple people.

Features of WA

it has payment option

it has group option

it hasbroadcast option

it takes contact list form phone

messages are said to be encrypted

it is availble in app as well as web through QR code

 

Assumptions against clarifing questions

 

I am PM at WA

This discussion is for global WA

There is no current issue as of now. Product goal is retention and growth.

 

Top 6 metrics

M1. total number of messages dilevered

M2. total number of messages sent

M3. Average number of sessions, devices and mobile devices

M4. total number of payments made

M5. Average number of payments made per person weekly

M6. total number of groups

M7. total number of calls places

M8. average number of calls placed per person

 

Metrics

 

Approach 1 : from M1 and M2, difference can give the failures. if its more than 5 % of total messages, then i would like to improve this as it would control my churn rate

Approach 2 : Average number of payments made per person weekly. I will compare this metric with number of phone registred and try to increase engagement here

 

Clarification

There could be differnt metrics if we look at various aspect of whatsapp. To answer this question we will not be looking at business metrics such as revenue, costs, profit. We’ll only look at it from product perspective. Additionally, marketing metrics such as new user acquisition, retetion are out of the scope as whatsapp is becoming a very mature product.

 

  • DAU – Daily Active Users
    • This is one of the imporant metrics as communicating with each other is almost a daily activity
  • daily number of messages sent
    • This indicates how many messages are sent on platform. if this number is increasing while DAU is same, it will indicate people are increasing their frequency of sending messages
    • we can further divide this into
      • number of texts
      • number of images
      • audio and doc share is not that important
  • weekly active groups
    • This indicates how often people engage in groups
    • it is also important because group usage indicates more user engagement and with many at once
    • This can be one of the early indicators if people are engaging less on platform as group activity reduces when people stop active usage of a platform
  • daily number of status created
    • This is a matrix to indicate how often people share their lives with contacts
    • increaase in this activity indicates increased usage apart from direct messages  (dm)
  • daily average number of followers per status
    • This indicates if people are watching status shared by their contacts.
    • if this number is reducing then it either means people are not interested in checking out others status or they are using mute status option more
  • daily number of calls placed
    • This indicates number of call activity as people tend to connect with ones near to them on calls only. additionally, it indicates user preference over connecting through telecom provider.
      • Audio calls
      • Video Calls (more important than audio)
  • daily number of calls connected
    • This indicates preference of users to recieve audio / video call over whatsapp instead of other platform
    • audio
    • video  (more important than audio)
  • number of users blocked & reported for spam  / fake news / fraud etc.
    • now a days, because of fake news, online frauds, bots, robocalling etc. this has become an important way to protect users as well as reduce spam from a platform.
    • increased activity of block/report shows such agents are increasing on  a platform, which eventually may hurt safey, privacy of users or it may result in fake news spread.
The main metric for whatsapp is daily number of messages sent
This is the most important metric as almost 2Bn user have whatsapp now and this metric can indicate frequency of usage among this 30% world population.
3 Improvements that I would like to suggest are
1. Auto-suggest text while typing – This will reduce time required to type messages and users can send more messages in shorter duration. hence ease of communication will increase which will give increased engagement on a platform
2. Stickers / images usage for text – sickers images provide more information quickly and typing time also reduces drastically. currently we need to go into stickers sections and then search appropriate sticker. if we auto-provide these images / stickers / emojis while typing it will help users communicate faster
3. talking to multiple people – especially for business or savvy text users, it is constant activtiy of switching between contact windows as they are talking to multiple people at a time. if we can pin all these people on top left corner, we can switch context easily

Use this guidance for answering this Google metrics question:

Whatsapp is a messaging platform that helps stay friends, family and colleagues stay connected. Users can send messages or call people using VOIP. Before Whatsapp people had problems communicating as sending and receiving messages between cross mobile operating systems was difficult and Whatsapp broke those barriers.

Users:

1.      1:1 conversation

2.      Group conversations

Whatsapp already has the largest user base hence I don’t think their focus would be on the acquisition, based on their current business component model, the focus is on engagement and retention. The current set of features in Whatsapp are not tightly driven with the motive to monetize.

Engagement & Retention       

1.      Daily Active Users [ Who performed at least one action like changing the profile pic, sending a message, making a video call, checking the status, saving a message etc)

2.      Total number of conversations / days [ An active conversation is having at least four to and fro conversations in a thread]

3.      Total number of video calls made / day

4.      DAU: MAU ratio [ This helps explain the stickiness to the product]

5.      No. of status updates / day

6.      No. of new groups created / day

Metric Pro’s Con’s
Daily Active Users Would measure Engagement frequency Wouldn’t measure the engagement quality
Total number of conversations / days Would measure the engagement quality Wouldn’t measure the engagement frequency
DAU: MAU ratio Exhibits the need for the service

Would measure the stickiness to the product

Wouldn’t measure the engagement quality

 

I will go with the second metric as it talks about the quality of engagement and the other two do not.

 

How would we improve the total conversations / day?

I would like to brainstorm some of the painpoints we have today and come up with solutions that tie back to our metric here.

1.      Providing ability to the user to be able to send e gifts

2.      Reminder of someone’s birthday as a notification

3.      Identifying the intent of the user and suggesting simple short answers [ pre-defined short text answers like – Thankyou, will do, sure, congratulations]