Why did your users churn?

That is the wrong questions

• Why is our retention rate low?
• Why is our Churn High?
• Why do users uninstall our app?

These are some of the popular questions marketing & product managers have, and from their perspective, they are important questions, especially if you have been spending a lot of money trying to acquire those users. Unfortunately, they are the wrong questions. Not all churn is the same, neither is any magic required to find out why your users are churning.

The right question is, when did the users churn? Figure that out, and you would have a bunch of possible possibilities as to why your users leave or uninstall.

On the journey of discovering when, the first thing you should figure out is your User Life Cycle. Once you have that figured out, you know where your users drop, which gives you insights as to why you are loosing your users. Here is a model that would fit for most Apps/Sites.

The diagram basically splits your lifecycle into 3 important phases Acquisition, Activation & Conversion. Your users will go through these stages and based on various factors will drop off at various points. It lists the possible scenarios as to why your users would leave at that stage.

There are also a few other possibilities which can occur at any stage, App Crashes for example or notification spam. Make sure you are tracking crashes with tools like Crashlytics.

Of course this model depends on the fact that you are tracking each of the events or page-views (please start tracking events, if you are not read this as to why you should) to get any insights out of it.

Did this help you? We we love to know if so, please do comment below. Do you have a churn/uninstall problem? If you need my help, reach out on twitter.