How we visualized organic growth geographically
Polls for iMessage
About Us
Polls for iMessage is a plugin for iMessage that lets you take a vote in your group chat.
People use our application to make group decisions as small as where to go for dinner or as big as where to throw the bachelorette party.
Why visualize organic growth geographically?
89% of our users install the app because their friend sent it to them. So organic growth is pretty important to us. We want to see it happen in front of our eyes. Visualizations are not just for storytelling, they are way to discover the patterns in your data. By seeing the explosions of regional growth we can then deep-dive to better understand what behavior drove the growth.
Digging Deeper: Attribution
We typically use Branch.io to track which content and channels are driving clicks through to the App Store. I highly recommend the too. However we discovered that client-side install attribution is not supported on iMessage Apps (one of many challenges with the platform you can read about in our article here).
We solved this problem by using App Store Connect’s built-in system based on Campaign Links:
After install, we use Firebase Analytics to understand user behavior and sharing. But there is still something missing, and that is word-of-mouth growth. How do you understand and attribute word-of-mouth growth that happens in the real world?
Our Hypothesis: Our organic growth is primarily regional
In an increasingly digital world, our social connections are no longer bound by our location. However, our hypothesis is that our organic growth is primarily regional.
The polls people send to their friends cover all topics (seriously all topics), but the most common polls are about people meeting up, and that means that for the most part our organic growth is likely regional. Of course there are the exceptions— Bachelor/Bachelorette parties are hard to plan, and many people leverage Polls for iMessage to help with all the group decisions involved from where to go or what Airbnb to book. These groups often include people from all over the country, but the number of bachelor party polls does not come close to the number of “where should we get drinks tonight” polls. So we think our hypothesis stands.
Attribution: The Full Story
We review this visualization as a team every month. When we see some explosive regional growth we start our investigation. The first thing we look into is how the seed got planted in that region. Was there high conversion on any of our content? Or did it come from polls being sent from other regions into this region?
The next thing we look into is user behavior. After the spark, what was it about these users that caused the flame to grow? Was there a particular use-case that resonated with this group of people? Was there something external happening that increased the need for a social utility like Polls for iMessage.
In one example, we saw explosive growth in a new city, not only did this city grow quickly, but the engagement was off the charts, rivaling San Francisco and New York. We analyzed the most common poll topics in the region and realized that the growth came from Fantasy Football Leagues. That’s how we got into the city and why engagement was so high in the area.
These are the investigations the help us truly understand our value proposition so that we can build a roadmap that emphasizes that value and continues this explosive organic growth.
What’s next
The bar chart race met our needs, but if you want to take your visualization to the next level here are some of our ideas:
- Plot your growth on a map by correlating cities to coordinates using public data
- Visualize social interactions from one region to another as an arc map
Step-by-Step: How to create these visualizations for your app in 20 minutes
If enough people are interested, we will be following up this article with a step-by-step guide on how to create these visualizations for your app. For now, here’s the tools we used.
- Firebase Analytics to collect the data
- BigQuery to query the data
- Flourish to visualize it