At Oculus, we’re trying to craft the most immersive and meaningful VR experiences in the world and deliver them to as many people as possible. As partners in this endeavor, you—our developers—spend months or years building apps hoping that people will find value in the experience you’re bringing to life. Once you launch the app in the Oculus Store, many of you ask: did we succeed?
This has been a tough question to answer unless you’ve built your own analytics into your app. Today, we’re changing that by releasing a new dashboard that gives you access to the most important data for understanding user behavior.
The User Engagement Dashboard is designed to help you understand how much value your app provides for users. Each of the metrics in the dashboard are used throughout Oculus to quantify the value we’re delivering to users, so they’re tried and tested. You can use this data to track changes in how people engage with your app as you improve it over time.
To access User Engagement, find your app on the API page. Then visit Analytics > User Engagement.
The Data
Here’s an overview of the metrics, why each of them are important, and how you might use them to guide your business.
Active Users
These charts show you the number of people who use your app each day, week, and month. This easily highlights trends in usage, which you can then manually correlate with changes you’ve made to your app.
The Growth Accounting chart breaks down the high-level count of active users into component parts, which makes it easier to tell what might be driving changes in total usage. For example, if you’re running a campaign to re-engage users after releasing a new update, this should drive up Resurrected Users.
Time Spent
We know that many users assess the value of an app based on how much time they spend in it, so it’s important to understand how much time people invest in your app. This chart shows you this data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can use this to understand how long a typical session lasts (“Last 1 Day” view) or if users are starting to spend less time in your app (represented by a downward trend in the “Last 28 Days” view).
Time Spent for New Users
The first few days after a user entitles your app are critical to setting them up for success. These charts show how much time new users spend in your app, which provides signal for how deep into your app they’re getting. For example, if your app consists of a five hour narrative, but users only spend one hour in your app, then they’re missing out on most of your work. In addition, users can return your app if they spend less than two hours in it, so we also show you the percentage of new users who pass that threshold. This is an early indicator of lower revenue due to returns.
Retention
Retention is the holy grail for most products because it indicates that you’re providing enough value to bring users back day after day. The easiest way to determine if your app retains is to look at a Retention Curve, which shows you the percentage of users who are still using your app over time.
If this percentage consistently declines, then you’ll need to constantly add new users in order to maintain the same number of active users. On the other hand, if the percentage flattens out, then that means people return to your app regularly. This is the best sign that your app has Product-Market Fit. The higher the curve flattens, the better.
Final Thoughts
We hope this new data helps you build more valuable experiences for your users. As people discover value in your app, many will share it with their friends, which will help your business grow.
Check out these docs for a deep dive into each element of the dashboard.
