Operational Tips: 11 indicators to pay attention to at each stage of mobile financial app operation

China's mobile financial Internet industry has entered a path of vigorous diversification in the past two years. At present, there are numerous apps in the field of mobile finance on the market. Just from the perspective of function, there are major factions such as payment, financial management , mobile banking, securities , consumer finance, etc.

In the current domestic mobile Internet environment, the genetic characteristics of Internet companies and large state-owned institutions have further accelerated the flourishing of various vertical fields. It is true that WeChat and Alipay , the two kings of scenarios, are present in almost every aspect of life. However, banks, as the source of finance, also firmly control the entrance to modern people's mobile banking and credit cards. But even though there are thousands of institutions, many mobile financial app operations also have clear indicators.

Figure: Mobile financial app operation stage diagram

1. Customer Acquisition Stage

1. Number of users

The number of users is the beginning and foundation of all operational work, and this also gives rise to the first disagreement in mobile financial app operations - how to define users. The current mainstream distinction methods in the industry are as follows:

1. Number of people who downloaded and used the app (registered or not)
2. Number of people using and registering
3. Number of people who have participated in the red envelope promotion activities of this app and left their mobile phone numbers (inter-financial management category)
4. Number of people who completed the account opening process after registration (Securities)

Different user segmentation methods will lead to different statistical calibers and operational strategies. Clarifying the definition of your own users is the first priority.

The indicator of the number of new users can be refined to the granularity of year/month/week/day, and it is necessary to add tracking and comparison with previous average data conditions. No analysis will be made without comparison. Example: The above figure reflects the number of new users of a mobile financial app during the statistical period. By comparison, we know that last month, a large number of advertisements and interest subsidy and rebate activities attracted a large number of users to register and use the app. However, after the activities were stopped, the number of users returned to normal natural growth, with a significant decline. Subsequently, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of user conversion and value, investigate the ROI (return on investment ) and LTV (lifetime value) of the user base attracted by this event, and use this to summarize and quantify the value of the event.

2. User acquisition cost

User acquisition costs often have two types of indicator meanings. One is the cost of acquiring all users, and the other is the cost of acquiring paying users. The former is a common observation indicator for all mobile apps, while the latter is particularly important for mobile finance and e-commerce apps. Mobile financial institutions generally use the previous credit card life cycle management method to calculate the user's lifetime value (LTV). Think about the P2Ps that have gone bankrupt in recent years. Except for a few institutions with capital and group transfusions, no institution can survive for a long time in a context where the cost of acquiring users is greater than their lifetime value. What's more, the "cost" mentioned here has not yet taken into account the core risk control and bad debt rate factors of financial institutions into consideration in the overall cost.

For medium and large financial institutions, the annual expenditure budget for operational customer acquisition is usually reviewed by the accounting department in the previous year, and it is often difficult to make additional adjustments later. Therefore, the user acquisition cost is not only used for traditional channel value assessment, but is also directly related to the important KPI of annual target user volume. The user acquisition cost of mobile financial apps is mainly composed of two parts: channel placement costs + red envelope (new customer) discounts, as shown in the following figure:

Of course, channel promotion not only undertakes the responsibility of acquiring customers, but also plays a role in overall brand promotion. Several well-known P2P companies in the industry spent more than 100 million yuan on channel promotion last year. Red envelopes are generally considered the most direct and effective means of acquiring customers, and various mobile financial apps have already made a big fuss about this. The most typical ones are financial management and consumer finance apps, which directly give out cash red envelopes ranging from 1 to 10 yuan, or high-value trusted financial management interest subsidies (usually adding 0.5-2% to the existing annualized rate of return, but in order to control costs, there are often more restrictions on the subscription amount and time), interest-free installments and other preferential measures.

The domestic mobile financial app market has gradually bid farewell to the incremental market and turned into a stock market. The cost of acquiring a single user has increased from 20-30 yuan in the early days to over 100 yuan today, comparable to credit cards. There is no downward trend in various fields in the short term, and the cost of acquiring customers will gradually become a focus of controversy between operations and marketing, risk control, and finance departments.

2. Active Phase

3. Card binding volume (rate)

Breaking down the meaning of mobile finance, it is to purchase products through electronic payment on mobile devices. These include both virtual financial products and services as well as physical products. Binding a bank card is the first element for this kind of purchasing behavior to occur. Many institutions regard the card binding volume (rate) as their lifeline. The reasons are as follows:

• The heavy decision-making chain characteristics of finance also affect the field of mobile finance. Users are willing to associate their bank card transaction interface with the app, which often represents an important sense of exclusive trust and is the beginning and precursor of a transaction.
• Obtain real information about users and obtain more accurate data for subsequent precision marketing ;

The factors affecting the number of card bindings often depend on the endorsement of the operating organization itself and the subjective needs of the user's business. In operations, a points system , functional discrimination, and gift rewards are often used to stimulate users to complete the card binding process - although the latter is often prone to attracting freeloaders. At the same time, attention to card binding indicators should still be based on the conversion funnel, observing the user loss at each step of conversion to formulate and modify the next stage of operation strategy.

The card binding conversion rate of a mobile financial app during the statistical period. Since it is a non-bank endorsed product, its 12% card binding conversion rate is generally outstanding. However, we still need to pay attention to the large number of users who are lost during the usage-registration and registration-card binding stages. Operations personnel need to communicate with product managers and developers to test and optimize the registration and card binding steps. At the same time, we adopt a small-scale sample survey method to conduct telephone/questionnaire interviews with users who lost during the card binding stage to understand their pain points for not binding a card.

4.Activity (rate)

According to traditional mobile app analysis methods, activity is measured from the time dimensions of day/week/month to check the number of overall active users during the statistical period and their proportion of all users. In addition, considering the overall trend of mobile financial apps being large and comprehensive, they integrate functions such as wealth management, stocks, payments, precious metals, and even e-commerce to manage user assets in an all-round way. Therefore, in addition to the analysis and statistics of the overall active volume, it is also necessary to pay attention to the conversion activity of users in each sub-business segment, with at least one completed purchase/participation in business behavior as the active conversion indicator.

By monitoring and predicting app activity on a daily basis, we can determine the effectiveness of the campaign. Example: The picture above is a red envelope activity launched by a mobile financial app in the second half of last year, aiming to attract new users and increase activity. In terms of active data, although the activity in the second half of the week stopped declining and the curve rose, considering the tens of millions of users, the overall effect was not more significant than when the red envelopes were not issued. Due to the large number of them at present, users are less sensitive to marketing activities for cash red envelopes. Further packaging and publicity will be the focus of subsequent red envelope activities, such as Alipay's Five Blessings Collection activity.

Figure: The transformation from one-way business activity to business-related cross-usage analysis helps to recommend related businesses during operations, analyze cross-user usage characteristics, and establish seed user portrait features.

3. Retention Stage

6. Retention rate

The concept of retention is not unfamiliar at all. Common statistical periods include the next day, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, etc. It is usually divided into new user retention and active user retention.

New customer retention: Statistics on the retention of newly registered users during the statistical period. Usually used in conjunction with analysis and monitoring of newly launched activities and channel promotions. Mobile financial apps fail to complete customer acquisition in the short term and usually carry out a large number of red envelope discount activities, thus attracting a large number of users known as "freeloaders". Although there are various methods such as black/white lists, user tags, IP monitoring, etc., it is difficult to completely eliminate such users. New customer retention can be used as one of the indicators to monitor users who are taking advantage of the service.

Active retention: Retention status of active users. Mainly monitor the (non-transaction) stickiness of existing users to the app. The high frequency of use of mobile banking, credit card and securities apps makes them perform very well in this indicator. For example, for securities apps, the next-day retention rate of active users on trading days can exceed 80%, while their performance is relatively low compared to financial management and consumer finance apps. Therefore, for mobile financial apps, in addition to managing user assets in an all-round way, improving functional modules is also a positive aspect. It can attract users with different functions and form long-term stickiness.

4. Revenue Stage

Figure: Example of channel delivery value

7. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

This data is mainly used to analyze the current user value and channel customer acquisition value. This data requires long-term comparative monitoring. In the gaming industry, user lifetime value = average revenue per user ( AR PU) * user life cycle (LT). But the situation of mobile financial apps is different in that while users contribute extremely high revenue (Revenue), the cost (Cost) of the financial products/services they purchase cannot be simply equated with props in the gaming industry, the latter of which has almost zero marginal cost. Therefore, the appropriate calculation method is the profit contributed by the user in a single month * life cycle. For example, the securities industry uses its turnover fee, and the wealth management industry uses management fees and interest rate spreads. The calculation period is usually one month. Considering the long decision-making nature of financial apps, the average duration between the average user’s first purchase time and registration time (or download time) is calculated to determine the appropriate starting time calculation point.

8. Total profit and ROI contributed by a single customer

Total profit contributed by a single customer = LTV - customer acquisition cost

ROI = LTV / Customer Acquisition Cost

The total profit contributed by each customer and ROI are also used as criteria for judging the value of the channel. With more device data, calculate the overall profit contribution of mobile phone brands and models to guide the selection of channel delivery and event prizes for future event operations.

5. Dissemination Stage

10. Industry ranking

There are a large number of data service providers in China that provide app data monitoring, such as TalkingData, iResearch, Questmobile, etc. Regularly observe the ranking and coverage of your own app in various mobile financial segments to understand the industry and competitive situation.

11. Number of SNS readings and forwardings

One of the analytical indicators of content operation , monitoring on a weekly/monthly basis while comparing the performance of competing products. Weibo, WeChat, Tieba, app store forums, and forums in various financial sectors (such as I Love Card for credit cards, etc.)

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @黄嘉伟 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!